shutting down a datacentre because it got hot on a daily basis would completely defeat having the datacentre in the first place. yes defending against cosmic rays and space debris is also expensive. The whole fucking idea is insane from the start.

Actually it is crazy difficult and VERY expensive to do. Temperature regulation in space is hard and expensive.

So it's interesting that the summary mentions Geoffrey Hinton, with his 10% or 20% estimate of AI ending the world. In the consensus of the ML community 10 years ago, neural nets had less than a 10% probability of becoming as artificially intelligent as they are right now. Making a useful estimation of risk is impossible when probability is near 0 and consequence is near infinity.

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

There's also the issue of cost/scope. I'm not sure that Id is atypical for a studio of its age and size in terms of how its games have gotten more costly over time; but it's still very much the case that Quake was about a dozen guys crunching and Trent Reznor making creepy industrial noises; while Doom: The Dark Ages was closer to feature film level budget.

More potential players now than there were in 1996; but the production cost increase has still, on the balance, likely done bad things to your ability to turn a profit on the basis of a relatively small slice of the market thinking that your game fucking rules; rather than making a major seller more or less mandatory.

In Id's case specifically I'd also be curious if they are somewhat victims of their own legend. Basically every "boomer shooter" going is absolutely mainlining some combination of doom and quake nostalgia(often doom aesthetics but with quake's actually-3d to better render how you remember them rather than how the weird 2.5d stuff actually behaved); and a lot of those actually have dev teams closer in size to Quake; presumably with the expected effect on how many units they have to sell to remain viable.

Are we really just going to sit and take the fact that Cuba has already achieved the sort of electrical grid reliability that demented AI bros are setting billions of dollars on fire to try to bring to the US? This is an outrage!

Before you assign the F.C.C. as further example of the Trump administration, that the F.C.C. is behind the design and operation of this Satellite, go back and read the F.C.C. document. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/at...

They are granting a station license.

Any time a satellite is launched, if it has communication abilities - all do - the regulatory agencies of the world must be in approval. A station license is granted. This satellite needs coordination, and that the F.C.C. coordinating the frequencies in use, and granting them station licenses does not makes them part of the design and operation. I have F.C.C. granted station licenses, as long as I work in the frequencies the license grants, and comply with the modes of operation allowed, they don't have anything to do with my stations.

This coordination happens on everything launched, not just communications satellites. And seriously, unless the satellite never transmits, it needs coordination. RF does not know political parties.

Almost as funny as people who think that the RF spectrum is political.

Make no mistake. The only thing the F.C.C has to do with this satellite is assigninging the Frequencies it communicates on. they have nothing to do with anything else. It has nothing to do with Trump, Obama, Bush II Clinton, or any political party. It has nothing to do with the design or use of the satellite. It has everything to do with RF, keeping radio signals away from each other.

Anyone using it as a further example and source of outrage for their hatred of a country, that this is politics - is only showing that they know nothing about what they are talking about.

"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

Read the official F.C.C. pdf document in TFS. Rather than gaslighting anyone, the F.C.C. is simply doing what they do, asked for frequencies to communicate on, they provided them in conjunction with the NTIA. This action is performed in conjunction with the similar organizations in other countries.

Has nothing to do with politics. Has everything to do with keeping RF emitters from interfering with each other. RF is not concerned with political parties. It is one area where there must be coordination between countries.

Now onto gaslighting - TFA is a fine example of exactly that. An article which paints the F.C.C as somehow being an integral part of this solar reflector is top tier gaslighting. The people in here, in their zeal, yet know almost nothing about the F.C.C or RF, yet demand that it is somehow evil.

RF is how I make my money, and people who know almost nothing about it yet make sweeping pronouncements about it are big gaslighters.

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

But when the Russians did the same thing, they were just being smart?

Many people in here apparently missed the part that the F.C.C. has absolutely nothing to do with the mirror itself. The F.C.C. has made a conditional grant for the frequencies used in communication, in concordance with the NTIA. And the payload is irrelevant. Other countries have similar groups to coordinate RF emitters.

One does not launch satellites without that coordination, you have to let them know where you plan on emitting RF. Or just as likely, ask where you can.

Why is this? https://www.ntia.gov/sites/def...

I have that chart printed on my wall in a large frame. Occasionally people come in wanting a chunk of RF to operate on. Many have trouble understanding just how crowded the RF spectrum is, and I refer them to the chart. "Pick a frequency". And that turns out to be way beyond their ability.

I don't do it to be contrary, but to educate them that this is seriously non-trivial. Especially when people don't know how RF acts. It is an unruly beast that has wildly different characteristics depending on frequency, and it beats with other frequencies to produce new frequencies outside its allocation.

The mirror sat itself is just a mirror sat, there is perhaps some data to be gathered from its deployment, but this company will find out just as the Russians did, that it is of limited utility. It is on a fast moving satellite, it doesn't provide all that much light, and then there is the clouds and stuff that block the sky.

But the F.C.C. and NTIA are just doing their jobs, which has nothing to do with the purpose of the sat, only keeping the spectrum operating. Just like with every other satellite for every different purpose.

I think the minimum number os sails that would work is the number that would block the sky completely. 8^)