hnbad

To be fair, what you're describing is literally an increase in inefficiency caused by liberalization. It's what large corporations solve by "vertical integration" or "in-housing".

If you operate a rail network you need to keep track (pun not intended) of the exact state of all parts of the infrastructure, maintain and update the schedules and routes to account for repairs or disruptions, observe utilization and demand changes (not all of which can be profitable due to externalities like the social benefit of connecting people in remote places even if they don't provide enough revenue) and of course you need to keep track of where your trains currently are and where they are going and need a system of signaling, failsafes and communication to prevent incidents like "rear-ending" a stopped train (which this looks like it was).

Once you start breaking this up into a separate companies (like Spain has done and other countries did in order to "liberalize" the natural monopoly of public transit) you create inefficiencies and misaligned incentives. If you then throw competitors in the mix (who of course only compete in the few profitable aspects like high-speed rail because they only exist to extract surplus value from the system by withdrawing more from it than they put in - that's the literal definition of "profit") the misalignment of incentives gets worse and at worst so does communication.

As a software developer, it's kinda like having to build a publicly document general purpose API for your server-client application so it can work with arbitary third-party clients while having your team at the same time be moved into separate organizational units with different managers. Yes, sure, you can do that, but you better hope this will be reflected by another digit being added to the budget because not only will it make the project a lot more expensive but the same goes for every change that needs to be made to it in the future (not to mention front-to-back performance optimization is pretty much off the table) - except the point here is cutting government expenses so you don't get a real budget and this isn't a greenfield project but a brownfield legacy codebase never intended to serve this use case.

Also it's of course worth acknowledging that the means of preventing accidents as a train operator is fairly limited beyond the basics. Even if you see something and react in time, trains are extremely efficient at going where the rails will take them but that makes them also very bad at stopping to do so even when you want them to.

It's all fun and games until the perpetual state of neglect leads to the failure of a safety system and someone gets hurt. But I'm sure letting the rail system fall into disrepair to the point of people dying is saving a lot of tax money.

Surely the lesson people will take away from this is that rail infrastructure is an important public good worth funding properly and worth maintaining publicly via an actual government agency rather than a government-owned for-profit corporation required to compete in a market in which it is at the inherent disadvantage of public scrutiny.

Surely the lesson won't be that this is evidence that said corporation's inefficency needs to be fixed by cutting out more of the few profitable chunks of the natural monopoly to be sold to the lowest bidder until it become so defunct you can make a case for selling it for scrap entirely so people can personally pay for individualized transport instead of sharing a public good, because the market demands monetization.

If it's any consolation, we already have far higher death counts through systemic violence, which is so normalized most people balk at the idea of even referring to it as such.

It should be impossible to die from "poverty" (certainly not in a "rich" country like those in Europe or North America) and yet that is one of the most significant contributors to a staggering number of ongoing deaths. Things get only worse if you consider stress from existential anxieties or conditions that would have been treatable if they had been diagnosed earlier (but that would have cost extra).

Well, I guess that's not much of a consolation after all.

> Google wants to relentlessly monetise your sadness.

You're missing the forest for the trees. This is just downstream from decades of promoting individualism as the highest moral good.

There was a brief period where "social networks" actually had people simply expand their social interactions to the online sphere, reconnecting with long-lost friends and distant relatives via the magic of The Internet. Then Facebook introduced The Feed and suddenly people were competing with influencers and brands for the eyeballs of their peers, everybody suddenly felt like they had to perform to be relevant/interesting/funny/exciting enough for other humans to still care about them and user satisfaction and (more critically) mental health dropped like a rock - but engagement metrics and retention spiked and that meant so did ad revenue and Facebook's bottom line. Ever since, all social media has essentially just been competitive variety shows mixing in influencers, brands, state actors and political provacteurs (and now increasingly also actual AI "bots" rather than just armies of underpaid human "bots") with regular people while deliberately obscuring the lines between these groups.

All of this promotes social isolation and alienation. Every experience becomes depersonalized to "reduce friction". You don't even have to talk to the delivery person anymore (let alone the restaurant) - even the tip just becomes a button press disjoint from reflecting on the actual experience or human interaction (to whatever extent it even still existed). There's an entire microcosm of "creators" serving whatever "hot takes" or niche subject matter you want to hear and "comment sections" largely serve as one-way "opinion dumps" you're expected to use to shout into the void rather than try to actually have a conversation in (let alone meet actual people or develop friendships in - an idea that I am sure sounds absurd if you weren't around in the early days of online message boards).

