Intent matters though. Malicious actors, who are very much in power, will use the information to target universities and ideas [1] they don't like. Don't build databases for your enemies. Censuses were a great tool too, until certain people took power, then destroying them became the moral thing to do [2].
Telling the history of your country about how you enslaved, murdered and tortured are considered "grievance narratives" by the current administration. Declaring scientists public enemy because they don't follow your politics.
Do they also teach about Comanche slave raids and other intra-native wars, and the native American treatment of prisoners of war and slaves, putting European conquerors in context as just another warring 'tribe', just a more successful one? Or do they teach a one-sided morality play version of history?
What history course would you expect to see this in? Courses don't tend to contain "by-the-ways" for things outside of the course material. Should it be against the rules to have a course specifically on the african slave trade? If somebody is teaching a course on the italian renaissance, should they be obligated to mention that great art was made in china too?
College history courses aren't "one-sided morality plays."
The reason why there is more discussion of atrocities committed by europeans is because there is way more course material focused on europeans. There are more courses on the american and french revolutions than the haitian revolution. Even orientalism is a european frame, focusing on how europeans engaged with the near and far east. A course on orientalism is not a course on the middle east. It is a course on europeans.
I do not observe classes on precolumbian american or the islamic golden age shying away from atrocities in their course material. Courses on specific topics rather than time period / region pairings don't tend to shy away from a global frame either.
So you've got a few options.
You could insist that when atrocities come up in courses that focus on europeans that the course contains a "but actually" where it discusses other atrocities to balance things out. This seems odd from a pedagogical standpoint.
You could reduce the number of courses focusing on europeans and increase the number of courses focused elsewhere. But doing this is also considered "woke."
You could deliberately avoid discussion of atrocities committed by europeans in "western civ" style courses. This also doesn't strike me as right.
Could you share what specifically you'd expect to change about history curricula?
Oh, I hadn't considered that there are complex and nuanced reasons why only white wrongdoing is discussed, and by others is ignored.
> Even orientalism is a european frame, focusing on how europeans engaged with the near and far east. A course on orientalism is not a course on the middle east. It is a course on europeans.
It is nothing of the sort. "Orientalism" is not about Barbary slave raids that emptied whole villages, about Ottoman invaders colonizing half of eastern Europe for centuries, or about the Islamic invasion of Spain. Instead it's focused on problematizing the fact that Europeans viewed these invaders as an 'other', and did not accept and welcome them as their own.
There is, notably, not a similar course chiding native Americans for seeing Europeans as 'other'. There's not even a course problematizing how Ottomans viewed [1] Europe.
You're free to invent further sophisticated reasons why this ridiculous cherry-picking is all perfectly natural and not motivated at all. I am done.
Orientalism is a discussion of how europeans engaged with culture from the near and far east, yes. That's a topic on europeans. And europeans engaged with this culture incompletely, which is not exactly a surprise for any community on the planet.
Again, the reason why we see more courses on Orientalism than the reverse is because of the continued disproportionate focus on european history in the academy. And at least for my professor friend who teaches indigenous american history, there is absolutely discussion of the ways that they understood and misunderstood europeans.
I do not understand how a modern authoritarian leader relates to this whatsoever. Does Erdogan have some say in history curricula at US universities?
While this has some valid points, constructively addressing these issues is clearly not the political thrust of the destructionists who wish to simplistically downplay the history rather than framing it in a more productive manner.
Also the condemnation of "treats political disagreement as moral evil" landed harder back before the other tribe decided to embrace the dynamic and fortify their political stances with blatant immoral evil.
From a European perspective this response and your other comments ranting about "pronouns" and "Marxist ideology" makes me think you're either a troll parroting bizarre US political memes or, if serious, you're the one indoctrinated in a radical ideology. Either way, I suggest closing the browser and talking to people in real life.
