It might be eventually doable, as an experiment or as a flex, sure. But it's never going to come close to being cost-reasonable versus the equivalent infrastructure here on earth.
The security advantages are enormous since access to space is so tightly restricted and controlled, compared to the access potential of a land based data center. Only risk in space is maybe we start WWIII with china and the US directly trading blows. On the ground, any insurgent group can disable your infrastructure. Nothing is truly safe on the surface of the earth. Anyone can strap a bomb on a drone now. See examples from the currently active wars.
It costs at least 50x more to put a GPU in space than it does on Earth. For that price you can have dozens more capacity in bunkers, under the sea, or on remote islands. Do you think your insurgents are going to get all two dozen? They could travel to the far corners of the earth, destroying 22 of them, and you'd still be ahead. Further, I wouldn't be surprised if a satellite with such a monstrous solar and radiator footprint wouldn't be susceptible to a laser based attack from the ground; either frying it or pushing it into an unstable orbit by vaporizing a few bits.
It costs much more than 50 times because there are no GPUs in space yet. Google is only planning to have some sort of space data centers mid 2030s, if everything works out. A big if, but if they don't start now then we'll never know.
What? No, exactly the opposite. It's very easy to jam radio signals and much harder to cut wires. There's a reason the drones on the front lines in Ukraine are dragging fibre optic lines these days.
There's probably so many ways to get around that with space based technology. I can quickly imagine several methods. It depends on what the system is for which might be a good method to use.
Method 1: same as how u2 planes dumped their data: air drop physical media containing data and catch it in the air.
Method 2: laser based emission to specific detectors.
Method 3: baseball style communication: station is under observation and manipulates in some way to serve as a signalling language.
Method 4: numbers station
Method 5: bill yourself as an isp and have some coded syntax that can be supplied in plain sight with the rest of isp traffic.
Method 1: Sure datacenters with latency measured in several hours sure are useful, and can also be intercepted
Method 2: Can be jammed by drone with laserpointer.
Method 3: Let me just transfer gigabytes of data via physical signalling
Method 4: Can still be jammed
Method 5: Can in fact still be jammed?
If you’re receiving data optically from a space based laser, yes you are quite vulnerable to your detector being jammed by a much closer laser that doesn’t have to be nearly as powerful to add noise to the signal.
Why do you think GPS is so easy to spoof?
Actually I just googled (clauded?) to learn more about space lasers and found a paper describing interrupting quantum key distribution (tamper evident but not jam proof!) with a 1kw laser on the ground pointed at the satellite! So it really does not take many photons to fuck up an encrypted signal.
“ Vulnerability of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution to Disruption from Ground-Based Lasers”
You're going to have to be very close, basically in the direct line between ground station and satellite (which would be airspace that's easily guarded), have a lot of battery/cooling systems to run that laser on what would essentially be a one-way-trip all for disrupting comms for maybe a few minutes tops? And that's just for one ground station, where the blue team can just set another one up a few meters away and be safe. Honestly, you'd probably be better off dumping glitter or water in the sky than trying to actively jam laser comms.
Method 1 runs into the problem of how to replace that media. The DC is in space so it's not like with U2 planes where they landed. Also, I think you mean the keyhole satellites and not U2 planes, since a plane lands at a secure site and can offload media then.
The United States is relatively expensive because the world's cash reserves are priced in USD, and a large fraction of the eastern Eurasian continent lives inside a work camp.
The old Chicago School boogeymen of unions, regulations, and red tape are effectors, but they're a pimple on the back of the world-mutating effects of seven-some decades of USD Seigniorage.
I imagine we're going to be living through the reverse of this Seigniorage experiment quite soon.
What was it the 27th law that says radiating heat in to space does not work? I'm skeptical of the whole thing too, but it's not an impossible engineering challenge, just an expensive one.
> Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village.
Except not really. Peasants were considered the property of their lords. If they decided to go and “try their luck” at a neutral location and that was reported to their lord, armed men on horseback would be very likely to show up not long after, to return them back to the lord’s land, but not without a solid beating and/or maiming first.
Sometimes, certain forms of civilization just are oppressive, rather than collaborative. They tend to be out-competed by forms that are less oppressive, true, but it’s not guaranteed and not always fast and not always permanent.
Typically that was not the case as far as I'm aware. It's why the black plague gave them so much leverage. They could go to a different lord.
But often the land belonged to the lords or at least they could take it within their region at their pleasing. There were not that much "neutral locations".
That wilderness was common land or hunting grounds belonging to someone.
I think we're both somewhat right, somewhat wrong. _Some_ peasants -- serfs -- were considered property of their lords, or well, of the land that the lord oversaw. If they ran away, they were rounded up and brought back, usually with a beating or worse. But there were also free peasants that rented said land. I didn't really mention them, because they deliberately chose to rent said land - they _could_ have tried their luck anywhere, but they _decided_ to try their luck on this lord's lands, and so, I thought, weren't really relevant to the conversation.
But it's not exactly irrelevant, either, right? It does add to the confusion to leave it out, so, my bad.