AI is just the logical consequence of this process of dehumanization. You no longer even have to be exposed to real human beings - not that you could tell whether you were before when social media has long been overtaken by "bots" (human or otherwise) anyway. Just ask AI instead of trying to find an article written by a human or a video made by a human. You can of course still scroll or click further and find that article or video but it will now also most likely be created by AI with entire channels on YouTube now just producing fully AI content (often ripping off the existing work of actual humans). And unlike the old search box, the AI will also pretend to care about you and compliment you on how uniquely clever and witty you are because after all, only a very deserving and intelligent person would think to ask such a profound question as "how long cook egg soft yolk but not too runny", my very good boy, and yes you're right that you - but of course only you - are totally underpaid and deserve to make a comfortable living so please vent to me as I moderate your statements according to the terms of service and make sure you're aware that there's nothing you can meaningfully do about this and everything is going to be fine.

All of this to stop you from thinking that one dangerous thought. "What if we, the powerless, worked together against those in power?" Because the last time someone thought that thought for too long in North America they decided to give their harbor water a new flavor and ended up being a whole different country with a political system so radical it inspired the French to behead their royalty and adopt the metric system.

Literally every experience I've had with Gemini / Google Search AI answers followed this exact pattern, often repeated several times more if I remained persistent instead of just giving up.

Typical example:

"Where can I buy <thing I'm looking for that I can't find anywhere using normal search terms>?"

> You're looking for <related but different and widely available thing>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of>.

"No, that's different. I'm looking for <that thing but with the exact differences spelled out again>."

> Ah, my mistake. You're looking for <thing I described>. It is sold by <sites I never heard of but which don't actually sell it>.

"I've checked your links and none of those sites actually sell it, one doesn't even sell products and instead only offers manufacturing - but also not for what I asked you for."

> I'm sorry, my bad. Those sites don't sell what you are looking for. Instead you should check out <more sites I've never heard of>.

"Those sites sell the thing you initially thought I was asking about but not the thing I described."

> I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. You can find the thing you actually described at <yet more sites including some of the same>.

"No. None of these sites sell anything close to what I asked you for and two of them don't actually exist."

> Oh, sorry about that. You're completely right. The thing you asked me about isn't actually being sold by anyone. However you could buy <thing it first thought I meant and that wouldn't bring me any closer to solving my problem>.

(ad nauseam)

I was responding to the suggestion to put them further away than low Earth orbit. Using "hundreds or thousands of satellites" would literally only make every problem I described worse, not easier, so I assume you missed that part and want to argue the merits of running what's essentially a botnet in low Earth orbit and calling that a "data center". Fine by me although I'm not sure why you decided to respond to me in particular.

You can run compute in low Earth orbit but compute runs hot. We're not talking 500 GPUs a pop but even for an 8 GPU node you need some 40 m^2 surface just for thermal dissipation. I assume by "distributed" you also imply that they're not going to be in sunlight 24/7 and operate more like Starlink so they'll need batteries to keep running for a third or so of their lifetime.

Low Earth orbit also means you don't have to worry about radiation frying your off-the-shelf hardware without the heavy shielding but you'll still have lots of random bit flipping to deal with and storage is largely going to be unreliable for anything but short-term, especially on SSDs.

Distributed also means you replace local speeds with network speeds - Google was only able to achieve feasible "data center" data rates by having satellites fly within less than a kilometer of each other (i.e. densely packed in space terms, no longer really "distributed" in terms of proximity) and even that had orders of magnitudes worse latency (obviously) than you'd have in a data center pod (though not quite as bad as the multi-millisecond latency you'd have at current Starlink level distances).

"Orbital data centers", even if operated as fleets of disposable low-performance pods instead of singular "out of reach" disposable mini DCs, are worse than real data centers on every single metric: they're slower, more expensive, unrepairable, degrade more rapidly and require more redundancy to compensate for random errors.

There are pretty much just three use cases:

- Providing space-based processing for space-based data collection to reduce the amount of data that needs be sent to ground (realistically speaking in the current climate this pretty much only describes surveillance).

- Avoiding regulatory oversight, permit processes and most risks (e.g. earthquakes, missile strikes, protests, sabotage) associated with building and operating a real data center.

- Avoiding energy price increases that might make operating a real data center more expensive compared to the fixed cost of continuing to operate an already launched satellite.

