The reason, data centers choose to be near London is because there is no pricing advantage to go up north. Even though energy is plentiful, readily accessible, and often curtailed when there's too much of it there. If there was a pricing difference, you'd see a lot more economic activity up north.

Basically the physical advantage is there but the lack of economics cover it up and wipe out the advantage.

MIT license requires attribution, which AI algorithms don’t provide AFAIK. So either (a) it’s fair use and MS can do that regardless of the license or (b) MS can’t do that. In any case, yeah, that’s not the issue Zig folks have with GitHub.

MS training AIs on Zig isn't their complaint here. They're saying that Github has become a worse service because MS aren't working on the fundamentals any more and just chasing the AI dream, and trying to get AI to write code for it is having bad results.

In this case, they probably were trying to not just rewrite but improve the engine at the same time. That's a much more complicated thing to achieve. Especially when the original is a heavily optimized and probably somewhat hard to reason about blob of assembly. I'm guessing that even wrapping your head around that would be a significant job.

Amazingly enjoyable game btw. Killed quite a few hours with that one around 2000.

I wish my managers would get this. Currently our product shit the fan due to us being understaffed and badly managed due to clueless managers, and what they did was add two more managers to the team to create more meetings and micromanage everrying.

The acquisition makes more sense. A few observations:

- no acquisition amount was announced. That indicates some kind of share swap where the investors change shares for one company into another. Presumably the founder now has some shares in Anthropic and a nice salary and vesting structure that will keep him on board for a while.

- The main investor was Kleiner Perkins. They are also an investor in Anthropic. 100M in the last round, apparently.

Everything else is a loosely buzzword compatible thingy for Anthropic's AI coding thingy and some fresh talent for their team. All good. But it's beside the point. This was an investor bailout. They put in quite a bit of money in Bun with exactly 0 remaining chance of that turning into the next unicorn. Whatever flaky plan there once might have been for revenue that caused them to invest, clearly wasn't happening. So, they liquidated their investment through an acquihire via one of their other investments.

Kind of shocking how easy it was to raise that kind of money with essentially no plan whatsoever for revenue. Where I live (Berlin), you get laughed away by investors (in a quite smug way typically) unless you have a solid plan for making them money. This wouldn't survive initial contact with due diligence. Apparently money still grows on trees in Silicon Valley.

I like Bun and have used it but from where I'm sitting there was no unicorn lurking there, ever.

It might only be a few percent of overall users. But a few percent of a billion $ is a couple of tens of millions. That's a steep price to pay for anti-cheat code.

It's only the highly competitive online games that have this issue. While they make up a lot of playtime, they're worked on by a tiny minority of developers.

Eh, maybe?

I'd put forth the notion that game devs might be caring how their game works on both Windows and Proton. That is, that they're still using the Microsoft-provided APIs to build their game, but care about how it runs on Linux just as much as how it runs on Windows.

It is up to Valve to sort it up, they are the ones that care, otherwise they will need to pay Windows licenses, which is really what this is all about, while pretending to be some kind of white knights.

Taking a moral stance against AI might make you feel good but doesn't serve the customer in the end. They need value for money. And you can get a lot of value from AI these days; especially if you are doing marketing, frontend design, etc. and all the other stuff a studio like this would be doing.

The expertise and skill still matter. But customers are going to get a lot further without such a studio and the remaining market is going to be smaller and much more competitive.

There's a lot of other work emerging though. IMHO the software integration market is where the action is going to be for the next decade or so. Legacy ERP systems, finance, insurance, medical software, etc. None of that stuff is going away or at risk of being replaced with some vibe coded thing. There are decades worth of still widely used and critically important software that can be integrated, adapted, etc. for the modern era. That work can be partly AI assisted of course. But you need to deeply understand the current market to be credible there. For any new things, the ambition level is just going to be much higher and require more skill.

Arguing against progress as it is happening is as old as the tech industry. It never works. There's a generation of new programmers coming into the market and they are not going to hold back.

So let's all just give zero fucks about our moral values and just multiply monetary ones.

You are misconstruing the original point. They are simply suggesting that the moral qualms of using AI are simply not that high - neither to vast majority of consumers, neither to the government. There are a few people who might exaggerate these moral issues for self service but they wouldn't matter in the long term.

That is not to suggest there are absolutely no legitimate moral problems with AI but they will pale in comparison to what the market needs.

If AI can make things 1000x more efficient, humanity will collectively agree in one way or the other to ignore or work around the "moral hazards" for the greater good.

