...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.

I'm less worried about those building Skynet than I am by those that are actively building Terminator.

Many countries are building running robots. Some can run 60 mph. They can carry guns. Wars are already using automated suicide drones to do the same.

Those weapon systems are the evil we need to be worried about.. not the overglorified chat coming from tech companies.

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)

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.

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" ?

Why are we running python on microcontrollers, exactly? It's the wrong thing in production, so why is it the right thing for education? Training upcoming engineers to use the right thing for the job is pretty fundamental; running an interpreted language on bare-metal hardware flies in the face of building that intuition.

Today's microcontrollers may be more powerful than you realize. It's not just the 8-bit processors running at 2MHz anymore. An ESP32 is a dual core processor running at 200 or 400MHz. They don't run a high level OS (just FreeRTOS).

And the RPi Zeros are really powerful 32-bit ARM or RISC-V processors running at several hundred MHz as well.

Python is perfectly fine for these processors. And you might think it's overkill, but so what? Most of these tasks are one-offs. Perhaps someone doing a bit of cosplay wants to have some lights on their costume, or drive an LCD. You expect them to contract out someone to do the software which is likely just displaying a bunch of graphics or cycling some LEDs?

Heck, some things in the maker world have become ubiquitous - like a CYD. It stands for "Cheap Yellow Display" because it's a stupidly cheap 2" LCD (in a yellow frame) that can be hooked up to a ESP32 board and with a few libraries you're drawing graphics on it with a total spend of under $10. One off projects.

The high end microcontrollers are pushing out the old 8-bit AVRs and PICs (which mainly hang around for legacy use nowadays), and the RPi Zero ones RP3050 and 2050 processors are pushing down the ceiling of 16-bit and even 32-bit ARM microcontrollers.

Heck, you mourn the day because it's easier to blink an LED with a 3 cent Chinese microcontroller than it is using "traditional" methods (e.g., a 555).

There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.

The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.

Water is actually a really radiation shield. It's why it's used as a moderator in nuclear reactors. Contrary to popular belief, water is required for the reaction to continue. It's a moderator, because what happens is the two neutrons emitted during fission of uranium come out too fast to be properly captured by other uranium atoms to spur ongoing fission. Water is used to slow down those neutrons to where they are more readily absorbed by uranium. The problem is, water is also used to cool the reactor, so while the reaction stops or slows down significantly, a tremendous amount of heat is still generated from the remaining reactions. Thus a "meltdown" refers to the fuel rods exceeding the melting point of uranium and it melting and pooling at the bottom of the reactor.

That said, the casks at the bottom of the ocean, as long as they stay there, will actually be fairly safe even if they rupture. Even the wildlife can get fairly close (inches) before it becomes dangerous to them.

So sadly, no three-eyed Simpsons fish is likely to happen.

Not in any way trying to diminish work developers put into this effort, but with all due respect, how difficult can it be to re-write utilities such as cp, mv and rm?

To do basic functionality? Not hard. Busybox and toybox implement the "90%" use cases of those utilities inside them.

To achieve POSIX compliance requires more work - you're adding stuff that handles edge cases and little used functionality.

To achieve GNU coreutils functionality with GNU extensions is a bit more work on top of that.

Uutils though achieves full GNU compatibility AND GNU bug compatibility. That is, odd quirks and stuff in GNU coreutils are replicated in Uutils as well.

The goal is 100% compatibility so you can take out GNU coreutils and replace it with Uutils and not notice a difference. There were plenty of edge cases where the default scripts Ubuntu used didn't work under Uutils in odd cases.

GPLv3 is an issue for some - especially embedded systems. Most use a form of busybox or toybox as a result even if size is not a consideration, so Uutils can fill that role as well (there has been a openembedded recipe for Uutils for a while now as a supported replacement for coreutils).

It should also be noted that many of the utilities also run faster than their GNU counterparts

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

Is it true though? I was watching a series of documentaries on the Ultima games, and it seemed their best work came out of the worst conditions. When Origin was small and the devs basically lived out of the office (and smelled like it), they were at their peak.

Or maybe it's that people have different views on and requirements for contentment.

Back in the 90s id was a small company of a handful of people who worked late. When Doom got released they all made out like bandits - the id parking lot was famous for the number of Ferraris that were parked in it.

Origin in the early days I could see being the same - they were pushing the frontier of computing in the early 90s and people in general were excited about computers. Heck, the company probably gave them pretty nice machines to work on, and if you were a computer geek in the 90s being handed a top end system to work on, it would be a form of contentment to just be there working it and pushing it hard.

But these were the pioneer days - like the early days of the dot-com era where similar things happened. The fact that people were getting stupid rich quick only served to provide the excitement going into it.

These days though, videogames are old hat, there's no quick money anymore and it's basically a mature industry. Back in the startup culture where you literally could get-rich-quick things were different.

You might compare it with the AI boom going on where money is being thrown around. I'm sure the people jumping between OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic getting those million dollar signing bonuses are working in pretty terrible conditions, but hey, if you're getting paid a million dollars a year with a million dollar signing bonus in a field that's booming, well, you don't really complain - you ride the gravy train.

Because when the bubble pops and the salary for AI developers plummets, if you managed your money right you can be set for life after the layoffs.

Contentment for many people is more than just money. Job satisfaction comes into play as well - and money can help with this, but also things like responsibility and other things. A small game development team might be fun to work with when you come up with an idea and everyone gets excited to add it to the game. Usually a sure sign of contentment is people that inadvertently work long hours because they're so excited at what they do they forget time exists. Contrast with someone who watches the clock and the interminable wait for 5pm.

It's one reason why WFH was popular and companies found their workers worked more - they were able to work, then deal with family business the work more to the point where they put in extra hours just because. You can take a smoke break at the office, but that doesn't compare to being able to spend quality time with your kid for 15 minutes during a break.

Unionizing takes several steps. First, you have to sign enough interest cards to even begin the process. 30% is about right - you show there's a significant interest in people joining the union. Then you have the certification push - that is, a general vote on if you want to join the union or not. That takes a simple majority - if it fails, then no union. It's basically 30% of people saying they're interested in joining a union.

As for a "monopoly on labor" you have to realize the power mismatch that's going on here. Basically gig workers are disposable - they have no power at all the employment relationship. It's take it or leave it. (This applies to most other workplaces as well). The company holds all the power and your option is to either starve or work at whatever the company says they'll pay you.

Unions basically try to combat that power inequity. Progressives aren't against monopolies, they're against unfairness. The key is fairness - everyone has a fair shot at getting a job. The fact you're about to be homeless shouldn't be a determining factor in what you'll accept for a job.

Trump's vision of how the 50s and 60s were - that was the era of the strong union where the C-suite was paid less than 20 times the janitor. Where even the janitor was paid enough to own a home.

Of course, that's why we're never going to return to those times unless the politicians start reversing course on greed and start giving workers power through unions. Union busting is basically why they make up only 10% of the workforce in the US today through right to work laws and other things.

Progressives aren't generally in favor of monopolies because they generally lead to unfairness. But in the unbalanced power dynamic of employer-employee relations where for most employees they have little to no power to dictate working conditions, a monopoly on labor suddenly becomes a powerful thing to equalize the power dynamic and strike a fairer deal.