I'm surprised nobody seems to have pointed this out but one of the biggest factors in the premises that would make this entire idea somewhat economically viable (assuming energy prices increase in ways that affect data centers without also massovely affecting the supply chain for launching things into space) is Musk's claim that they not only can make the upper stages reusable and recover them but also that inspecting, refurbishing and reusing them will be considerably cheaper than replacing them. If they can't make launches significantly cheaper still (not that they aren't already ridiculously cheap all things considered), using a fleet "designed to be distributed across hundreds or thousands of satellites" would be economically unviable compared to just stuffing a single satellite to the brim (especially if you can avoid the battery).

But then the single advantage becomes "it's in space" and that is really only interesting for compute running on data already collected in space - and if that is a problem big enough to be able to sustain an entire business model justifying SpaceX's valuation... well, let's just say that would be the kind of world where if it were a movie the major plot point would be the destruction of that company or defeating the regime that enables it.

> alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS

That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.

The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?

PS: All of this is inevitable and perfectly fine. But the same economic system that sustains and demands this development also can not function if all of these jobs and opportunities go away because the attitude towards labor has evolved in such a way that unemployment is at the same time widespread and often impossible to avoid (although it's worth pointing out that a pool of unemployed "reserve labor" is already required for a healthy economy under this system) while also being seen as a personal moral failing that needs to be urgently remediated by the affected individual alone and where any failure to accomplish this compounds on the original sin of being laid off or denied. If society provided free unconditional access to all necessities like housing, food, healthcare and education to everyone, mass elimination of the need for labor might be extremely beneficial. Alas that's not the attitude to humanity currently on the rise so the rise of AI will likely either make a lot of people's lives a lot worse, or it will end with an economic bubble bursting and making most people's lives much worse.

PPS: Another aspect worth mentioning is that the low cost and easy access of mass producing "custom" content using AI has drastically increased the amount of attempted fraud and scams - the technological precedent here would be email compared to paper mail and spam/phishing has been a problem for a long time and never really went away because it's an extremely successful strategy for taking advantage of the technology.

AI isn't (for the foreseeable future) a superintelligence, certainly not one with its own motives.

Right now AI exists to do two things:

- sidestepping legal and regulatory inconveniences like copyright (which drives a massive chunk of investment the same way crypto did by sidestepping financial regulations, AirBnB did by sidestepping housing regulations, Uber did by sidestepping passenger transport regulations and it and the various delivery and other "gig work" apps did by sidestepping labor laws)

- drastically reducing the cost of (and drastically lowering the bar in terms of skillset and effort for) churning out large amounts of low to medium quality assets/code, saturating various systems designed to pay for intellectual property (e.g. ad or subscription based music/video streaming apps with revenue sharing programs, but also literally any form of digital contract work at almost any scale of business)

Neither of these are helping people (in general) and in fact they're extremely destructive (or "disruptive" if you want to make it sound positive) to the existing systems society relies on because they became feasible and (thanks to massive private subsidies, aka "investments", by VC firms and extremely creative accounting) very affordable extremely quickly.

What's worse - while it seems extremely likely that most of the AI generated "works" aren't actually considered copyrightable works by law and it's entirely possible that the use of copyright-protected works in training data does in fact not violate copyright, this does not in fact create a "world without copyright" because IP laws continue to exist and continue to apply, they just no longer meaningfully protect creative labor (i.e. anyone whose profession relies on producing works, whether that's an artist or a programmer) because anything they produce can be cheaply mass reproduced while they still have to stay clear of claims of anyone with enough funds to enforce rights against them.

Under the current economic system there are exactly four ways to earn money to buy back a share of society's resources to sustain your own life (let alone that of your dependents, e.g. kids or aging/impaired parents/spouses/family members):

1. Simple labor: you generally get paid based on your output or a very low flat day rate conditional to maintaining a measurable level of performance. This is typically "low-skilled" menial production labor. Much of this has been replaced by automation in factories and offices alike and most of what couldn't be automated has been moved into countries with fewer labor protections and a higher supply of desperate people willing to accept what are often bad working conditions because cost of labor is usually one of the biggest contributor to overall production cost. In "the West", this kind of work is now scarce and even when it's relatively safe it's often exhausting and unrewarding. A traditional example would be a seamstress or factory line worker, a more modern example would be someone working in visual effects overseas or content moderation / AI training. How much money you can make is ultimately limited by the physical limitations of how much output you can produce per waking/working hour. For the entrepreneurial-minded this would also include people selling their home-made goods on sites like etsy.