You can start by explaining what your specific moral value is that goes against AI use? It might bring to clarity whether these values are that important at all to begin with.

Is that the promise of the faustian bargain we're signing?

Once the ink is dry, should I expect to be living in a 900,000 sq ft apartment, or be spending $20/year on healthcare? Or be working only an hour a week?

But it requires giving up things a lot of people don't want to, because consuming less once you are used to consuming more sucks. Here is a list of things people can cut from their life that are part of the "consumption has gone up" and "new categories of consumption were opened" that ovi256 was talking about:

- One can give up cell phones, headphones/earbuds, mobile phone plans, mobile data plans, tablets, ereaders, and paid apps/services. That can save $100/mo in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 20 years ago.

- One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.

- One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.

- One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.

- One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.

I could keep going, but by this point I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.

It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone and a cell phone plan. Many things that were possible to do before without one now require it.

> - One can give up laptops, desktops, gaming consoles, internet service, and paid apps/services. That can save another $100/months in bills and amortized hardware. These were a luxury 30 years ago.

Maybe you can replace these with the cell phone + plan.

> - One can give up imported produce and year-round availability of fresh foods. Depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save almost nothing, or up to hundreds of dollars every month. This was a luxury 50 years ago.

It's not clear that imported food is cheaper than locally grown food. Also I'm not sure you have the right time frame. I'm pretty sure my parents were buying imported produce in the winter when I was a kid 50 years ago.

> - One can give up restaurant, take-out, and home pre-packaged foods. Again depending on your family size and eating habits, that could save nothing-to-hundreds every month. This was a luxury 70 years ago.

Agreed.

> - One can give up car ownership, car rentals, car insurance, car maintenance, and gasoline. In urban areas, walking and public transit are much cheaper options. In rural areas, walking, bicycling, and getting rides from shuttle services and/or friends are much cheaper options. That could save over a thousand dollars a month per 15,000 miles. This was a luxury 80 years ago.

Yes but in urban areas whatever you're saving on cars you are probably spending on higher rent and mortgage costs compared to rural areas where cars are a necessity. And if we're talking USA, many urban areas have terrible public transportation and you probably still need Uber or the equivalent some of the time, depending on just how walkable/bike-able your neighborhood is.

> It's not clear that it's still possible to function in society today with out a cell phone

Like I said... I've likely suggested cutting something you now consider necessary consumption. If you thought one "can't just give that up nowadays," I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.

---

As an aside, I live in a rural area. The population of my county is about 17,000 and the population of its county seat is about 3,000. We're a good 40 minutes away from the city that centers the Metropolitan Statistical Area. A 1 bedroom apartment is $400/mo and a 2 bedroom apartment is $600/mo. In one month, minimum wage will be $15/hr.

Some folks here do live without a car. It is possible. They get by in exactly the ways I described (except some of the Amish/Mennonites, who also use horses). It's not preferred (except by some of the Amish/Mennonites), but one can make it work.

This idea that increased consumption over the past century has been irrelevant to quality of life is just absurd.

Past 50 years...meh.

I've been alive slightly longer than that. And can't say life today is definitively better than 50 years ago in the USA.

It was the tail end of one income affording a house and groceries for a family. So to afford the same things, for many families requires almost double the labor.

A lot of new medical treatments, less smoking and drinking, overall longer life spans. But more recently increases to longevity have plateaued, and an epic of obesity has mitigated a lot of the health care improvements. And the astronomical increases in health care costs means improvements to health care capabilities are not available to a lot of people, at least not without greatly reducing their standard of living elsewhere.

College and university costs have grown exponentially, with no discernible increase in the quality of learning.

Housing prices far outpacing inflation of other goods and services.

Fewer intact families, less in person interactions, and the heroin like addictiveness of screens, have ushered in an epidemic of mental illness that might be unprecedented.

Now AI scaring the shit out of everyone, that no matter how hard you study, how disciplined and responsible you are, there's a good chance you will not be gainfully employed.

I frankly think the quality of life in the world I grew up in is better than the one my kids have today.

But if we take "surprisingly small salary" to literally mean salary, most (... all?) salaried jobs require you to work full time, 40 hours a week. Unless we consider cushy remote tech jobs, but those are an odd case and likely to go away if we assume AI is taking over there.

Part time / hourly work is largely less skilled and much lower paid, and you'll want to take all the hours you can get to be able to afford outright necessities like rent. (Unless you're considering rent as consumption/luxury, which is fair)

It does seem like there's a gap in terms of skilled/highly paid but hourly/part time work.

