AD or BC? This matters. If Bill Gates is a time-travelling reptile from the Pleiades, and put chips into vaccines, it could be that all who took the vaccine will be spirited back into the Bronze Age and offered up as human sacrifices.

The truth is way out there.

If you actually find anyone doing that in the real world, you should point and laugh until they get angry.

The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

Yes, yes, yes. Thing is, there was a clear lack of urgency here. The timelines you cite are for your case, and whatever requirements, budgets and deadlines you suffer. T-Mobile made a bad bet in 2008, and the writing has been on the wall for years now, and viable alternatives have been available at least as long. Were T-Mobile competently managed, they certainly had the means to meet the necessary deadlines. Instead, they made yet another bad bet trying to litigate against pirates.

The correct bet today is container orchestration and open-source based virtualization tools that aren't at the mercy of inveterate rent seekers. There are many ways to skin these cats, and the fact that T-Mobile has slouched into its current unfortunate position is entirely T-Mobile's fault.

Also, the argument that only "two calls" where made and, therefore, a team of 20 people is somehow ridiculous is specious. Support contracts at this scale involve far more than picking up a phone during business hours, and Broadcom will have absolutely no difficulty poking that argument full of holes.

If you're close enough to see an enemy, they already have multiple autonomous weapons coming for you.

Just little old me. This is a big deal. The density increase here is basically Moore's law surviving another decade, with all that that implies. The zdnet puff piece annoys me. ASML is only mentioned in passing. The truth is ASML is right at the heart of this: it's their machine. And that's not me blowing ASML's trumpet: the story is the deeper relationship going on here. The Albany site is basically the US government (successfully) using IBM as their domestic lab operator to facilitate US strategic prerogatives with regard to frontier lithography, which secures US dominance over EUV tech dissemination for many years to come. The reader sees none of this in this zdnet tripe.

When you understand the back story, the future stories make sense. When the US tells ASML to whom they will and won't be selling equipment, and ASML quietly obeys, understanding this stuff means it won't be lost on you why an EU company bends the knee. This is why China can't make iPhone chips or NVidia GPUs, and that this situation is going to persist for years to come because of what's happening right here. Further, it puts the lie to all the yap about the US "falling behind" and failing because "capitalism" and some mythical abhorrence for "public-private" partnership, etc. The US does all of that, and it does this at least as well as everyone else.

A great deal. IBM licenses, partners and consults with semiconductor manufacturers globally, and runs a thriving IP business from their huge R&D facility in Albany, NY. Samsung, Rapidus, AMD, ST, SMIC and others are all paying for IBM tech in recent deals. GlobalFoundries bought out IBM Microelectronics for IBM's 300mm tech. IBM is among the most prolific patent filers in the world.

The real story here is this: ASML has a new machine for a new process node. ASML is obligated to perform much of their R&D in the US due to strict export and technology sharing agreements with the US government. IBM operates huge, world class R&D lab in Albany, heavily subsidized by the state and US government. The new process that this story is about is really IBM working as an R&D partner with ASML to refine the process and get it ready for commercial operation.

In a few years, when they get the yields to something plausible, ASML customers will buy the new machines, and IBM will be in the room, taking their cut for IP, consulting, support etc.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.

It has been my experience, sad to say, that online stores aren't above selling consumer credit card information either, and I've grounds to think Amazon is one that does this.

I have an industrial air conditioner for my home. (It's a small home, but summers are increasingly severe.)

I don't recall being asked a damn thing.

My suspicion is that this is scaremongering.

I have been stress-testing AIs with increasingly complex projects for some time. The Chinese AIs struggle, but actually do a FAR better job of handling massively complex tasks than Grok, and Gemini just rolls over and whimpers at anything above a very low level of complexity.

What I've found is that the Chinese AIs tend to be sycophant but do "understand" complex projects properly in that you can ask specific technical questions and the answers will be generally very accurate. Any sort of critical analysis is beyond them, though. (Ether that, or I'm a mega-genius. Which....doesn't sound terribly likely.)

Of the "Top AIs", ChatGPT is good on basics but is incapable of any kind of detailed generation. Claude is brilliant at detailed generation, but overloads with anything but a tiny data set.

I've been putting up the projects on Gitlab for a while, so anyone who wants to see an AI break down and cry in despair is able to do so.

The secret tools don't bother me - they'll have long understood how to use Big Data and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. AI isn't going to find out any more than combinations of those tools will, because that's basically all AI is - a Big Data classification system.

So you're telling Claude something vague and washy, then Claude invents a prompt that might vaguely possibly be somehow related to what you want along with a drink that is almost but not entirely quite unlike tea. Claude then recurses through this until it has a Celtic knot so intricate that it has its own Hausdorff dimension. What burps out is a product that is completely useless and patented to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.