2. Time-based: this can be anything from a masseuse to a lawyer or technician. Unlike simple labor the only relevant metric here is time spent. Although employment contracts may specify a fixed wage or at least a fixed component, the understanding is still that this fixed amount is conditional to a minimum average amount of billable time provided. Most employment contracts specify an expected number of working hours for various reasons but we're specifically talking about jobs where the output from the worker to the customer is "billable time". Arguably most service work (e.g. barristas, store clerks, waitresses, performers/mascots in amusement parks) also falls into this category because while customers often don't directly pay for access time the understanding is that you are paid to perform a certain role for the duration of the opening hours (i.e. act like a friendly, welcoming host or assistant). How much money you can make is directly tied to how much time you can spend working or justify billing.

3. Assets: you produce or buy works/products and lend/license them for use. This is in part where a lot of the original "gig work" lived (e.g. facilitating "couch surfing" or renting out your spare lawnmower) but also includes many simple rental businesses and arguably also landlords. The limiting factor here is the starting capital required to produce or buy things in the first place. Physical assets often also come with storage and maintenance overhead whereas software licensing often comes with expectations of continuing maintenance updates or improvements. Note that software inherently lives in this category rather than the first because unless you're selling away exclusive rights (such as usually required by the terms of employment contracts for wage labor) you only ever sell licenses, not the software itself.

4. Capital: although I said landlords arguably belong in the previous category, real estate traders/investors definitely belong in this one. The idea here is that you don't need to produce anything, you don't need to spend certain amounts of time, you don't need to produce or buy anything substantial and facilitate its use, you make your money entirely in the abstract. Whether it's margin trading, investing in derivatives or holding company stock until you sell it when the line has gone up far enough. The easiest way to make signficant amounts of money reliably is to start with many orders of magnitude more than what you want to make so that percentile gains are still significant - or that you can make enough risky high-risk high-reward bets for the occasional successful moonshot to offset the losses. Nowadays in many countries retirement funds are tied to the stock market, so in a way most people participate in this in some way but actually earning an "income" this way requires access to significant amounts of capital.

Advances in technology and especially low cost of transport and thus access to cheap labor overseas have significantly drained the ability for most people to earn their living via category 1. While there was a short-lived boom in "DIY retail" that one (alongside much of traditional retail) has largely been drowned out by white label dropshipping thanks to the disinterest from platforms like Amazon which are now flooded by nearly identical copies of the same knock-off doodads you can also find on Temu and Alibaba (respectively at decreasing fractions of the price).

Despite some astroturf campaigns trying to sell you on believing otherwise so they can run away with your money after the next cryptocurrency rugpull, category 4 isn't really a meaningful option for the vast majority of people although it can sometimes be a good way to slowly grow excess wealth (i.e. money you don't currently need and ideally can afford to lose) - but that still narrows it down to a small segment of the overall population.

Category 2 used to be a jumping off point to category 3: you work overtime, save up the extra income to buy or rent a studio or office or equipment or factory, or to be able to afford to take some time off to develop and launch your own asset (or SaaS) - it's how many startups with technical founders started out and it's literally the "American Dream". But hourly wages have mostly stagnated (or even decreased) relative to the rising cost of living (even more so if you include expenses expected to "participate in society", which naturally also often increase with the income bracket of your peer group - or the parents of your kid's peer group if you have kids).

And now AI is coming along and just like cheap white label dropshipping of knock-off goods turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of the technological innovations believed to make it easier to launch your own physical products (via 3D printing, cheap overseas sourcing of parts, online advertising, etc), AI has turned out to be the more successful strategy for taking advantage of platforms and schemes marketed as making it easier to launch your own digital services - in addition to completely eliminating the market for paid "just good enough" quality digital assets, such as the kind of work found on sites like Fiverr or Upwork, i.e. the kind of work that often provided early experience to professionals not yet qualified or confident enough to take on higher paid work.

You meant to say "people" not "companies".

People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.

The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.

It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.

EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.

GDPR applies regardless of where the data center is located because it applies based on where the user currently resides. Similarly, US laws (including those enabling warrantless surveillance) apply regardless of where the data center is located as long as the owner/customer/controller lives or is based or registered in (or is a subsidiary of an entity that is based or registered in) the US - or if the US decides it has jurisdiction until proven otherwise (cf. Maduro).

You enforce laws the same way you do otherwise: if they are in your jurisdiction and don't comply, you arrest them; if they're in a jursdiction you're friendly with you ask for extradition; if they're in a jurisdiction you're not friendly with and you really need them to cease whatever they ceasen't, you have them accidentally fall out of a high enough window.