US wind farms are 30 miles from the coast at most? No country is attacking that under some plausible deniability and it not being seen as an act of war.There are more important power lines further from civilisation running through rural areas in the US. These are not fiber cables a 1000 miles from the coast.
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
> Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw
Only if they're already spinning and everything is hot and ready.
Non-spinning reserves can take hours to bring online. Cold power plants cannot be brought up quickly. The simplest designs can ramp within a few minutes, but these are generally not intended for any kind of continuous operation due to efficiency concerns.
No. It's currently a fantasy. Even if the cost of getting payloads to orbit decreased another x100, you still have the issues of radiation and heat dissipation.
this will age poorly. you have both Google, Tesla/X betting on it. They are not stupid and probably have given it way more thought than people's whose paycheques not tied to this have thought about.
This is an ambitious bet, with some possibility of failure but it should say a lot that these companies are investing in them.
I wonder what people think, are these companies so naive?
Edit: Elon, Sundar, Jensen, Jeff are all interested in this. Even China is.
What conspiracy is going on here to explain it? Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
Serious question: If you are so sure that this is a big payday, have you put all your net worth into SpaceX? Seems like a no brainer if you fully believe it.
The reason for this "data centers in space" is the same as the "sustained human colony on Mars". It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Just a small sampling of previous failed Musk promises:
- demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York by the end of 2017
- "autonomous ride hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year"
- “thousands” of Optimus humanoid robots working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025."
- Tesla semi trucks rollout (Pepsi paid for 100 semis in 2017, and deliveries started in 2022, and now 8 years later they have received half of them.)
The thing about Elon is that he's got more than enough credibility with betting on big crazy ideas that he's one of a few people that you have to take seriously.
SpaceX rewriting the entire economic formula for space launches, accounting for almost 90% of all launches globally last year, becoming a critical piece of the Department of Defense while also launching Starlink globally.
Neuralink let's people control computers with their brain, even playing video games. They're working on an implant to cure blindness right now.
I get that the man is politically unpopular in some circles, but it's really difficult to bet against him at this point. So far, the biggest criticism has been that it took a little longer than he initially said to deliver...but he did deliver.
I have put as much money as I believe in it (risk adjusted). And same goes for Google, Spacex, Blue Origin and other companies.
This trope
> It is all pie in the sky ideas to drive valuation and increase Musk's wealth.
Really needs to stop. This is based on a naive interpretation of how wealth gets created. Musk has an amazing reputation getting things done and making things that people like. Whether you like him as a person or not, he has done stuff in the past and that's reason enough to believe him now.
Sure, I don't claim all of them go well. Do you want to run a hypothetical exercise on how many they get right vs wrong? And based on that we can see if this is a "fantasy" or not?
No but you're claiming "if they all are investing X amount then these bets obviously must pan out". If you follow that rationale then it means that all bets that these company's make in the same space must all pan out. So if they don't all pan out then the fact that they're all making bets isn't a sound rationale for it being true.
As others have pointed out, investors notoriously have FOMO, so rationale actors (CEOs of big tech) naturally are incentivized to make bets and claims that they are betting on things that the market believes to be true regardless if they are so as to appease shareholders.
> simply that most bets are made intelligently with serious intent.
That is NOT what you said. You said this:
> Why would they all put money into this if it is so obvious to all of you that it is not going to work?
In other words: "if these companies are putting all of this money to work then it's obvious it will work"
So, no you didn't simply say "their bets are made intelligently with serious intent". No one is saying these companies aren't serious about it, they are saying there are legitimate physics limitations involved here that are either being ignored or the companies are betting on a novel scientific breakthrough.
> your take on investors is naive and largely incorrect - its the musical chairs theory of markets.
Then you clearly have never worked with investors before.
Here’s our point of disagreement: I think smart people have made a bet in this with serious intent after considering all the pitfalls.
You think they are either deliberately ignoring it (so ridiculous) or they are betting on a scientific breakthrough.
