The author’s previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.

Proponents say this represents a natural step in the evolution of moving heavy industry off the planet’s surface and a solution for the ravenous energy needs of artificial intelligence. Critics say building data centers in space is technically very challenging and cite major hurdles, such as radiating away large amounts of heat and the cost of accessing space.

It is unclear who is right, but one thing is certain: Such facilities would need to be massive to support artificial intelligence.

Starcloud’s fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.

Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.

I think Zitron has some important analysis mixed up with the clickbait and the populist rhetoric. I thought he was trying to be a full-time blogger but now I see he runs a one-person PR business (!)

Its too bad that Patrick McKenzie sided with the promptfondlers because he was a useful ally calling “we need more reporting on cryptocurrency by journalists who can read a balance sheet and do arithmetic”

none

When faced with a long complicated argument outside your competence, its a really useful heuristic to spot-check a few sections and assume that if they are wrong the whole structure is flawed. And at least as many readers will take away the soundbites like “none of these companies is profitable” and “pathetic revenues” as any nuanced version that is hidden in there. At critics of spicy autocomplete go he is really far on the “pundit” end of the “academic to pundit” scale (well past our David Gerard).

I think Zitron has posted that none of these companies is profitable. Midjourney claims to be making a profit since 2024 although that depends on not paying for the IP they use etc. etc. etc. (and private companies can claim all kinds of things about their balance sheets without the CEO going to jail if they are creative).

The market should be flooded with used business laptops that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro

now it works! I do not understand the two sentences “I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it (what? - ed.) is zero at i.”

Who is flaviat? I don’t see that handle on this lemmy or Greg Egan’s mastodon account, and Egan just re-tooted someone who gives x^2 + 1 as a counterexample.

Wouldn’t f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to “any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant”? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?

Given the state of Mozilla I hope the EU is debating “do we build our own browser or something to replace web browsers?” Likewise for a web search index.

The big web exists because 1) VC money, 2) massive surveillance rewarded by lack of privacy laws in the USA, 3) US hegemony, and 4) cheap energy and a stable climate. All of those are going away. Most of the big sites are like an 18th century sugar plantation owner’s formal garden and pet composer, they lose money or barely break even but M$, Google, and Facebook have so much money that they don’t care. Then one day the plantation owner hears that Saint-Domingue is free or the colonials are in revolt, and a few months later the servants are told that economies must be made.

And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.

Founders’ credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)

It does look like the facial recognition in the support.apple.com link is opt-in!

I am told that Apple, DropBox, etc. have done this for years, often in the name of “fighting CSAM” or “helping you organize your photos”. https://support.apple.com/en-us/108795 Agree that its a very good reason not to touch corporate cloud services and to not let people take digital photos of your face even if they promise not to share them! I do not trust any company with physical assets in the USA not to be penetrated by three-letter-organizations and data brokers.

We did quite well with few long Internet videos 20 years ago, and we will do well again 50 years from now when the corporate Internet has collapsed like the Qing Dynasty or the East India Company and the Internet is decentralized, low-bandwidth, and solar-powered

They don’t like to talk about solar panels and battery technology do they? But those are obvious examples of a technology on the vertical part of the S-curve right now. And computing is not just hardware (Moore’s Law and blue LEDs) but also algorithms like A* or ActivityPub Protocol and software like Google Search.

It reminds me of the “infinite scroll” archive of a Substack blog which also freezes or crashes if you search a blog with a few hundred posts so fortunately they don’t encourage you to post often (picks up note card) um, although they encourage you to post often

Stripe the payment processor published a book asking “what if bubbles are good and necessary? Was it economically rational to discover America?” The authors have a startup called Anomaly Capital. https://press.stripe.com/boom

Scroll down to the book by a Dwarkesh Patel who interviewed all our favorite people.