- I've bought and redeemed gift cards for only one single company ever. Can you guess what company? :) Exactly - Apple. Because these MFs generously banned whole countries from using their services, and not because of the justified sanctions or a law, but simply because they could. So when I lived in Ukraine and got my first Apple device, I had to buy and use gift cards to purchase any app or media in the Apple's closed system.
- That proposal I've seen a few times too, basically put up a constellation up there, linked with laser comms and then transfer data to the illuminated sats in a loop. That sounds possible, but I have doubts. First of all if we take 400 km orbit, the "online" time would be something like 50 minutes. We need to boot up the system fully, run comm apps, locate a peer satellite and download data from it (which needs to be prepared in a portable form), write it locally and start calculations, then by the end of the 50 min repeat. All these operations are slow, especially boot time of the servers (which could be optimized of course). It would be great if some expert could tell us if it is feasible or not.
- Lift costs are not quite dropping like that lately. Starship is not yet production ready (and you need to fully pack it with payloads, to achieve those numbers). What we saw is cutting off most of the artificial margins of the old launches and arriving to some economic equilibrium with sane margins. Regardless of the launch price the space based stuff will be much more expensive than planet based, the only question if it will be optimistically "only" x10 times more expensive, or pessimistically x100 times more expensive.
I don't get this "inevitable" conclusion. What is even a purpose of the space datacenter in the first place? What would justify paying an order of magnitude more than conventional competitors? Especially if the server in question in question is a dumb number cruncher like a stack of GPUs? I may understand putting some black NSA data up there or drug cartel accounting backup, but to multiply some LLM numbers you really have zero need of extraterritorial lawless DC. There is no business incentive for that.
- You need 50sqm of solar panels just for a tiny 8RU server. You also forgot any overhead for networking, control etc. but let's even ignore those. Next at the 400km orbit you spend 40% of the time in shade, so you need an insulated battery to provide 5kWh. This would add 100-200kg of weight to a server weighing 130kg on its own. Then you need to dissipate all that heat and yes, 50sqm of radiators should deal with the 10kW device. We also need to charge our batteries for the shade period, so we need 100sqm of solar panels. And we also need to cool the cooling infrastructure - pumps, power converters, which wasn't included in the power budget initially.
So now we have arrived to a revised solution: a puny 8RU server at 130 kg, requires 100sqm and 1000 kg of solar panels, then 50-75 sqm of the heat radiators at 1000-1500 kg, then 100-200 kg of batteries and then the housing for all that stuff plus station keeping engines and propellant, motors to rotate all panels, pumps, etc. I guess at least 500kg is needed, maybe a bit less.
So now we have a 3 ton satellite, which costs to launch around 10 million dollars at an optimistic 3000/kg on F9. And that's not counting cost to manufacture the satellite and the server own cost.
I think the proposal is quite absurd with modern tech and costs.
- Author also forgot batteries for the solar shade transition period and then additional solar panels to charge these batteries during the solar "day" period. then insulation for batteries. Then power converters and pumps for radiators and additional radiators to cool the cooling infrastructure.
Overall not a great model. But on the other hand, even an amateur can use this model and imagine that additional parts and costs are missing, so if it's showing a bad outlook even in the favorable/cheating conditions for space DCs, then they are even dumber idea if all costs would be factored in fully. Unfortunately many serious journalists can't even do that mental assumption. :(
- Those people broadly fall under "the Oxford professor" catch-all phrase. Obviously. I was talking about 99.99% of random internet texts, which do not conform to any Manual of style and are not written by literature majors. If I see a text authored by some known figure or in a respectable journal/site, then I don't have a task of detecting LLM slop in the first place. But when I do want to know if the text is generated or not, it is usually written by less sophisticated crowd, or anonymous.
- While author is correct in general, I would like to add a counter-point regarding em-dashes specifically. Yes, many people use them like this - and many website frameworks will automatically replace a keyboard not-really-a-minus symbol with em-dash. So that is not a sign of the LLM generated slop.
What LLMs also do though, is use em-dashes like this (imagine that "--" is an em-dash here): "So, when you read my work--when you see our work--what are you really seeing?"
You see? LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop.
- Fair use doctrine is explicitly for the humans. For the better overall state of humankind. It is not logically "fair" in the terms of some abstract logic, since we are giving preference to some part of the population and not everyone equally/fairly. So the fairness is not in the perfect mathematical equality of the application of fair use law, it is in the inequality of it and this is what makes it fair. In short - fair use is a hack, which we humans invented for ourselves, for our better living.
There is no some law of the universe that a hack we have invented for ourselves should be extended to literally everything everywhere, we don't "owe" this to anyone. So we don't "owe" it to our computers that fair use doctrine should be extended to the computer programs. The fairness word in the fair use doctrine doesn't mean that every entity should automatically benefit from such law. It's only for humans now.
My point of this long rant is that making fair use universally fair, automatically makes it unfair for the humans, for the original recipients of the benefits of this law. And there is no compromise here. We either ignore human rights, or computer program rights.
- iPhone keyboard is probably one of the several biggest factors I consider when once again I think "hmm, maybe this time I should upgrade to iPhone?". And then I'm confronted with this, ummm... thing, and immediately remember why I ditched iPhones years ago :) . How do you deal with it daily? I'm at a loss really. PS: I've owned 3GS and 4S and a few iPads, so I'm not just baseless here.