(Not disagreeing with the rest of your post though)

>I'm just hoping you acknowledge that what people consider optional consumption has changed, which means people consume a lot more.

Of course it's changed. The point is that

1. the necessities haven't changed and have gotten more expensive. People need healthcare, housing, food, and tranport. All up.

2. the modern day expectations means necessities change. We can't walk into a business and shake someone's hand to get a job, so you "need" access to the internet to get a job. Recruiters also expect a consistent phone number to call so good luck skipping a phone line (maybe VOIP can get around this).

These are society's fault as they shifted to pleasing shareholders and outsourcing entire industries (and of course submitted to lobbying). so I don't like this blame being shifted to the individual for daring to consume to survive.

As an aside, every thread I see here has a comment by you lol, that's some good effort but maybe take a break from such strenuous commenting, I say this sincerely as I also used to get into all these back and forths on HN and then realized, much of the time, it's a waste of my own time.

But that's not what they said, they said they want to work less. As the GP post said, they'd still be working a full week.

I do think this is an interesting point. The trend for most of history seems to have been vastly increasing consumption/luxury while work hours somewhat decrease. But have we reached the point where that's not what people want? I'd wager most people in rich developed countries don't particularly want more clothes, gadgets, cars, or fast food. If they can get the current typical middle class share of those things (which to be fair is a big share, and not environmentally sustainable), along with a modest place to live, they (we) mainly want to work less.

Not really a "want" as much as "move where the jobs are". Remote jobs are shakey now and being in the middle of nowhere only worsens your compensation aspects. Being able to live wherever you please is indeed a luxury. The suburb structure already sacrificed the aspect of high CoL for increase commute time to work.

I also do think that dismissing aspects of humanity like family, community and sense of purpose to "luxuries" is an extremely dangerous line of thinking.

If you think your life is a waste right now, do something with it. That's actually the number one thing people don't expect from being retired, how bored they get. They say in FIRE communities that all the money and time in the world won't help if you don't actually utilize it.

Edit: There is some research covering work time estimates for different ages.

We can live without a flat screen TV (which has gotten dirt cheap). We can't live without a decent house. Or worse, while we can live in some 500 sq ft shack we can't truly "live" if there's no other public amenities to gather and socialize without nickel-and-diming us.

There's more to cosume than 50 years ago, but I don't see that trend continuing. We shifted phone bills to cell phone bills and added internet bills and a myriad of subscriptions. But that's really it. everything was "turn one time into subscrition".

I don't see what will fundamentally shift that current consumption for the next 20-30 years. Just more conversion of ownership to renting. In entertainment we're already seeing revolts against this as piracy surges. I don't know how we're going to "consume a lot more" in this case.

Then the hospital takes the house to pay off the rest of the debts. Everybody wins!

But _somebody_ will be living in a 900,000 sq ft apartment and working an hour a week, and the concept of money will be defunct.

And I believe they (and I) are suggesting that this is just a bad faith spin on the market, if you look at actual AI confidence and sentiment and don't ignore it as "ehh just the internet whining". Consumers having less money to spend doesn't mean they are adopting AI en masse, nor are happy about it.

I don't think using the 2025 US government for a moral compass is helping your case either.

>If AI can make things 1000x more efficient

Exhibit A. My observations suggest that consumers are beyond tired of talking about the "what ifs" while they struggle to afford rent or get a job in this economy, right now. All the current gains are for corporate billionaires, why would they think that suddenly changes here and now?

Where are you going to draw the line? Only if it effects you, or maybe we should go back to using coal for everything, so the mineworkers have their old life back? Or maybe follow the Amish guidelines to ban all technology that threatens sense of community?

If you are going to draw a line, you'll probably have to start living in small communities, as AI as a technology is almost impossible to stop. There will be people and companies using it to it's fullest, even if you have laws to ban it, other countries will allow it.

The goal of AI is NOT to be a tool. It's to replace human labor completely.

This means 100% of economic value goes to capital, instead of labor. Which means anyone that doesn't have sufficient capital to live off the returns just starves to death.

To avoid that outcome requires a complete rethinking of our economic system. And I don't think our institutions are remotely prepared for that, assuming the people runnign them care at all.

The same could be said of social media for which I think the aggregate bad has been far greater than the aggregate good (though there has certainly been some good sprinkled in there).

I think the same is likely to be true of "AI" in terms of the negative impact it will have on the humanistic side of people and society over the next decade or so.

