If you're using AI as a better alternative to traditional search, agreed.

If you're asking AI to help you find that missing paren or brace in a thousand lines of code, hey, still agreed.

If you're asking AI "Make an anime themed roguelike in Godot. It should have the following..." - I don't care how much elaborate world-building you do after those ellipses, "you" aren't making anything.

Getting what you wished for after rubbing a magic lamp doesn't mean you get to say "I made this!"

I'm speculating here, but pay attention to the timing of his resignation.

It wasn't after he had an affair with an alleged Chinese spy - Though we may find the "affair" part of that distasteful, it's two consenting adults; and the "spy" part is both unproven and, even if true, Nvidia could potentially spin it as Jensen somehow being a victim. Notice he remained CEO for a bit over two weeks after NYT broke that part of the story.

Then we learned he was banging a subordinate. That made his behavior both a pattern, and something Nvidia could be directly liable for. He resigned the next day.

/ Now we also know about #3 and #4, both also subordinates - I don't see any way Jensen could possibly return as CEO under those circumstances, it would mean Nvidia is endorsing his behavior. Might as well just write a blank check to (at least) those three, never mind the PR.

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?

It's funny - I was just going to ignore you at first, because clearly you have nothing to say beyond irrelevant ad-hominems.

Then I took a look at your comment history. Just... Wow. You've certainly mastered "noisy little dog" energy, haven't you?

Get a personality, dude.

You misunderstand their actual raison d'etre: Serving as a counterexample to Chrome having a monopoly.

Sure, we only care about exactly one of their products, particularly since Manifest V3 made Chrome unusable on the public internet. But let's be serious, you can only do so much gratuitous fiddling with one browser before people rightly start complaining about issues as petty as themes. Mozilla, accordingly, keeps trying to find some not-quite-browser niche to make them relevant as more than Google's cover story.

To be clear, I agree with you completely in spirit - Don't change what's not broken. That's a hard sell for CEOs trying to pretend they're worth their annual bonus, though.

Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

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.

WTF does that mean? I'm by no stretch pretending she's innocent, but I'm curious how they phrased "Sorry for kidnapping you for almost a year on the Orange Turd's say-so, but don't you dare do absolutely nothing we can prove ever again! And don't come back because, um, reasons!"

Singapore isn't exactly known for being light on crime. If they had anything supporting the allegations, they'd already have hung her.

It's now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer pedo!

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

Fair enough - I should probably have taken a more "congrats, you're one of today's lucky 10,000" approach.