What do you expect? "Person X is a spy for country Y" rarely comes with any detail, even when it's blatantly true. Intelligence work is by definition secretive and probabilistic. Nobody's gonna give you a blow-by-blow Ian Fleming novel about an active investigation.

To be clear about what we actually do know about the "spy" label: members of the US Congress (on appropriate committees, etc) apparently received a memo from the US intelligence community that speculated she may have been recruited by the Chinese MSS (Ministry of State Security.) It's not hard to guess how they might have gotten this leverage: on at least two occasions she's run into problems with the CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission), which they could have offered to make go away.

That said, sometimes a black-market importer is just in it for the money, and Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) said he found the narrative improbable after being briefed on it. Apparently the FBI is busy sniffing glue (thanks, Kash), the DNI's lackeys think the label is reaching, and the CIA feels she has plausible deniability. What is clear, however, is that China has definitely benefited from her self-interested actions, and she definitely used her romantic proximity to Jensen to achieve that. My understanding is that intelligence agencies often try to groom or coax such "useful" people to steer them into being more efficient/productive/relevant in their activities; so they're assets, even if they're not field agents.

Don't forget to account for attrition -- satellites are known to stop working and/or decay out of orbit over time. In the worst case, SpaceX could start losing satellites faster than they can replace them. But even in the "everything went exactly as planned" case, having an orbiting array of ten-to-twenty-year-old GPUs is probably not going to be the money-making asset people imagine it to be; it would be like trying to selling CPU time on a network of Pentium 4's today.

What's the benefit of launching a nuclear-powered data center into space, over just leaving it on the ground and running it there?

when you're done beating it, please put that dead horse back on the pile with the rest of the Fox News scapegoats (and remember to wash your hands with soap)

I don't mean to alarm you, but there's a good chance this will actually be on the way out. The new cohort of Democrats seized on it and made it a major issue during the midterms. In total, 51 congresscritters signed a letter demanding it, and both Jeffries and Schumer have described it as a priority for the new session.

You'll have to get something new to moan about! Won't that be fun?

To think, an entire genre of low-effort knee-jerk Slashdot comment might become obsolete soon. I never thought I'd see it in my lifetime. Truly, miracles are possible. :')

Trump knew for an entire year about the Jensen/spy situation; Jensen confessed to it, got defensive when asked about China, and there's plenty of photographic documentation that it existed. There's no coincidences here; it's routine for the US President to be get advance notice of something major before it goes public, and the blatant insider trading is just normal behavior for Trump.

No moral failing is so profound, no travesty so great, that it cannot be overlooked if doing so will insulate one's investments from the horrors of mediocrity.

Too true! And you can rely on that. In fact, he will continue to "have been a good boss" until the value of their stock portfolios recovers.

Should we email Microsoft and advise them on how to install Linux and FreeBSD on their servers?

Why did God ostensibly go overboard just to amuse humans 4.3 Billion years after he formed the Earth and a fuckton of other creatures before humans arrived to be amused? The Christian Right Wingnuts will have no problem squaring this account with Bible since they can square anything given enough time and and those funny mushrooms God in his infinite wisdom has also provided.

I doubt the U.S. State Dept. ever gave a thought about him being compromised. The current crew is about as bright as a concussed troll. I think the board simply looked at the ramifications of shipping chips surreptitiously to China, seeing as Singapore is waaaaay too small use them all, and concluded Huang knew. He thought he didn't have anything to worry about because our corrupt Dept. of Commerce head, Lutnick, has already shown he (Lutnick) didn't care about a bit of sex on the side (his Epstein connections) and has already shown the only thing he (Lutnick, and his minder in the White House, el Bunko, and in turn his minder in the Kremlin, Putin) cares about is money.

The board however dipped their collective dick in some water and waved it in the air to see which way the wind was blowing and figured that the newly elected Blue Maggot-Eating Blob was not going to stop feeding. So they pulled the plug on him. Plus, it had already become an issue with Wall Street that having a feudal lord riding shotgun over a company with Nvidia's tentacles into damn near everything was becoming a problem for them and their stock portfolios. The also looked at Elmo and saw all his loot couldn't buy political squat; and that he too had hitched his ass to el Bunko in the White House.

And why should he have worried. From one of my previous posts:

From Yahoo Finance: Trump’s Nvidia Stock Purchases: Financial disclosures revealed that Donald Trump purchased between $500,000 and $1 million (with some reports noting up to several million) in Nvidia stock around the same timeframe his administration weighed key technology and China policy decisions. The Trump Organization and White House have maintained that Trump's assets are managed in a blind trust by his children with no conflicts of interest.

From the Tax Policy Center: The Trump administration allowed Nvidia and AMD to resume or license certain AI chip exports to China (such as H20 and H200 series chips), under an arrangement where the companies reportedly share a percentage (such as a 25% or 15% cut/fee) of those China revenues with the U.S. government—an arrangement criticized by legal and policy experts as a quasi-export tax.

Also: Nvidia donated $25 million toward the planned White House ballroom project associated with President Donald Trump (that we know about).

Re the energy usage, Elmo doesn't give a flying rat's ass about the environment and will happily spin up gas or coal plants to supply power. The trick now will be getting them approved. However, I doubt the newly elected blue people are raging environmentalists. And we still do not know how susceptible they are to corruption of which the R's in those states are well practiced. The lobbyists have not be diselected.

Elon's smart enough to know it won't work -- but he's also smart enough to know how gullible his fan club is. He's discovered that he can convert bits and pieces of 1960s sci-fi novels into easy money and online adulation.

I suspect SpaceX would be putting a lot less money and effort into mitigating the negative effects of its data centers if their host states had remained red. Regulation of the AI industry is already having a positive effect, and it hasn't even been written yet :)

Whether SpaceX's current efforts will be enough to mollify their new blue overlords remains to be seen.

It's now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.

Welllll, I didn't say it was Waymo that killed taxi service in San Francisco. No, that would be Uber and Lyft.

However, a lot of people -- particularly women, for reasons -- increasingly prefer Waymo.