However like social media before it I don't know how useful it will be to try to avoid it. We'll all be drastically impacted by it through network effects whether we individually choose to participate or not and practically speaking those of us who still need to participate in society and commerce are going to have to deal with it, though that doesn't mean we have to be happy about it.

Not really. Or at least, "just be happy" isn't a good response to someone homeless and jobless.

Yes, absolutely.

Just because it's monopolized by evil people doesn't mean it's inherently bad. In fact, mots people here have seen examples of it done in a good way.

Like this very website we're on, proving the parent's point in fact.

I don't know if HN 2025 has been a good example of "in a good way".

It won't be as hard as you think for HN to slip into the very thing they mock Instagram of today for being.

Yup, story of my life. I have on fact had a dozen different times where I chose not to jump off the cliff with peers. How little I realized back then how rare that quality is.

But you got your answer, feel free to follow the crowd. I already have migrations ready. Again, not my first time.

It will be, of course, but only until all human competition in those fields is eliminated. And after that, all those billions invested must be recouped back by making the prices skyrocket. Didn't we see that with e.g. Uber?

AI wouldn't fall into that bucket, it wouldn't be driven entirely by the human at the wheel.

I'm not sold yet whether LLMs are AI, my gut says no and I haven't been convinced yet. We can't lose the distinction between ML and AI though, its extremely important when it comes to risk considerations.

Machine learning isn't about developing anything intelligent at all, its about optimizing well defined problem spaces for algorithms defined by humans. Intelligence is much more self guided and has almost nothing to do with finding the best approximate solution to a specific problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

You are free to define AI differently but don't be surprised if people don't share your unique definition.

You not liking something on purportedly "moral" grounds doesn't matter if it works better than something else.

Guess you mmissed the post where lawyers were submitting legal documents generated by LLM's. Or people taking medical advice and ending up with hyperbromium consumptions. Or the lawsuits around LLM's softly encouraging suicide. Or the general AI psychosis being studied.

It's way past "some exceptions" at this point.

You don't see how botched law case can't cost someone their life? Let's not wait until more die to reign this in.

>Someone could search on Google just the same and ignore their symptoms.

Yes, and it's not uncommon for websites or search engines to be sued. Millenia of laws exist for this exact purpose, so companies can't deflect bad things back to the people.

If you want the benefits, you accept the consequences. Especially when you fail to put up guard rails.

Removing all personal responsibility from this equation isn't going to solve anything.

That argument is rather naive, given that millenia of law is meant to regulate and disincentivize behavior. "If people didn't get mad they wouldn't murder!"

We've regulated public messages for decades, and for good reason. I'm not absolving them this time because they want to hide behind a chatbot. They have blood on their hands.

But you may indeed be vying against your best interests. Hope you can take some time to understand where you lie in life and if your society is really benefiting you.

For instance I work for one of the companies that produces some of the most popular LLMs in use today. And I certainly have a stake in them performing well and being useful.

But your line of reasoning would have us believe that Henry Ford is a mass murderer due to the number of vehicular deaths each year, or that the wright brothers bear some responsibility for 9/11. They should have foreseen that people would fly their planes into buildings, of course.

If you want to blame someone for LLMs hurting people, we really need to go all the way back to Alan Turing -- without him these people would still be alive!

Okay, cool. Note that I never asked for your opinion and you decided to pop up in this chain as I was talking to someone else. Go about your day or be curious, but don't butt in then pretend 'well I don't care what you say' when you get a response back.

Nothing you said contradicted my main point. So this isn't really a conversation but simply more useless defense. Good day.

Didn't think that would go so cleanly over your head given you're all the way up there on your high horse of morality.

According to the logic of your argument, it's perfectly okay to drive a 360t BelAZ 75710 loaded to its full 450t capacity over that bridge just because it's a truck too.

I am an AI skeptic and until the hype is supplanted by actual tangible value I will prefer products that don't cram AI everywhere it doesn't belong.

However, what I don't like is how little the authors are respected in this process. Everything that the AI generates is based on human labour, but we don't see the authors getting the recognition.

In that sense AI has been the biggest heist that has ever been perpetrated.

Authors still get recognition. If they are decent authors producing original, literary work. But the type of author that fills page five of your local news paper, has not been valued for decades. But that was filler content long before AI showed up. Same for the people that do the subtitles on soap operas. The people that create the commercials that show at 4am on your TV. All fair game for AI.

