Of course it’s his favorite thing. He’s been using the project as a way to get “donations” from companies and people he did favors for. The same with his inauguration ceremony, which was pretty shit but also garnered hundreds of millions in donations. All of that money is going straight in Trumps pocket.

It’s such a bizarre situation. Not only are they expecting AI to perform miracles (it won’t), they are also expecting AI to fuel financial growth at unprecedented rates? Where is that money even going to come from? It’s not like companies just have lots of money laying around, waiting for something to spend it on.

The premise is AI would be able to replace people and therefor instead of paying people, companies would pay for the AI instead. But there is zero evidence that’s going to happen and if it happens the entire economy collapses. It makes perfect sense from the point of view of someone like Altman. If AI rules the world, they control the hardware and the software, so in fact they rule the world. But from a regular investor point of view, it makes no sense at all.

But I guess people see this similar to crypto, it’s bullshit and makes no sense, while in the short term it’s a good vehicle for making money. Similar to a pyramid scheme, people who got on early can make a lot of money, with the late-comers left holding the bag. Difference is, the scale has become such that it won’t really work for long. We are destroying the economy regardless of the outcome.

Some people will have you believe it’s all about the angle of the dangle, while we all know it’s about length times diameter plus weight over girth divided by angle of the tip squared.

I wonder if AI would ever be not shit, if that could actually be an interesting thing. Like at the end of the day you sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit and put on a podcast. But instead of it being about some random topic, it’s about the meetings you had today.

They discuss what you were wearing and how tired you looked. How you obviously cleaned up a bit in view of the camera, but didn’t guess the angle right so some mess was still visible. They spend about 30 minutes on how you had prepared a talking point, made your arguments and had everyone on board, until Steve made a simple remark that destroyed your standpoint and had everyone laughing at you. They speculate a bit about your childhood and how today will impact the future. The upcoming review gets mentioned, but the host stamps down on that, as that’s a topic for a future episode and it’ll be an extra long episode with special guests. Somehow there’s a sponsor spot for anti-depressants? Not sure what that’s all about.

Alas we’ll never have that whimsical flavor of distopia, just the regular shit flavored one.

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’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.

Well that would lump all users into one instance. Costs of that instance would be huge, leaving the owner to seek out ways of monetizing the whole thing. Downtime and disruptions would then also impact a large part of the user base. And if the instance goes belly up, those users are shit out of luck. It would also place a lot of power in the hands of that instance.

Basically what you describe are the exact things the fediverse is meant to fix. Otherwise you are just creating a new single large social media, with all the same issues. The whole point is to have people be distributed over lots of instances or even run their own instance.

The point however is valid, this is an issue that deserves some thought. But it’s a hard problem to solve.

This is true for more aspects of Lemmy in my opinion. For lots of things it’s too similar to other larger social media, where I feel better choices exist. Or it’s similar to one kind of social media, where it could use aspects of other kinds of social media. We are seeing some of that being fixed now with Lemmy being able to integrate with other parts of the threadiverse.

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.

I like it when an app seems a little bit poorly made, I can just try it out and when it doesn’t work I can simply delete it. Much better than installing it with some random shell script or handmade package file. You never know if installing won’t fuck up something or uninstalling it leaves stuff behind or removes stuff is shouldn’t.

There’s a few apps I use once in a blue moon to convert some files, they all sit in one little folder not hurting anything till I need them. That folder is pretty old and has moved multiple systems, but they still work great for what they do.

Thanks Steve

Unfortunately it isn’t just the high end stuff which is feeling the crunch. These AI companies have bought up all the production capacity, which means there is less low-end stuff being produced. We’re still coasting on existing stock at the moment, but as that runs out prices will rise across the board.

Was it one of those lighting rams from the DLC? Man fuck those guys

Suleyman has been a known bullshitter for years now. Even people who agree with him wished he would shut the fuck up.

I totally get it. I’ve been critical about using AI for code purposes at work and have pleaded to stop using it (management is forcing it, less experienced folk want it). So I’ve been given a challenge by one of the proponents to use a very specific tool. This one should be one of the best AI slop generators out there.

So I spent a lot of time thoroughly writing specs for a task in a way the tool should be able to do it. It failed miserably, didn’t even produce any usable result. So I asked the dude that challenged me to help me refine the specs, tweak the tool, make everything perfect. The thing still failed hard. It was said it was because I was forcing the tool into decisions it couldn’t handle and to give it more freedom. So we did that, it made up the rules themselves and subsequently didn’t follow those rules. Another failure. So we split up the task into smaller pieces, it still couldn’t handle it. So we split it up even further, to a ridiculous level, at which point it would definitely be faster just to create the code manually. It’s also no longer realistic, as we pretty much have the end result all worked out and are just coaching the tool to get there. And even then it’s making mistakes, having to be corrected all the time, not following specs, not following code guidelines or best practices. Another really annoying thing is it keeps on changing code it shouldn’t touch, since we’ve made the steps so small, it keeps messing up work it did previously. And the comments it creates are crazy, either just about every line has a comment attached and functions get a whole story, or it has zero comments. As soon as you say to limit the comments to where they are useful, it just deletes all the comments, even the ones it put in before or we put in manually.

I’m ready to give up on the thing and have the use of AI tools for coding limited if not outright stopped entirely. But I’ll know how that discussion will go: Oh you used tool A? No, you should be using tool B, it’s much better. Maybe the tools aren’t there now, but they are getting better all the time, so we’ll benefit any day now.

When I hear even experienced devs be enthusiastic about AI tools, I really feel like I’m going crazy. They suck a lot and aren’t useful at all (on top of the thousand other issues with AI), why are people liking it? And why have we hedged the entire economy on it?

Can we get Hbomberguy punch through a wall and ask: “Protect them from what Tom? PROTECT THEM FROM WHAT?”

Trump has a menu posted above the counter, McDonald’s style. Just pick what you want and pay at the register. We’ve got a special on pardons this week, and you can SuperPAC if you want.

Why is AI entering the operating room? Why???