Impossibruh!

It’s so terrible that the stock jumps up on news like this. All of those assholes already rubbing their hands going: “Yeah, we’re going to make so much money from cancer patients. Fuck yeah, bleed em dry the suckers”.

Instead of a rational world where we make sure these kinds of companies or labs are doing good and have money to do their thing. But once a new drug is developed we make sure we can produce it cheap and safe in enough quantities for patients to get treatment.

There’s absolutely no need for the insane profits we’re seeing recently. We can run the world just on normal profits. The CEO would still be a millionaire, the fat cats would still be fat. But we can make sure everyone has access to stuff they need without going bankrupt. Or in civilized countries, without our collective money flowing into big pharma companies (and especially the owners, higher ups and shareholders).

As a species we’ve lost our damned minds.

Yeah except this is a tiny little plane and a 737 is huge. So those comparisons don’t make much sense.

That’s one of the things that frustrates me most about this whole AI thing. I fucking hate it and I want it to die, I wish it were never created in the first place. But from a tech enthusiast and a maths nerd point of view, it is super interesting.

Like the performance of these models is shit compared to a real person doing actual work. But if we think about what we are doing on a basic level, the performance is way beyond what I would expect it to be. I wouldn’t expect it to be able to form a coherent sentence or scale as well as it does (even though the resources required to run these is still very high).

It could have been really cool shit people did studies on and played around with to explore the math. Cool little play models we could let go on a bunch of data and see what it did and how. Something for a small group of nerds and experts who are into that kind of thing, for the sake of learning and nothing else.

But no, somehow it got transmorphed into “AI”. And marketed like this actual learning almost sentient computer system that can replace all workers. You can ask it anything and it will give PhD level expert answers. Oh and it’s run by a handful of the most vile men imaginable who pour all of the world’s money and resources into it, all so they get to be god emperor of the world. Fucking terrible.

Looks like a pretty significant dip yeah. No idea if it’s just an unseasonably warm bit that evens out, or if the ice started retreating really early this year. Normally the peak is in September, not August.

It’s so misleading how these AI products are marketed as all knowing super smart knowledge sources. While in reality, even if they don’t hallucinate bullshit, it’s trained on the internet mostly. So at best these things have the knowledge of an average Reddit poster. What does an average Reddit shit poster know about farming? Jack shit…

I’m going to guess you have a “Don’t thread on me” flag up, but also a “Thin blue line” flag at the same time?

Even if it were all above board, it’s just gambling and should be heavily restricted just as all other forms of betting.

A kidney? Psssh that’s small potatoes, how much RAM do you have?

I’m making my way through the “He who fights with monsters” series, after enjoying the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I’m on book 9 at the moment. There have been some books that were a bit better than others in the series, but overall I’m very much enjoying it. It isn’t like the most complicated or deep book series, but it’s enjoyable.

Or the economy crashes by AI replacing everyone and doing an absolute terrible job, causing stuff like supply chain collapse and communication/power outages.

I have yet to see someone explain how this whole thing actually works out. Just a dozen different scenarios that turn out terrible for almost everyone. The only scenario that works out is if a handful of people like Altman absolutely rule the world, become de facto dictators as they are the ones that control the few AI companies that run everything. And by work out, I mean it works out for that handful of people. For the rest of the world it’s probably just about the worst case scenario. But you just know it’s the scenario scammy Altman is hoping for.

You are the only one who can answer that. Things will change, but if you qualify that as a loss that’s up to you.

In my experience with Linux, where there is a will there is a way. If you want something to run badly enough it will simply work.

Personally I still play Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 a lot, including mods, randomizer etc. I’ve even used cheat engine on those, for example to spawn items at the start of the game to do challenge runs. That’s old software and primarily designed for Windows, it runs just fine on Linux tho.

It isn’t really an OS, it doesn’t have the layers or the infrastructure of an OS. It’s just a shitty app that can do a few pre-programmed things and those don’t even work. They call it an OS because it runs without needing an OS. But that doesn’t make it an OS itself. Before EFI you could just write machine code into the boot sector of any disk and the BIOS would boot from it. This used to be totally normal. My first machine was an MSX computer and it didn’t really have an OS. You’d have Basic for doing stuff, or you’d plug in a cartridge and it would run the code on the ROM inside that.

Not sure, I think 1993 was like 5 years ago maybe?

Before 2030 makes it sound like a long ways away. WIthin the next few years is a better way of putting it.

It’s a very transparent corruption tool. When Trump was elected, he and his ghouls went around with the hat to get “donations” from all of the large companies. Especially the ones in big tech donated huge amounts for what turned out to be a very sad inauguration ceremony. After Trump gifted all of them huge tax benefits and removing restrictions and regulations, the time had come for the hat to go around again. But you can’t just donate directly to the president, then even the dumbest of the dumb would cry foul. So like the shitty landlord Trump has always been he destroyed part of the White House and announced plans for a huge new construction project. This allowed all of the assholes to once again “donate” to this project. A project that has caused a lot of damage to a monument in order to “own the libs” and has raked in millions in donations, but has done little else. All of this money is being pocketed by Trump and his goons.

As with many terrible things, it’s all out in the open and yet America does nothing. Checks and balances indeed.

No such thing as a free lunch tho. It’s like saying solar energy on Earth is free, it’s obviously not. Sure, once the panels are produced and installed, the running costs are minimal. But that doesn’t mean that energy is now suddenly free. When I did the calculation on my solar installation, I took the costs of buying the panels, installing them, maintaining them and in the end tearing them down and properly recycling them. Then we calculated the estimated total energy produced during the lifetime of the system and thus arrived at a cost per unit of energy. Then we can compare that to what the cost would be as compared to other energy sources. At the time it didn’t make financial sense, as over the lifetime other energy sources (which might have been solar as well, just out of large scale installations) would be cheaper. But some government subsidies, plus a feeling the cost of energy in the future is unsure and wanting to contribute to sustainable energy production made me pay for them anyways.