It's not a heist, just progress. People having to adapt and struggling with that happens with most changes. That doesn't mean the change is bad. Projecting your rage, moralism, etc. onto agents of change is also a constant. People don't like change. The reason we still talk about Luddites is that they overreacted a bit.

People might feel that time is treating them unfairly. But the reality is that sometimes things just change and then some people adapt and others don't. If your party trick is stuff AIs do well (e.g. translating text, coming up with generic copy text, adding some illustrations to articles, etc.), then yes AI is robbing you of your job and there will be a lot less demand for doing these things manually. And maybe you were really good at it even. That really sucks. But it happened. That cat isn't going back in the bag. So, deal with it. There are plenty of other things people can still do.

You are no different than that portrait painter in the 1800s that suddenly saw their market for portraits evaporate because they were being replaced by a few seconds exposure in front of a camera. A lot of very decent art work was created after that. It did not kill art. But it did change what some artists did for a living. In the same way, the gramophone did not kill music. The TV did not kill theater. Etc.

Getting robbed implies a sense of entitlement to something. Did you own what you lost to begin with?

People claiming that backpropagation "steals" your material don't understand math or copyright.

You can hate generative tools all you want -- opinions are free -- but you're fundamentally wrong about the legality or morality at play.

See Studio Ghibli's art style being ripped off, Disney suing Midjourney, etc

Regardless of whether you think IP laws should prevent LLMs from training on works under copyright, I hardly think the situation is beyond dispute. Whether copyright itself should even exist is something many dispute.

If they had succeeded in regulation over machines and seeing wealth back into the average factory worker’s hands, of artisans integrated into the workforce instead of shut out, would so much of the bloodshed and mayhem to form unions and regulations have been needed?

Broadly, it seems to me that most technological change could use some consideration of people

Robbing implies theft. The word heist was used here to imply that some crime is happening. I don't think there is such a crime and disagree with the framing. Which is what this is, and which is also very deliberate. Luddites used a similar kind of framing to justify their actions back in the day. Which is why I'm using it as an analogy. I believe a lot of the anti AI sentiment is rooted in very similar sentiments.

I'm not missing the point but making one. Clearly it's a sensitive topic to a lot of people here.

This type of business isn’t going to be hit hard by AI; this type of business owner is going to be hit hard by AI.

If every AI lab were to go bust tomorrow, we could still hire expensive GPU servers (there would suddenly be a glut of those!) and use them to run those open weight models and continue as we do today.

Sure, the models wouldn't ever get any better in the future - but existing teams that rely on them would be able to keep on working with surprisingly little disruption.

>the type of business that's going to be hit hard by AI [...] will be the ones that integrate AI into their business the most

There. Fixed!

Prompting isn't a skill, and praying that the next prompt finally spits out something decent is not a business strategy.

No thanks, I'm good.

well you just describing an chatgpt is, one of the most fastest growing user acquisition user base in history

as much as I agree with your statement but the real world doesn't respect that

By selling a dollar of compute for 90 cents.

We've been here before, it doesn't end like you think it does.

Recently I had to learn SPARQL. What I did is I created an MCP server to connect it to a graph database with SPARQL support, and then I asked the AI: "Can you teach me how to do this? How would I do this in SQL? How would I do it with SPARQL?" And then it would show me.

With examples of how to use something, it really helps that you can ask questions about what you want to know at that moment, instead of just following a static tutorial.

I still wondering why I'm not doing my banking in Bitcoins. My blockchain database was replaced by postgres.

So some tech can just be hypeware. The OP has a legitimate standpoint given some technologies track record.

And the doctors are still out on the affects of social media on children or why are some countries banning social media for children?

Not everything that comes out of Silicon Valley is automatically good.

From the point of view of developing your brain, leaving your country is a free education in itself. There is also the effect of embedding yourself in a network of expats made up of the best and brightest from countries all over the world. That all comes on top of the education you receive. And if you are less in it for the intellectual stuff and are more into drinking and partying, college life in the US is pretty lame compared to some university towns across the world. Cheaper, wilder, better.

Community college to state school path.

You can get a full bachelors degree for ~$35k. All four years, $35k. Not per year. Full degree. $35k.

And that's before any scholarships or grants.

Kids and parents are just insane though, and want to flex about the college they are going to from day one. Its become a ritualistic practice with social shame attached to going to community school.

Even though the end result is exactly the same.

Whether that is a sensible strategy for the firm (a candidate bias towards those who can pay the top college fees) is another question.

A one-person apartment in the local halls of residence costs under €500/month here in DE. A room in a shared flat costs a lot less.