As far as the black plague, what gave even serfs so much leverage was the fact that there were so few people in all categories around anymore. Fewer peasants to work the land, so the prices of the free peasants went up commensurately. But even serfs who wants to run far away and set themselves up as free peasants elsewhere could frequently get away with it because a) fewer men on horseback to spare to chase them down, and b) the other lord they went and rented land from didn't have enough peasants to work his land either, and had a real vested interest in making sure they weren't caught and brought back to their original lord.
There’s not even a need for armed men on horseback. The lord/patron is your protector against overly draconian laws where just about everything is punishable by death. Lose the patron and next time you e.g. look at the neighbors’ wife, you get to be shorter by a head for entertainment of the folks with a patron. Some of these patron’d folk might have killed somebody last week for which they get to spent time with a priest working on the salvation of their soul and no further punishment.
I’ll even go one step further - I don’t even like saying “Artificial Intelligence”. I think even that anthropomorphizes the machine too much. I prefer “Simulated Intelligence”, and I feel like that describes what is going on much better.
We are, through this process, simulating intelligence. These models aren’t intelligent, but they can simulate it. Every simulation has a degree of fidelity, and we’re not at 100%, not even with the top models. When you think about it in those terms, I find it becomes a lot easier to keep their limitations in mind. Additionally, it becomes easier to remember that this is an algorithm that you are running, and are responsible for, not another being that you can ascribe blame to.
What is the difference between simulating eg factoring a cryptographic number that is the product of two large primes and "actually" factoring that number?
Every time LLM-defenders get upset that people apparently don't understand how LLMs work, why is it they _immediately_ pivot into examples and statements that demonstrate that they don't understand how _people_ work?
"you would be autocomplete too"
"thoughts are just tokens"
etc
You're not helping your case the way you think you are.
I think people have more passion to argue than they have passion to learn. Probably doesn't help that SV culture tells people to hustle so hard that they don't have time to think. Gotta go fast?
15% more price for 25% more battery is worth it alone. Add in that every time I adjust the volume without needing to dig out my phone, and I’ll feel even better.
$20 is a single meal at a fast food restaurant, which I’ll have forgotten about the very next day. This is a much better long term investment.
>Starting September 14, we're permanently raising standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25% for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans. Until then, the current 50% increase will be in place.
> Compared to today, this works out to a 17% reduction in weekly limits on Claude Code. We’re working on exciting changes that will make it feel like you’re getting more from Claude, while having more visibility and control of your usage. Can’t wait to share them.
They are both raising the limits by 25% and apparently reducing them by 17%. I think they mean to say you can do more, but what a terrible press release.
I'm pretty sure they mean going from 150% to 125%, where 1.25/1.50 = 0.83, so they're calling that a 17% reduction. It's less than today, but also more than a limit they made up and then didn't apply.
Exactly this. You still have to understand the abstraction layer the LLM is working at in order to be able to form an opinion about the quality of the code. (If you DON’T care about the quality of the code, there’s always been ways to get an extra 1000% short-term speed improvement by just not giving a shit.)
AI isn’t “a code abstraction layer” any more than Jira is, or the engineer themselves is.
I think "the engineer themselves" is much closer to the abstraction layer I'm referring to.
Imagine for a moment that, rather than using a compiler to translate c++ into assembly, that it instead has to be done by a person on the team. If that were the case, the resulting assembly code would certainly have to be reviewed and assessed before it was accepted.
Why?
Because people can also be leaky, non-deterministic abstraction layers. The only reason that the output of a compiler isn't regularly reviewed (in 99% of cases) is because it's extraordinarily reliable and consistently correct, or correct enough for most cases.
It's not terribly dissimilar from delegating engineering tasks to other engineers. When I ask someone else to develop one component of a larger application, I'm not telling them exactly what lines to write, I'm giving them some kind of structure and they're filling in the rest. The communication to them is above the implementation layer.
Agents are increasingly letting us work at that same boundary. Just because the current state of LLMs requires engineering knowledge to review the result doesn't mean an abstraction hasn't occurred. It speaks more to the current quality of that abstraction than the absence of one.
I think that if LLMs were able to achieve the same consistency as a compiler, most people wouldn't ever bother to check the underlying code it produced. I also think it would be difficult to not acknowledge that LLMs have gotten better at converting natural language into functioning software. The abstraction is certainly not perfect, but it is clearly improving.
Damn, can you imagine a world where it would be so easy to convince one of these companies to stop poisoning the minds of an entire country like that?
Like, I kinda jest, but also kinda don’t. Would that really be so bad of an outcome? The net positives don’t really seem to bear up under all the negatives just… going away.
Yeah, but social media won’t be the only companies that notice. If Australia’s government will do it to them to prop up their local dying industry, they will do it to you, too. If the EU or US tries that, well, those are huge markets and maybe you bend (maybe you don’t!). But Australia is 27 million people, less than 10% the size of those. If they want to get heavy-handed, well, it’s their country, but as recent US actions have shown, other countries’ companies may pick up their ball and go home rather than play with you.
As an Aussie expat who uses Facebook to keep in contact with my friends and family: yes, it would be bad. Social networking tools have real positive effects on the world, let us not forget that.
It's exactly this - "coding was never the hard part" translates more directly to "coding was never was slowing me down". It's nailing down requirements, it's cross-functional team meetings, it's planning the testing and rollout, it's integrating with all the other parts of the product and systems, etc etc etc. Optimizing coding was just aiming at the fastest part of the job already.
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