It’s the exact same with launching a datacenter into space. Once it’s up there the energy might not cost anything and running costs per satellite might be relatively low (although there still are running costs for sure, often just spread out over the entire constellation), but that doesn’t mean the thing is free. Investers would want to see a return. So that means a lot of the costs are upfront, developing the system, paying the launch provider, getting the right licenses, etc, etc. Then during the lifetime of the system, it needs to sell the compute in order to make a profit. When directly competing with newer ground based systems that run cutting edge technology, it doesn’t really matter where or how the compute is done. It’s simply a unit of work being sold at market rate. Newer technology will push the price per unit down, as the new tech is more efficient. And it might make your compute less attractive as it’s lacking in newer capabilities, so it can only be sold at a lower price.

So even if the system would be designed for a lifespan of 10 years and put into an orbit that can last 10 years, the compute would be very hard to be sold for any reasonable price after 5 years. And as mentioned, operating a satellite is far from free, there are many running costs associated.

Plus when you build a datacenter on Earth you can use it for decades. You can swap out small parts (like the servers and networking hardware), which keeps it useful. Cooling and power setups are often good for a very long time and those can also be upgraded if needed. The building itself and all of the supporting infrastructure is good for at least 50 years. And a lot of the building is dedicated to easy access for humans to do stuff like maintenance. This is a design requirement for any datacenter.

When shooting shit into space, that’s it, you can’t access it for upgrades or maintenance. And we’ve seen these past years cutting edge AI hardware is good for maybe 3 years at best. After that it’s basically worthless, maybe useful for some niche uses, but mostly useless and definitely not profitable. Not that this matters much, as to keep latency down the orbits would be so low they deorbit within 3-5 years anyways, like with the current Starlink constellation.

But this is of course very useful for a cheap launch provider, as it keeps them yeeting shit into space non-stop. And what a surprise, Elon Musk is one of the people pushing this concept hard. No alternate motives there for sure.

Yes, it was sold as being one Starship in LEO, one Starship to refuel it and off it went. But now they’re onto this plan with a ship to do the mission, a ship with a different design to act as a fuel station and then at least 4 fueling missions, but more likely 8 to 12. It’s ridiculous really, to expect all of this to work out.

At the same time Nasa can’t get SLS to do what they want and that’s just a single mission. A more complicated one for sure, but still a single mission, not a dozen within two days.

A lot of the Moon mission hinges on Starship being a reliable machine that does all of the things Musk promised. I have no doubt that SpaceX in time could build something good, they do have a lot of good people working there. But the time lines given by Musk to the government in order to get the contracts weren’t viable. And as usual Musk overpromised about the capabilities.

One of the biggest doubts at the moment is about Starship being able to go to the Moon. The plan was to send up a Starship into LEO, then send up another Starship to refuel the first one. That way it would have enough fuel to go to the Moon and work as a lander there. It doesn’t need to do much, just get to the Moon, take the people to the surface and get them back into Lunar orbit.

The issue with this is, a lot of things need to go right in order for this to work. You’d need two functioning Starships, they need to both launch into the correct orbit and rendezvous. Then they need to dock and transfer fuel, undock and separate. This is pretty much never been done, so they would be doing something new, but in theory it can be done. Hard and experimental, but in principle achievable.

However when calculations were made, it turns out once you put a Starship in the right orbit it’s not possible for it to have enough fuel to fully refuel another Starship. So Musk said they would simply stretch a Starship and use it as a fuel station. Nobody is really sure if this stretching is even possible, as this wasn’t part of the original design, but let’s say it is. Now the mission become more complicated still, you’d need the Starship that does the Moon mission. Then you’d need the fuel station ship and another ship to fuel that station. And all of this has to work and be timed properly for the Moon mission to work.

But then further calculations were made and nobody is sure how many Starship launches would be required to fill up that fuel station. Partly because Starship isn’t finalized, so the exact specs are unknown. But back of the napkin calculations put the figure at something like 6 launches. A big problem is the fuel used is very hard to store for any amount of time. As it’s cryogenic, it needs to be kept cold. On Earth this is done by using very thick and sturdy pressure vessels, combined with a bunch of machinery and off-gassing. But in space this gets harder, since the pressure vessels need to be light, they can’t be as sturdy. And there isn’t room (both in volume and weight) for all of the cooling machines, which would require too much power and cooling themselves to even work. So we end up with only off-gassing to maintain temperature. This usually doesn’t matter, on Earth the fuel that’s lost gets replaced right away up to the point of liftoff. After that the fuel is used to fly the mission and usually the rocket’s main fuel tank is empty after that. This puts a lot of time pressure on the whole thing, that fuel station in orbit is losing fuel all of the time. So it’s a race to fill it up faster than it’s losing fuel. So those 6 missions need to be flown within a day or maybe two. And if it turns out the amount of fuel being delivered is lower than expected or the loss is higher, there would need to be 12 fueling missions within a day. Not strictly impossible, but not exactly easy. And the not knowing is making people nervous.

They are so far behind schedule, on a system that hasn’t been finalized, let alone tested, it’s very doubtful they could do it anywhere in the near future. Nasa has since asked other companies if they could build a lander if SpaceX can’t do it. But canceling the whole landing part is an option as well.