Exactly. Most of us can recall an era where script kiddies had similar unreasonable success even if they had no actual skill or thinking behind the attacks. Just canned toolkits designed around known vulnerabilities, common password databases, understanding of common, bad security practices, and bundled up in easy to use harnesses.

So whether it not an agent can actually "think" or is just putting together a potentially workable narrative of how hacks can happen and running it against real world targets doesn't matter too much. If you wired up the script of Terminator to the real world and it somehow launched nukes, it wasn't that skynet was thinking, it was that the systems folded easily to a movie script. Either way the distinction would hardly matter.

To the extent lack of thought may matter, compromising security is a use case that heavily favors AI systems that repeatedly "get it wrong", as it can have nearly limitless tries to get it right and even if it utterly fails, no one will really notice or write about it. It only takes a few successes, even if rare, to be pretty critical.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

The federal government has always (for at least several decades) used the threat of removing federal funding to force states to do things that they don't want to do. This is nothing new, and is not, as this summary implies, setting a dangerous precedent.

The difference is that normally, this is used to do things that add standards intended to make things better/safer for the general public or serve some legitimate public need.

This is being done to remove standards intended to protect the general public. As a general rule, states have always been allowed to have stricter laws than the federal government, just not more lax laws. Using the threat of removing federal funding to take away laws intended to protect the public's rights, reduce competition among content providers, and push the Internet more and more towards a content monopoly is doing the opposite of that.

It's not the federal government using the threat of withdrawing funding to push its agenda that is bad. It is the agenda itself that is bad. It is fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law, fundamentally contrary to the regulatory powers required to maintain a functioning capitalist system, and fundamentally contrary to the public interest. It is putting greedy corporations ahead of the American people.

Additionally, the executive branch taking such an action without authorization from Congress is also bad. The long history of doing this has, to my knowledge, been limited to the executive branch acting on laws passed by Congress that give them the authority to withhold funds for specific non-compliance reasons. Doing so in the absence of such laws is likely a violation of the separation of powers.

But unfortunately, the current administration has a long history of violating that separation of powers, doing various illegal acts, knowing full well that it will take months for the courts to strike down those acts, and that the damage will have been done by then, and using the threat of such illegal executive orders as a way to extort concessions out of states, government agencies, corporations, nonprofits, and individuals. And that right there — the repeated willful commission of unconstitutional acts for borderline felonious purposes — is a fundamental abrogation of their oath of office.

So the way I see it, there are only three ways to fix the problem:

A. Pass laws clarifying that Congress has exclusive power of the purse, and that the executive branch shall not retract funding to any state, any agency, or any individual for any reason unless the right to retract funding for that specific reason is explicitly codified in the relevant law as an executive power, and that this rule shall apply to all government agencies, without exception, superseding all previously assumed authority, and providing criminal liability for anyone acting in contravention of this law, with no statute of limitations. That way, federal agency heads who act on such executive orders will no longer be protected by any assumption of legality or constitutionality, and will risk future criminal charges if they act on an executive order that violates the separation of powers in this way.

B. Remove the people who are pushing this agenda, whether through the ballot box, through impeachment, or both.

C. Do both A and B.

I was wondering if someone did a writeup and of course a simple search finds what we for cooling data centers in space.

Surprisingly it was done - the server had to throttle because the designed radiators were too small to get rid of the heat.

IEEE Spectrum featured a calculation show much would be required - https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbi...

Let's be more specific about how and why this could happen? What scenarios could lead to the total destruction of mankind?

Well, given OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, the most obvious path is hacking infrastructure. Turning off water or electricity is a definite possibility. We found this out in a recent hack.

Another thing it could do is to cause data centre loads to be spike and then sink, which could be very disruptive to the grid to the point where it results in it shutting down. Remember the 2003 blackout was caused by a power station going offline causing ripple effects. If some AIs cause such power disturbances to happen the flow of electricity rippling across the grid could cause disruptions.

And that omits the more obvious things like AI-powered weapons that the military is heavily interested in procuring, or AI powered things like drone control systems or military sensor fusion where AI helps with targeting.

More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

Exactly the same happened when an OVH datacenter caught on fire in France. Many customers which didn't have replication set to a different geolocation lost their data. Heck a dude I know had backups on different servers in the same datacenter which turned out to be useless.

There's a difference though.

People using OVH were using OVH as a hosting service - like the hosting providers of old. You either rent space in a data centre like a colo, or you purchase a virtual or physical server from the data centre. Blow up the data centre and your server goes along with it.

AWS is not a hosting service. They are a cloud provider. You cannot choose what data centre your server is located in. You request a server and it's provisioned for you. You choose a region of the world and the data backup and replication are handled automatically. If a data centre is blown up, the servers are backed up elsewhere in the region.

The problem for AWS is that Iran managed to blow up a number of AWS data centres at the same time where all copies and backups of servers can be destroyed.

AWS compensates for losing a data centre by having multiple in a region. AWS just never anticipated that multiple data centres in a region could be attacked, and in doing so destroy all the redundant copies simultaneously. Because in general if you are going to have multiple data centres in multiple countries get attacked, there's traditionally been a lot of advance warning, like say, a war declaration. I mean, if war broke out in the Middle East then you'd have a little bit of time to try to move as much data around as you can. But Iran just managed to attack all the data centres by surprise. And do so in such a precise way that basically no one outside the building got hurt.

It's a level of precision that Iran is demonstrating - even attacking US positions without destroying the military base it was attached to. (It's why the USS Lincoln ran into programs - because Iran destroyed the supply depot in the Middle East, resulting in having to obtain supplies from Asia. The result was resupply which used to take under a day now took a week)

1) I do *nothing* with the cloud.
2) I back up my system - user data, and a complete rpm -qa into a file - using old fashioned external eSATA drive bay. every month. Different geolocation? I grab the drive, which is sitting on my desk, and I'm out.

And it's a lot faster than tape.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Yep, pretty much this.

When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

"Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don't want to take the red eye flight from "London" Isle of Skye airport... you get the idea and before you know it that £19 flight is a £190 flight. Amazons price structure is the same, cheap headline price, what you actually pay is much, much higher.

Who wizzed in your wheaties?

And I stand by what I said. Practically no phone that still works at all does it at the low level of a capacitor anymore.

Near where I hark from, South Australia is sitting at 80% renewables. The balance is CCGT. The CCGT works out at $115/MWh, the renewables $60/MWh, averaging out at $72/MWh. For a while it had the world's biggest battery.

South Australia has the most expensive electricity in Australia, mostly because because of this transition to renewables. Turns out rebuilding all your generation is an expensive exercise. But they had little choice as they have no coal or gas, so they were forced into this transition. It will be over soon. They hope to hit 100% renewables next year.

That's what the subsidised $149/MWh is competing against. Unsubsidised, the price has to drop by at least 70%. I genuinely wish them luck. It would be a great thing for the planet. I suspect it would be a hard to complete against renewables in SA, as they have both great wind and solar. But other places in the world aren't so blessed, so here's hoping.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Here's a quarter, kid.

Buy yourself a real operating system.

This is why I still like the (very) old fashion tape backupp systems. Just backup to tape every day (And preferably a copy kept in a bank safe or whatever. In case your office literally burns down or whatever) and if you get ransomware, just send "Fuck you" to the attacker, go to the safe, restore, be done with it.

Granted the cloud... not so easy. But I always prefer old school on-premise servers so whatever.