Bear in mind that the jet engines were Elon Musk's data centers, not Anthropic's, nor those of any other even remotely competent tech company. You have a company run by someone who things anthropogenic climate change is a myth choosing a high-pollution power solution that costs more per kWh just to piss off the environmentalists. The problem isn't the data center. The problem is the person building it.

Most data centers aren't going to use a jet engine. They're going to use a solar farm during the day and grid at night, or they're going to put in massive battery banks and go off-grid entirely. It's cheaper and better for the environment. Maybe the power production will be off-site and connected over the grid, or maybe it will be on-site, depending on location, or maybe they'll pay to build solar production and power storage to offset their consumption, but either way, that's the way things are mostly trending.

Same is true for water use. The big companies try to reduce their water use, because that's an ongoing cost, and they'd rather spend more up front than pay for their mistakes forever. And they can do that, because they have the money to spend up front. It's mostly the little fly-by-night startups that produce eco-disasters, because their main concern is avoiding spending unnecessary capital costs on construction that they don't have, and hoping that the higher ongoing costs won't bankrupt them before they become cash-flow-positive and can start building better data centers that are less awful.

Funny, the Linux man page for crypt says it returns NULL on error. Same with the Mac man page.

Anybody who thought that returning a string on error was a good idea just because some badly written piece of code might crash should never be allowed to write software. Let it crash. Fix the bug in the other software. Working around one bug by creating a second bug is pretty much always a mistake unless it is targeted sufficiently to prevent the bug from causing further harm.

Car companies mostly do, except for certain features that cost them money on an ongoing basis (like map subscriptions, anything involving cellular data, etc.). And you absolutely can buy appliances that don't have a software component (and should, because the ones that do are likely to be a security nightmare).

I would consider that folding clothes. One would assume the ability to hang shirts as well, which is the 90% time sink for me.

And this is why I try to avoid buying products from those companies. That said, if you're on your third fridge, maybe don't buy from that company ever again. I've never heard of any fridge lasting less than a decade except perhaps Samsung.

I would hope that any AI would be on-device. I think anything else would be a show-stopper.

I mean, if it is lasers, the cat might chase it, and use up all nine immediately.

It's a trivial task that wastes one to two hours per person per month. For a four-person household, that's the better part of an entire person-day wasted every month. So it might be trivial, but that doesn't mean people want to do it.

No, this is *exactly* the kind of thing I want AI to do. Clean my house. Straighten my house. Put things away. Fold clothes. Free up those hours so I can do something more fun, more interesting, or more productive.

That said, there's one very critical design consideration that Apple may not be thinking about, but that will make or break this as a product: upgradability. No one will tolerate throwing away a hundred pounds of e-waste to get the latest version every three years. People are going to want to buy this and keep using it for literal decades, because they'll see it as an appliance, not an electronic toy. This means a modular design, both at a hardware and software level:

• All of the parts should standardize on CANBus for control purposes and something faster like 10-gigabit multimode fiber for video delivery.
• The central core should be a large open space with adequate fans to ensure decades of upgrades.
• The central core should contain a computer in a box that has its own fans to vent into the larger enclosure, and any network switching if necessary should be a separate unit with separate fans. These should be user-replaceable if future design changes require updates.
• Cables should snake through conduit for easy replacement of large components like arms or head.
• Physical connection points (e.g. arm attachment) should be standardized up front and never changed.
• Upgrade units should include: battery (individually, external, quick swappable), cameras (individually), hands (individually), arms (separate from hands), legs (individually), head module (separate from cameras mounted on it), brain, network switch.
• Each of these individually upgradable units should be easy to detach and reattach with a minimum number of screws and zero small connectors or thin cables.
• To the maximum extent possible, each of these pieces should be easy to take apart for component-level repair.

And so on. The software should be designed under the assumption that new software versions should be compatible with older brain units to the maximum extent possible, for as long as possible (minimum 10 years), and that nothing more than a brain transplant should be required for backwards compatibility forever, so long as you are not using new features that require new versions of components (e.g. you might need an upgraded camera module for the eyes for some future feature, but that should block only that feature, and only until you swap the module).

In other words, for this to actually sell, it has to be built more like a Windows PC than a Mac. And this is why as much as I'd love to see the level of polish Apple would bring to something like this, I have my doubts about whether they can distance themselves from the hard-to-repair form-over-function design concepts that they are used to, and create something that behaves more like an appliance that people will pass down to their grandchildren when they die.

Would you believe, so they can be used as an energy storage system?

It's actually a pretty good idea, but only if you can keep the command-and-control system secure.

Alas, it's historically been easy for people to slip into a mindset of "no hacker would ever know or care about OUR little system, because [reasons]", and use that as a justification for ignoring security concerns altogether.

Of course that's never really been the case, but now that any bozo with $200 in their pocket can just pay an AI to find every possible security hole and report back, it's REALLY not the case.

Outright hostility, you say? I can't imagine how that came about.

PowerBook Pismo: Display cable sliced by Airport antenna connector. PowerBook Wallstreet: Hard drive connector board attached by a single screw that didn't hold it in place, causing constant disconnects. The iBook G3 graphics chip disaster. So many mechanical design mistakes, so few column inches to write about them.

You mean 24x7 solar power? Now calculate how many centuries an on-earth data center could go, even with having to use batteries at night, even with replacing the backup batteries every couple of years, before the cost would equal the cost of a single launch. In other words, that's not an actual advantage, at least in practice.

Besides, you can't repair or upgrade the hardware when it is in space, which is such a colossal disadvantage that the advantages would have to be almost unimaginably great to balance that out.

It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Why not boost the ISS instead of de-orbiting it? Is it because it's just too old to keep safe for human habitation, regardless of what orbit it's in?

The only theoretical advantage I can think of for a satellite would be that if someone launched one from international waters, if some random government wanted it to stop existing or stop doing something, they'd have to launch something to destroy the satellite, because from a legal perspective, it wouldn't be within their jurisdiction.

But in practice, as far as I know, nobody is launching anything into orbit from international waters, so this is entirely theoretical, at least right now.