Any IDE or basic text editor can do that as well, no LLM necessary. I'm sure CS professors will tell you that their students have been doing it for decades, no artificial intelligence necessary. Of course just like the students who get caught every year, the developers who do are going to be the lazy ones that don't try to refactor in the slightest and just use whatever the LLM spits out. It'll probably still have the original author's name on it.

For two reasons:

First, that the wealth will be shared. It'll be squandered on various boondoggles.

Second, that the Trump administration won't want a second bite of that apple. I think if you tell The Orange Man that he has to do something because he agreed to it, he'd give you that confused head tilt dogs do.

The US Federal government owes about $114,000 per capita. That's your cut. Make your check payable to the US Treasury.

(Note, that'd just debt held by the public today, not inter-agency debt or unfunded future liabilities.)

Fewer land owners to complain about the data center using all of the water for cooling obviously.

The cost of putting anything in orbit is hideously expensive and there's little reason to do so in most cases. Musk just wants a reason to sell people the means getting there. If the data center could be put in space because bandwidth or latency aren't an issue, it could be put in northern Alaska, Siberia, etc. for less money.

AI data centers are evolving rapidly. You want to be able to rip and replace gear all the time. That's expensive to do in orbit.

Managing heat in a data center is a huge issue. It's very hard to dissipate heat in space. It's a lot easier to dump waste heat into the air or a river.

Communication between nodes, racks, and rows is a fundamental limit to AI performance. Spacing rows hundreds to thousands of kilometers apart is going to add speed-of-light delays and bandwidth limits. I don't see how you maintain performance in that environment.

All in all, this seems like an incredibly impractical idea. It really screams "I have rockets and want to find uses for them." But Musk is a smart guy, I have no doubt he's thought more about it than I have.

I used to always own at least one console, despite mostly being a PC gamer. I felt like the console was more of an appliance, really. Power it on and it has one job. Even if I came to accept the idea of buying games digitally on Steam or elsewhere for my Windows gaming PC, I never felt like it should be the same experience on a console. It's nice to own a physical library of game titles your friends or family can look through on a shelf and decide what they want to pop in and play. It has "permanence" - even if the game itself requires an Internet connection and supports online multiplayer gaming.

I guess I could be swayed to be less concerned if the manufacturers would play fair with all of it, but IMO, they really don't. As one example? My wife's kid bought an XBox 360 and owned a number of digital games on it. Microsoft decided to ban him from their network permanently, and without any warning or real explanation. He wasn't running hacks or cheats, and he wasn't threatening other gamers with violence or anything of the sort. He did have an odd nickname/handle (something about killing a unicorn?), so he finally decided that's what offended some people and got him banned. After all that money was lost on the console and digital purchases - the entire family decided to never again buy an XBox of any type.

My wife had a similar hassle involving the Nintendo Switch and her favorite game, Animal Crossing. To be honest, I don't even play the Switch so I'm not even that familiar with the whole thing. But it had something to do with her buying the game on a physical cartridge but then Nintendo trying to move everything to digital games only. They provided a means to use the physical copy to authorize your account to download and play the digital one, but that wound up hampering how she wanted to play the game across three different Nintendo Switch consoles she owned while retaining her saved game.

People who think Trump is the stupidest possible don't know about Ron DeSantis.

It's not just a movie (they made sequels!) but the X-Files episode executes the idea better as the Wishmaster films are horror schlock, but still enjoyable for fans of the genre. The idea has been around forever (or at least as far back as One Thousand and One Nights) as anyone with a creative DM knows. Most religions probably have their own versions of the story.

Calling something essential doesn't exempt it from the same "laws" of economics that everything is susceptible to. The benefit of increased prices are that they're attractive to suppliers. Make sure that it's no less difficult to build power plants than it is to build data centers and the problem becomes self-correcting.

If it hasn't already I suspect the real issue is that there were plenty of NIMBY laws that made it difficult to build power plants that didn't also apply to data centers. I'm sure someone will complain that those same laws ought to apply to data centers as well, and even if that weren't terribly misguided in the first place, the horse has already left that particular barn and would do no good.

A data center is a type of industry that wants a very consistent and fixed amount of power. It can run 24 hours per day and the lid won't fluctuate heavily. It's actually a great candidate for just building a power plant next door that produces what the data center will consume. That's literally the dream scenario for a power plant because for many types of generation having to ramp up and down is more costly than delivering a fixed amount of power. Data centers can be built out in the middle of nowhere and the power plant to feed them can be built right next to them.

Even if the data center company goes out of business because AI is a flop they can rent the space and possibly the equipment to crypto miners who will gladly buy cheap power. If the farmers in bumfuck Virginia are upset at the idea of evil data centers just over provision the power generation a little and sell them cheap electricity below market price so they can start their own crypto farm as a fuck-you to the power company.

I'm reminded of the evil genie that would "corrupt" a person's wish to give them exactly what they asked for even though it wasn't really what they wanted.

With no life there can be no death.

Be careful what you wish for.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

No... nobody I know thinks we're "leading the world in banking technology". We're well aware how backwards the systems are. That's likely a big motivator for people to dabble in crypto and to use all the electronic payment systems that popped up, from Venmo to Cash App.

It's endlessly frustrating. At least 20 years ago, I was sure paper checks would vanish because of the utter lack of security they provide people. It seems like they came from an era where one's signature meant something? (If you think about it, that theme runs deep in our Financial system. Every credit card transaction prompts you for a signature. Yet if you ever have to challenge/fight fraudulent charges, you'll find the card companies don't give a crap if your signature matches what they show was scribbled for the transaction. You're still just as liable for it. Sign with a stick figure .... doesn't matter.) But yeah, give me a paper check and now I have your home address, likely one of your phone numbers, a copy of what your signature looks like (should I want to forge it later) and your bank's routing number + your account number. It's pretty common to ask the person paying to write down their date of birth on the check too. How are people ok with this?

Credit card processing is pathetic too, really. I was selling some 3D prints just a few weeks ago at our booth at the local Farmers'/Artisans' market, and a guy gave me a card that only worked with a mag-stripe. I had to run it with Square by manually keying in his card digits! I thought mag-stripe was rendered obsolete by now!

It is figuratively a blank check, which is the opposite of "literally".

Many times. The late 1940s. After the Vietnam War. The "Peace Dividend" after the USSR's collapse, etc.

They have those systems because it would be impossible for them to implement ours. They don't have the infrastructure to support it and so they've skipped all of that and gone with a system they can afford and that isn't affected in a way that would cause others to fail. The US has the opposite problem where there are generations of people used to an old system who have no desire to change. Until they become few enough in number where the cost of supporting their business is as impractical as it would be for an African nation to implement it, no company can afford not to continue offering it without losing those customers who refuse to modernize.

We're rich enough that we can afford to keep antiquated systems in place because people are comfortable with them and value that comfort. These African countries will eventually run into the same problem where there is a new, better, cheaper way of doing things but they have an entire population that's comfortable doing things the old way and who don't want to change because they pay a cost to learn that new system. Some even less developed countries will start using the new system for the same reasons previously established.

Think of it this way. Each year automobile manufacturers release new vehicles that have more features, better safety, etc. but do you upgrade every year? America is rich enough that many people could, but most people don't. They're comfortable driving their existing vehicles. Once anyone makes a large enough capital investment in anything there's pressure to keep it around and maintain it even though there may be something newer and better available. If that example seems silly, consider smart phones where over half of the country could afford upgrading every single year. Stuff that works tends to stick around even if it could be replaced.