The best thing about all these AI stories is they give people a lot more chances for a FP.

...the password was hard-coded to today's date, and some "smart" people put it directly onto the Internet (or via port forwarding).

To an outside person, this was virtually indistinguishable from an web-site, in fact from the screen-shots circulating on Fedi, it even looks well designed compared to many web-sites out there.

Kinda like a /. post.

I means Google clearly doesn't think it's likely they'll need that level of power in the near future... but they cannot tell their investors that, since that would sound like they are quitting out of the AI race.

So the obvious solution is to make contracts with a company that will, most likely, never provide a service economically. Nobody has ever operated a nuclear power plant without heavy subsidies, and using old equipment that's long out of its desired life-span doesn't make it more economical. On the other side there are now a lot cheaper and simpler alternatives like solar, wind and battery storage. Look at the prices for solar panels, look at the prices for batteries. Nuclear will most likely never be able to come close to the economics of renewables. That ship has sailed in the last decade or so.

So in a few years, when the hype has died down, and we need much less data centers, Google will just be able to quietly back out, since Constellation Energy will most likely, not have delivered on their promise. Everyone is happy then, and the amount of money wasted is minimal.

With permanent DST we won't get the stories twice a year.

They'll need the money to settle all the resulting lawsuits.

Memory now is expensive now, and fewer people shell out for the gigabytes of memory a typical Linux system needs. So people will likely just stick to Windows and DOS games as those run fine on 64 Megabytes of RAM.

I mean, as the numbers show, few people played games on workstation class machines anyhow. Why waste hundreds of dollars or euros on a Linux workstation, when you can rescue a Windows box from scrap.

Yeah, but you could just put everything you'd put into a satellite into a small shed and plop that somewhere. There's extemely little to be gained by going into space for such things, particularly considering the effort.

The promise of "new space" startups like SpaceX is, that they will somehow be able to reduce the costs of bringing up something into space by multiple orders of magnitude. That's what they promise, if people stop believing that they can do that eventually, they will just implode.

Bringing electronics into space has it's problems, but it's essentially proven technology. We have had space stations converting many kilowatts for decades now. We can do that, we know how to do that. We know where to get the energy from (storage and batteries) we know how to cool that. We know how to do high-speed data links. A Terabit to a LEO satellite is just a regular engineering problem.

So why don't we just put data centers in orbit? The answer is that putting anything into orbit is prohibitively expensive. We can have most of the advantages of the technology also without putting stuff into space. You can run data centers by solar and wind, heck it's hard to find a hosting company in Germany, for example, that does not do that.

Claiming that data centers in space have a future is claiming that "new space" companies are likely to achieve their goal. I don't know how much investment Google has in "new space", but if it's a billion, spending some pocket money on such an experiment seems like a sensible investment to strengthen that investment.

The market for fashion-statement laptops is already crowded. You can buy hundreds of different "to thin to be useful" laptops, that barely work under real life conditions.

There would be a market for easy to maintain laptops that are thick enough to not only provide essential ports (Framework failed on this), but also provide the ability to have battery packs of meaningful size. (e.g. >100Wh)

Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.

IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.

Something fishy is going on.

Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?

Yes, but think how great the fire sale is going to be for everyone else.

Well, some people think AI will extinctify us within four years, whereas if the IRGC gets nukes they'll figure out like everyone else that they can't actually use them except in self defense without getting erased, so the only difference will be that we won't be able to try crush them anymore.

Yes, tell us how easy the current effort is turning out to be. Someone grabbed a tiger by the tail and can neither subdue it nor let go. The IRGC is probably laughing its ass off.