- Someone can build a server in space, pairing a puny underpowered rack with a handful of servers to a ginormous football field sized solar panel plus a heat radiator plus a heavy as hell insulated battery to survive being a planet shade every hour for tens of minutes. We can do that from existing components and launch on existing rockets, no problem.
Why though?
Why would anyone need a server in space in the first place? What is a benefit for that location, necessitating a cost an order of magnitude higher (or more) compared to a warehouse anywhere on the planet?
- "Sam Altman, a man best known for needing a few more billions at any given moment." (c) HN best-of-2025 :)
- I think we should split definition somehow, between what LLMs can do today (or next few years) with how big a thing this particular capability can be (a derivative of the capability). And then what some future AI could do and with how big a thing that future capability could be.
I regularly see people who distinguish between current and future capabilities, but then still lump societal impact (how big a thing could be) into one projection.
The key bubble question is - if that future AI is sufficiently far away (for example if there will be a gap, a new "AI winter" for a few decades), then does this current capability justify the capital expenditures, and if not then by how much?
- Money can buy quality of life, and people earning 100-150k in USA per person in household do confirm this. And this purchasing ability is not linear, because of the fixed costs for many good and services. Previously many countries with low salaries had corresponding low cost of life (and cost of quality of life), but today the costs are rising faster than salaries everywhere across the globe, so the biggest winners are people who earn more in absolute values, hence rich Americans.
- You honestly believe that a combined Germany-Poland-Baltic army, maybe with Italy's help and absolutely no USA involvement and manufacturing is today a viable threat to ruzzians? And that such an army is somehow more capable than today Ukrainian army in an all-out land battle with combined forces, permanently fighting for a decade now?
Of course such coalition has a big number of ultra expensive and effective weapons like planes, ships and tanks. That number of weapons will last for 3 months or so. Then what? Ruzzia is not a Taliban or Hamas, you can't just bomb them with impunity. Even half a century old soviet SAMs are valid threat to anything in the air, let alone newer ones. Plus Ruzzia is not alone, they have whole Axis manufacturing power potentially behind them - Iran, China, NK etc.
I would be very concerned about Ruzzia, if I were you. Just a thought experiment, what would Germany do when Ruzzian force will appear on the Poland-Lithuanian border, annexing all Baltic states?
- I would like to point out two fundamental misconceptions towards the end of the article:
1. "AI is a filter. It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving."
At any reasonable school-college level this is false. LLMs are perfectly fine replacing creative and collaborative aspects of work or study at intermediate levels. Yeah, they are unrealiable in results, but the participants don't care. LLMs produce data in shape of creative and collaborative work and that is enough to submit it.
What I mean by this, is when the house of cards will burn down (and it won't, because education is not a purpose of a school), it will also burn down creative training too.
2. Solving real/actual/applied/etc problem at the education facility of any level is nice and all (running business or solving community problems), but some studies just don't afford to be that "real" or "applied". All humanities, most of the harder STEM, etc. In USSR we had a whole separate class of higher-ed facilities, below universities called "technicums", which focused only on the applied knowledge. They were fine, but they definitely didn't fill all the demand.
- > At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?
The problem is scale. The more widespread is such system, the lower is the barrier to entry and the higher is cost to actually prosecute users to their amount and rate of usage (which we already see today).
Also this whole legal/illegal divide is often presented as if there was approximately same order of magnitude of both users. While I guess that actually the illegal use is way way larger than the legal use, simply because it is so crude and slow and buggy and unsafe by design. (excluding gambling, since that use is kinda derivative, depending on the all other uses making up a base on which to gamble)
And this is why token systems by rights should be heavily restricted, since they are so disproportionate in impact. We can all legally buy a knife in any shop, despite the fact that if used for attack a knife almost inevitably produces at least one body. Small arms are also available almost anywhere but with a lot of restrictions. Big arms are almost never available for purchase, just like explosives. And then the stuff like a canister of zarin is totally out of the question. That's because of the disproportionate effect. Same with financial instruments. Tokens are an Abrams of the finance world, and currently we let anyone have one, which is mindboggling to me.
> In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
You are correct. Afaik all tries to ban Tornado laundered tokens were eventually dropped. But the mechanism and potential still remains.
Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, in the case of BTC specifically we can track tokens from the "dust" attack and separate them from the legal and nice tokens, since they will stay in the different UTXO in the same wallet. Though I'm not very familiar with that, if it possible to pick which UTXO to transfer selectively.
- That's 40 TUSD, Trump Golden Dollars, which would be an equivalent of the lightly used Trumrolette Goldenrado or a typical young family tent.
- That's fine, good even. Afaik at least for some of these tasks dev teams are doing a lot of manual tuning of the model (rumored that "r in strawberry" had been "fixed" this way, as a general case of course). The more there are random standalone hacks in the model, the more likely it will start failing unpredictably somewhere else.
- And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know.
A fitting quote for the moment:
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.
Also many sites show significant degradation in FF lately. Youtube works like shit in FF, once every 10 page opens it just gets stuck half way with part of the background loaded, like black with black empty frames on top. Or just empty page. No, it never finishes loading from that state, and neither it can reload on F5. But opening a new tab works fine and YT loads normally.
And to finish off this rant, FF has now started corrupting my open tabs after opening FF with saved session. This never happened since this feature was implemented and in 2025 has happened 3 times already. And in mozilla bugtracker all tickets about this are ignored for years now. Meanwhile they are developing some crappy bells and whistles, instead of fixing fundamental bugs.
If not for Chrome monopoly, I would consider switching browsers. Ladybird can't come soon enough. Mozilla has lost touch with reality.