I wonder how long it will last? UK Universities are now for rich foreigners only. It does mean great options for Chinese food near student halls though.

Except some universities may allow foreign students to take on-campus jobs, which would probably pay enough. Or for a PhD, usually the university pays you.

Citation needed, because I'm almost certain not being allowed to work as a foreign student is the exception to the rule. A surface level Google search for Western European countries (BE/NL/FR/DE, typical places to go study abroad) shows me all of them allow non-EU students to get a job. You'll typically see these student workers in bars, restaurants, grocery stores, ...

RE the parent comment stating 500 EUR rent is potentially too much for a foreign student to afford, I can imagine it might be. But it's also too much to afford for plenty of native students, and a large share of them get these student jobs to be able to afford their student housing and the likes.

I looked at other countries and they have much less restrictions, so it seems you’re right and it’s more common than I thought.

And is this about the content of the degree(s), or just brand name recognition?

1) ISS is about 30 years old. It's hardly the state of the art in solar technology. Also, it's much easier to get light to solar panels far a larger part of the time. Permanently in some orbits. And of course there is 0% chance of clouds or other obstructions.

2) We'll have Starship soon and New Glenn. Launching a lot of mass to orbit is a lot cheaper than launching the Space Station was.

3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

4) There have been plans for large scale solar panels in space for the purpose of beaming energy down in some form. This is not as much science fiction as it used to be anymore.

5) Learning effects are a thing. Based on thirty years ago, this is a bad idea. Based on today, it's still not great. But if things continue to improve, some things become doable. Star link works today and in terms of investment it's not a lot worse than a lot of the terrestrial communication networks it replaces. The notion would have been ridiculous a few decades ago but it no longer is.

In short, counter arguments to articles like this almost write themselves.

Rockets: Launching no mass to orbit is even cheaper still.

Bandwidth: You do realize that even starlink speeds are crazy slow and high latency compared to data center optical connections? Fiber and copper always win out over wifi. With space, you are stuck with wifi. (Oversimplified, but accurate.)

Space solar power: there has been talk of this for half a century, yes. It never materialized because, like space data centers, it doesn't make economic sense.

Domestic solar panels are heavy, and dont need to deal with hypersonic sand blasting. even at that height, you are in shadow every 90 minutes.

> 3) The article complains about lack of bandwidth. Star Link serves millions of customers with high speed, low latency internet via thousands of satellites.

Right. First power and heat are a massive pain to deal with. You need megawatts to run a datacentre. A full rack of GPUs (48u, 96 GPUs) is around 40-70kw. It also weighs a literal ton.

You also need to be able to power that in the time when you are in darkness. BUT! when you are zooming around the earth every 90 minutes, you can't maintain a low latency connection, because the distance between you and the datacentre.

That means geostationary, as that solves most of your power issues, but now you have latency and bandwidth issues. (oh and power, inverse square law and bandwidth are related)

> 5) Learning effects

Great, but it gets us nothing.

There are orbits that stay in permanent sunlight, even in LEO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

> Special cases of the Sun-synchronous orbit are the noon/midnight orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around noon or midnight, and the dawn/dusk orbit, where the local mean solar time of passage for equatorial latitudes is around sunrise or sunset, so that the satellite rides the terminator between day and night.

The dawn dusk orbit is in constant sunlight. The noon-midnight orbit isn't.

Those orbits (and their corresponding constellations) lack 100% availability for a ground station.

Furthermore, a polar orbit launch is quite a bit more expensive since it requires a significant change in inclination.

Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.

Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.

Yes, arguments that are facts-and-numbers-free are easy to write, but that applies to any topic, not just space data centers.

Dissipating heat into outer space is extremely difficult, you can't escape thermodynamics.

And the quality of the debate remains very low as well. Most people barely understand the issues. And that includes many journalists that are still getting hung up on the whole "hallucinations can be funny" thing mostly. There are a lot of confused people spouting nonsense on this topic.

There are special interest groups with lobbying powers. Media companies with intellectual properties, actors worried about being impersonated, etc. Those have some ability to lobby for changes. And then you have the wider public that isn't that well informed and has sort of caught on to the notion that chat gpt is now definitely a thing that is sometimes mildly useful.

And there are the AI companies that are definitely very well funded and have an enormous amount of lobbying power. They can move whole economies with their spending so they are getting relatively little push back from politicians. Political Washington and California run on obscene amounts of lobbying money. And the AI companies can provide a lot of that.