The splicing isn't the problem rather companies are letting people block ads if they put the work in.

Google could definitely win that arms race if they wanted to. They have vastly more resources after all. But at the same time I don't think they want to risk losing the users. Or worse have them go to a competitor.

That's probably the real issue. There is still the possibility of competition however remote.

And as usual they claim that China is only capable of stealing and copying. It's always the same mistake, and the same outcome.

It's because they think they can launch capacity faster than they can built it on Earth. Instead of dealing with local government, grid energy supply availability, water and so on, they can just launch it into orbit. It's all about being the first to deploy the compute capacity and cornering the market.

Of course it also creates lots of business for SpaceX, so a lot of it could be a Hyperloop-style scam.

Thing is they need to deal with the pollution it will create (stuff burning up on re-entry doesn't just vanish), frequency allocations for the comms, and the fact that now everyone wants their own 50,000 satellite constellation in those prime orbits.

The technical hurdles are relatively trivial in comparison.

Yeah, no naturally it was modded down. There are some real luddites around here.

Sure, but thinking further ahead, e.g. the plan for Starship is to land vertically on the moon and then lift off again. The renders they have produced show landing struts, presumably derived from the booster ones.

The Chinese lander shown off a few years ago looks to be more like the Apollo LM and planned Soviet LK, so they don't need that capability to hit their "before 2030" goal.

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

The Bonanza of free training data is over and done with. Sites are locking down and blocking scraping bots. They have to or they get overwhelmed by the cost of the traffic.

That means only the big platform holders are going to be able to keep their models fed and current.

So facebook, microsoft, maybe Apple and that's about it. In the past I would include Twitter but I think it's mostly politics bots and pussy pics in bio posts.

AI is a technology that by its very nature becomes a monopoly.

Everything is automated so we don't get any job creation and all the money just goes up to the top anyway. What the fuck do I care if it's a Chinese billionaire getting all the money or an American billionaire and getting all the money?

It's 2026 is there anyone naive enough to believe that there's some magical world where jobs come back? Half of people under 30 are living with their parents and no it's not because of cell phones and avocado toast...

Presumably that's why they envision having 50,000 of them. One alone won't do much, dozens or even hundreds of them all reflecting at the same spot...

Depends, is the amount of solar it generates at night going to offset more heating than it causes?

Y'all need to read up on the Indian rubber company or any one of the thousands of companies involved in colonialism.

Or Jesus fucking Christ Coke has death squads. And the stuff that the del Monte fruit company did would give you nightmares.

I don't like Facebook because they are driving my country to fascism but they've got a long way to go.

On the other hand they did help Elon Musk kill 8 million kids so there is that.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

The phrase you're looking for is "BAU, functioning as designed"

This is a small prototype, not a full-scale mirror.

Also, ignoring that, pretending light brighter than the full moon is useless is... silly? For generating power, sure, but for illumination, it absolutely is not.

In fact China has brought in a lot of fairly strict environmental policies in the last few decades, which often have quite dramatic effects on local industry. For example, no factories within half a kilometre of most rivers, and no discharging untreated waste into them.

Then there is the massive and frankly staggering rate at which they have adopted renewables. Hit their Paris targets 5 years early, and those were considered too ambitious to be realistic at the time.

"But China" was never a good argument, but these days it's laughable.

TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out.

All the EU has to do is hold its nerve until he relents.