This is fairly naive, Elon isn't the only investor in SpaceX.
My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense.
It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects. Even if AI dataenters in space are break-even it would be a massive win for SpaceX and leave their competition far behind.
You do not radiate all the heat away from a GPU, a modern GPU can run pretty hot. Also look up how this is getting better for the next generation of GPUs.
Maybe repeat your calculation with updated assumptions?
But even if you were completely right, your argument is that we can't do this tomorrow, yes I agree. Typical technology development cycles are about 5-10 years.
>You do not radiate all the heat away from a GPU, a modern GPU can run pretty hot.
LOL. If you don't radiate the heat the spacecraft just gets indefinitely hotter (until it glows and the heat is forcibly irradiated). It's space, there's no fluid to provide convection.
The same way that having motorized farming equipment was a race to the bottom for farmers? Perhaps. Turned out to be a good outcome for most involved.
Just like farmers who couldn't cope with the additional leverage their equipment provided them, devs who can't leverage this technology will have to "go to the cities".
Please do read up on how farmers are doing with this race to the bottom (it hasn't been pretty). Mega farms are a thing because small farms simply can't compete. Small farmers have gone broke. The parent comment is trying to highlight this.
If LLM's turn out the way C-Suite hopes. Let me tell you, you will be in a world of pain. Most of you won't be using LLM's to create your own businesses.
But modern tillage/petrol based farming is an unsustainable aberration. Maybe a good example for this discussion, but in the opposite direction if it is.
The idea that a group of people would spend so much of their time trying to get linux to work on Apple hardware through reverse engineering always seemed absolutely crazy to me. I would never consider buying Apple hardware precisely because it doesn't support linux and the work they put in achieves nothing because the risk will always remain that they will lock the hardware further. Nevermind the fact that they will likely never fully reverse engineer all the components.
It just seems like a completely pointless endeavor... perhaps some people buy into it? why would anyone buy overpriced hardware with partial support that may one day be gone? the enhanced battery life doesn't really hold much appeal to me, and the arm architecture if anything is just another signal to stay away.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they wanted the achievement on their resume, and in that given recent developments they succeeded?
You overlooked the UTM app on the App Store (and open source available too), which wraps Apple Silicon virtualization excellently, or you can use Qemu (which I don't).
I used to use Asahi, but the sleep modes power drain was tedious.
With UTM, I install a latest Fedora ISO (declaring it a "Linux", which exposes the option to skip QEMU and use native Apple Silicon virtualization.
It's fantastic. I mention this only because it's been super useful, way better than Asahi, with minimal effort.
The hardware isn’t overpriced, it’s best in class. It’s just that that class isn’t what you’re looking for, and as a Linux user it’s not for you, which is valid! But the hardware for what it is is one of the absolute best price to performance ratios on the market right now and I’m tired of people pretending it isn’t. You can get a brand new m4 MacBook Air for under $800 right now, and that’s simply one of the best deals around. For an M2 for asahi Linux? Second hand the prices are even better.
A sufficiently seeded torrent is a high latency static CDN.
You just need a client that can make use of it.
I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.
I'm not ideologically opposed to AI. The problem will get worse because while the quality of the music will improve, it will still be bad and there will also be a lot more of it.
We aren't really short on music. Diluting the good stuff with 100x more mediocre filler is not a good thing.
If AI generated music ever actually becomes good then that's another story but that is quite a way off.
when you combine a residential proxy with a tool like curl-impersonate (there are libraries in Go for this type of fingerprint spoofing now) they dont even show up as scrapers anymore, just users. especially when they adjust timings to mimic humans.
clouflare only blocks the most dumb of bots, there are still a lot of them.
this is why cloudflare will issue javascript challenges to you even when you are using google chrome with a VPN, they are desperate to appear to be doing something. and every VPN is used to crawl as well. a slightly more sophisticated bot passes the cloudflare javascript challenge as well, there really is nothing they can do to win here.
i know some teams that got annoyed with residential proxies (they are usually sold as socks5 but can be buggy and low bandwidth) so they invested into defeating the cloudflare javascript challenge and now crawl using 1000's of VPN endpoints at over 100 Gbit/s.
Is "residential proxy" another name for an hacked/owned computer that the bots have access to? Or are there legitimate services that sell access to residential IPs?
People legitimately sell egress. It's "free" money. But of course, if you have a botnet, you can sell that through the same channels, no one is looking too closely.
The answer to that is simple: They hate AI and the environment angle is just an excuse, much like their concern over AI art. Human psychology is such that many of these people actually believe the excuse too.
It helps when you put yourself in the shoes of people like that and ask yourself, if I find out tomorrow that the evidence that AI is actually good for the environment is stronger, will I believe it? Will it even matter for my opposition to AI? The answer is no.
You don't know that. I don't know about you (and whatever you wrote possibly tells more about yourself than anyone else), but I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
And the environment is far from being the only concern.
You are attacking a straw man. For you, being against GenAI, simply because it happens to be against your beliefs, is necessarily irrational. Please don't do this.
> I prefer my positions strong and based on reality, not based on lies (to myself included).
Then you would be the exception, not the rule.
And if you find yourself attached to any ideology, then you are also wrong about yourself. Subscribing to any ideology is by definition lying to yourself.
Being able to place yourself into the shoes of others is something evolution spent 1000s of generations hardwiring into us, I'm very confident in my reading of the situation.
> Having beliefs, principles or values is not lying to oneself.
The lie is that you adopted "beliefs, principles or values" which cannot ever serve your interests, you have subsumed yourself into something that cannot ever reciprocate. Ideology by definition even alters your perceived interests, a more potent subversion cannot be had (up to now, with potential involuntary neural interfaces on the horizon).
> Citation needed
I will not be providing one, but that you believe one is required is telling. There is no further point to this discussion.
My guess is "that they did the math" and had an engineering study which convinced them that getting AI datacenters into space will make sense.
It's also not hard to imagine why, the process alone once perfected could be reused for asteroid mining for example, then mirogravity manufacturing, either of which alone would be enormous capital intensive projects. Even if AI dataenters in space are break-even it would be a massive win for SpaceX and leave their competition far behind.
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