It’s too comical to even address the “they are ignoring it part” so I’ll ignore it.
I would agree with you that part of their bet might involve hoping for breakthroughs and the investment analysis probably factored it in.
Lots of earlier investments have banked on breakthroughs like this.
Also your opinion on how markets work is naive and unscientific.
Because it will inflate their stock valuations? It's like with fusion energy or going to Mars etc., constantly X years away and currently economically unfeasible.
I'm not sure if you're joking, but "AI datacenter in space" is the kind of phrase that attracts investors, that's straight from Musk's playbook for keeping the stock trading at ridiculous P/Es, especially now that he is planning SpaceX IPO.
why does it attract investors if it is so obvious that it will fail?
it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory you are trying to assert - musk comes up with an absurd idea that captures investor's attention. its not like he wants to make a good product, he just wants to fool investors. not only that, he fools them, gets the money and then puts said money into this venture that obviously won't work. why does he waste his time into a venture that obviously won't work? who knows
You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was creating a new political party in the US, how's that going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing people on Mars in 2018? It’s 2026. How is boring company going? etc.
I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works, and the physics is simple here: unless you change the physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.
You didn't answer my questions. How is The Boring company going? And in this context, you can also ask: "Is he putting money into something that will obviously fail?"
Also, go back and read how many people who were "smarter than him" there nine years ago:
You know why I mentioned hydrogen energy earlier? There was a Financial Times article last month titled "Hydrogen dreams meet reality as oil and gas groups abandon projects", which notes that "Almost 60 major low carbon hydrogen projects—including ones backed by BP and ExxonMobil—have been cancelled" because they weren't economically feasible. Space data centers are in the same place today. It's physics.
And none of the people you mentioned have invested in this. They may be interested and might research the topic, but that's not the same thing. I've yet to see any plan that explains how they'll replace failed hardware and manage heat while keeping the whole thing economically feasible.
You're using an uninteresting appeal to authority argument again.
So let's talk physics. Are you familiar with the radiative heat-balance problem? You can use the Stefan–Boltzmann law to calculate how many radiators you'd need.
Required area:
A = P / (eps * sigma * eta * (Tr^4 - Tsink^4))
Where:
A = radiator area [m^2]
P = waste heat to dump [W]
eps = emissivity (0..1)
sigma = 5.670374419e-8 W/m^2/K^4
eta = non ideal factor for view/blockage/etc (0..1)
Tr = radiator temperature [K]
Tsink = effective sink temperature [K] (deep space ~3 K, ~0 for Tr sizing)
Assuming best conditions so deep space, eps~0.9, eta~1:
At Tr=300K: ~413 W/m^2
At Tr=350K: ~766 W/m^2
At Tr=400K: ~1307 W/m^2
So for 10 MW at 350K (basically around 77°C): A ~ 1e7 / 766 ≈ 13,006 m^2 (best case).
And even in the best case scenario it's only 10 MW and we're not counting radiation from the sun or IR from the moon/earth etc. so in real life, it will be even higher.
You can build 10 MW nuclear power plant (microreactor) with the datacenter included on Earth for the same price.
Show me your numbers or lay out a plan for how to make it economically feasible in space.
Because "investors" are a large group. Many of them are not involved in the industry and are clueless about tech. Same reason they invest in OpenAI, that hasn't made any money.
Investors, both commercial and individual, often have more money than sense.
I didn't say they make it. They have it, like an older person who grew their portfolio over time. They are an example of someone who invests in AI without knowing anything about what it is.
Google is hardly betting on it; they are exploring the feasibility of it and are frank about the engineering challenges:
> significant engineering challenges remain, such as thermal management, high-bandwidth ground communications, and on-orbit system reliability.[1]
why do you think this changes what i said? I know it has constraints but the fact is that Google is serious about it. Enough to publicly speak about it many times and invest enormous amounts of R&D.
