Just thought of treadmill while working. What is a "cheap walking pad"? Same thing?

... as in: If you get in bed with them, you'll get screwed.

You really have to be a special kind of dumb to buy anything from Facebook. What did you expect? Their entire business model is selling YOU.

SpaceX made $75 billion actual real dollars. It's in the bank.

Sure, the individual VCs aren't allowed to take their actual cash out of the company until August 6. Want to bet the datacenter hype keeps going until at least then?

Elon Musk, or whoever manages him, already learned not to post speculative tweets about his companies followed up shortly later by "just jokes lol".

It's not great, but I don't think that's the least practical part of it. Reasonable people have done the math and you can almost make it work just by making the radiators the same size as, and putting them on the back of, the solar panels. Starlink satellites already generate and dissipate a kilowatt plus.

The impractical part is that the whole thing is going to deorbit and burn up after five years. Sure, maybe you don't want the five year old GPUs, but replacing the panels and radiators every five years is going to be more expensive than building twice as much on the ground.

Conspiracy theories are silly, and unnecessary.

Remember when Elon ruminated about hyperloop and everyone went nuts? Well, this time he ruminated about space datacentres. Oh, and SpaceX investors cashed out for ~$85 billion.

It is LEO.

Size is not free. Besides having to get the thing up there, which might come down to merely very expensive, there's drag in low Earth orbit, and the bigger the surface area of your satellite the more propulsion you need to keep it up there. The life of Starlink satellites is primarily limited by their propellant.

Even if you ignore launch costs entirely, is it cheaper to put your datacentre in space and replace it and your power plant every few years, or put it in a nice desert or on a floating island somewhere instead? Oh, and you have to engineer it to be completely maintenance free for the first option too.

What's the downside? SpaceX stock got pumped for their IPO. The money is made. As long as the hype keeps going they can raise more any time they want, or Elon could sell some of his shares. If it turns out to be unworkable, SpaceX (and subsidiaries) are back where they started.

There aren't really any unsolved engineering problems. SpaceX can absolutely put a rack of nvidia GPUs into low orbit. We could have done that in the 70s. The argument is whether it's economical or not.

Which is cheaper, putting a thousand square metres of solar panels, a rack of GPUs, a vacuum cooling system and propulsion in low orbit and incinerating and replacing it all every few years, or the panels, GPUs and a convective radiator that is ~50x more efficient on the ground and runs for twenty plus?

If I put some bricks or concrete blocks in a vacant lot and they assembled themselves into a house you'd think that was pretty cool.

There are tons and tons of pathogens with high mortality rates without medical intervention. There are tons of pathogens that only see minimal death rates without active medical intervention because vaccination reduced the penetration that those pathogens have into the community and may have even forced evolution for increased transmissibility in lieu of virulence in order to spread at all.

OK, so explain how you had supposedly never heard of the Transformers? They've been around since 1984.

I didn't get the feeling that the GP post was claiming it was valueless. I got the feeling that the concern was it would get out of the control of its creators, manage to mutate or evolve past a death in five generations, and become a threat to everything we know and love.

I didn't say they didn't. Those missiles were very effective. Much more effective than ten times as many drones would have been.

Both missiles and drones are of limited use when you're not willing to send infantry to take and hold territory. Cheap light drones much more so than Tomahawks and GBU-57s.

The app receives a token when you present your ID, and uses that token in subsequent age verifications, it does not need to contact the central authority each time. The scheme and app are open source, so you can verify what data is communicated when and with whom.

It is not. Or they get hold of their dad's passport, or whatever. No system is going to be proof against a curious teenager. Does it have to be?