You are saying they are "hardly betting on it". This is grossly false and I wonder why you would write that? Its clearly a serious bet, with lots of people working on it.
> Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
Its surely a high risk bet but that's how Google has been operating for a while. But why would you say they are hardly betting on it?
As a counter question: do you think Google is not serious about it?
I never said Google wasn't serious; I said they are hardly betting on it relative to their other capital expenditures. Google rightfully describes this as a "moonshot." To date, the only public hardware commitment is two prototype satellites in 2027 for a feasibility study. Compared to the billions pouring into Waymo, DeepMind, and terrestrial data centers, this doesn't yet qualify as an "enormous" financial bet, even if the engineering intent is serious.
Data centers don't create local jobs once construction is complete. 40 people, most remote, can run a data center. The F-35 program claims to have over 250,000 people employed in its supply chain in the US and has large factories with high paying, often unionised jobs.
In these small rust belt towns, even 40 jobs is a huge boost. You have the hands on sysadmin and network guys there, which yeah thats small. But you also have facilities, security, maintenance. When you combine this with the stimulus to the local economy through construction its a positive. Sure its not a 10k person factory, but there are places where the biggest employer is Walmart. These places look at an Amazon Warehouse or a Datacenter as being a big benefit.
I'd also chime in that the presence of a datacenter in a smaller community can also help through the increased tax revenue the town/county gets.
Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.
There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.
When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.
Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
Sure, but that's to my second point of if they pick up camp and leave, that's still developed property that has potential to be more useful than it had been.
And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).
Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".
It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".
At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol
I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.
For a 100MW scale facility the contract work is never over. Once you are done with one bit of work something else is in need of refreshing or changing. Components are breaking daily at that scale, and switch gear, UPS, generators, breakers, etc. all have useful lifetimes and a replacement cycle.
It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three.
Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.
Which is a straw man no? This thread is about building data centers, not F35s. Microsoft and FB aren’t competing against LM for land or jobs in Beaver Dam WI nor is it a zero-sum outcome, both can exist ie ‘manufacturing hubs’.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Oracle founder Larry Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
You want companies to pay you to process their customers voices and private data, but I don't see a privacy policy or even what jurisdiction you operate in. Your Terms and Conditions is literally a placeholder. That's a huge red flag.
If you're processing people's data it doesn't matter if it's free or not, you need to understand your legal obligations. You can't have a blank Terms of Service. You should really talk to a legal professional.
That was obvious before even looking at the repo because the OP used "the core insight" in the intro. Other telltale signs of these type of AI projects:
- new account
- spamming the project to HN, reddit etc the moment the demo half works
- single contributor repo
- Huge commits minutes apart
- repo is less than a week old (sometimes literally hours)
- half the commits start with "Enhance"
- flashly demo that hides issues immediately obvious to experts in the field
- author has slop AI project(s)
OP uses more than one branch so he's more sophisticated than most.
Gun manufacturer accountability (or lack thereof) is a complex topic and one with ongoing lawsuits and evolving legal arguments. (In the USA see the Bush-era NRA-backed Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005 and recent Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Mexico arguments).
Personally if a gun manufacturer markets a gun with the primary feature being finger print resistant (yes, that's real) and being easy to carry concealed, I think lawmakers should investigate. Likewise f someone makes a big CSAM generator button and puts it in front of millions of users, it also deserves legal attention.
It was an unserious response to an absolutist statement. I pointing out where such absolutism would lead if applied to other areas.
I don't think fingerprint scanner on guns will be effective as it tracks ownership and not legality of usage. However, a number of modern vehicles do have capabilities to perform autonomous actions, including overriding user input.
It's not an absolutist statement and it doesn't lead to any of the insane conclusions you came up with. Holding the people running a model liable for what it generates has nothing to do with making tool makers liable.
It’s not a CSAM generation button, it’s a general content generation button that someone used to generate CSAM, and it’s that someone who is responsible for it.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_...
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