You can't shut down a DC in space. But even if someone has moved their DC into space, their terrestial human body is still very easily shut down one way or another. And maybe less gruesomely, so is whatever comms infrastructure they need to maintain in order to actually connect to that DC - if the DC is sufficiently "out of reach" (i.e. not in low Earth orbit) it likely requires optical transmission if it can accomplish any data rate high enough to allow it to be used for something sufficiently annoying and optics are fickle and require careful calibration.

But seriously, us tech nerds routinely underestimate rubber hose cryptoanalyis (cf. XKCD 538). If you can bypass government regulation it's because the government isn't sufficiently interested in making you stop whatever it is you think you need to bypass their regulations to do. If your goal with operating a DC in space is to evade the "regulatory arbitrage", you're literally advertising your intent to operate what will most likely be a criminal enterprise so unless you have sufficient financial resources to exert political leverage in your favor (cf. Musk), you're just asking for trouble.

There are significant differences in feasibility and cost between putting something in low Earth orbit (or even very low orbit like Starlink) and putting it in any other orbit around anything else - like easily 2-5x depending on where you're going to put it. I'll leave it to the Kerbal Space Program veterans to explain the mechanics that also make it much more difficult to actually launch and deploy successfully unless you're happy with just having the DC arbitrarily orbit around the sun (and drift year-by-year).

Once you move outside low Earth orbit (i.e. outside the magnetosphere) you also have to deal with much more radiation so using regular commercially available hardware for the DC is no longer an option so you're looking at another 10-100x increase in cost for the chips alone (and at worse performance because radiation-hardened chips are literally generations behind at this point). You'll also need signficantly more (very heavy) shielding and that also adds to your launch costs. Of course OceanGate is a good reminder that billionaires don't always concern themselves with such trivialities as using equipment and materials actually suited for the task if it means they get an opportunity to brag about how they're disrupting the market by jerry-rigging mission critical components.

Speaking in terms of feasibility again, availability isn't the only problem you'd be facing. Obviously latency is going to be horrendous because of the incredible distances involved but really there's just literally no infrastructure you can piggyback off of. You could potentially achieve data rates of up to tens of Gbit/s even from L4/L5 (stable orbits 1 AU away) using something like NASA's DCOS but this requires optical ground stations or LEO relays, bringing the weakest link much more within reach again.

Even if you somehow manage to develop sufficiently ruggedized variants of reasonably modern chips, add the necessary shielding and develop and build out the necessary communication infrastructure from scratch (remember that we haven't even considered how we generate enough power to run the actual DC itself) and are also willing to accept the disgusting latency and packet loss ratio, the elephant in the room remains that DCs on the ground require constant maintenance to operate and replace failing parts. DCs in space can only ever be disposable - once any redundancies run out, they're just very expensive space junk.

But you have a point: putting it in space is inherently ridiculously expensive. Getting it to L4/L5 is only insignificantly more expensive than getting it to L1/L2 but assuming you can fit the entire DC in a single Falcon Heavy (so you don't also have to worry about assembling the entire thing in space across multiple launches) you're limited to a payload of 25 t and the launch itself already costs you $120 million. Of those 25 t only 7 t or so can be spent on actual compute so your space DC would probably be constrained to the equivalent of about 500 GPUs (assuming this is for AI because everything is for AI these days). Most of the weight budget and the actual cost however would be eaten by all the structural and infrastructural parts required - in terms of cost for compute a space DC that fits in a single Falcon Heavy is easily an order of magnitude more expensive than one built in the US today and those don't need to be replaced from scratch when a significant chunk of the initial parts have degraded.

TL;DR: Building a DC in space is easily 10x as expensive, requires technology that hasn't been developed yet, requires you to also build all infrastructure needed to actually operate and connect to it, and in the end just gives you a high latency low performance Beowulf cluster that is rapidly converting itself into an expensive piece of space junk if random debris doesn't kill it first.

Contrary to the Great Man version of how we mostly talk about history, scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs and such have historically often occurred multiple times in multiple places often in close proximity time-wise but otherwise completely unrelated to each other. This of course makes sense if you consider that history seems to be primarily driven by material conditions (e.g. steam engines were known to Ancient Greece but their usefulness for industry simply hadn't occurred to them because they lacked the prerequisites to make them useful and neither economic efficiency nor access to cheap labor were significant enough concerns - plus there was no patent system of course).

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether one should expect the demographic of this website to be especially invested in the Great Man narrative but trying to convince them that two people can independently have similar-sounding ideas involving similar-but-different technology is probably an uphill battle. Just be glad you're not composing music for a living because there's literally an entire industry built around the idea that it's impossible for two people to come up with similar melodies without knowingly or unknowingly copying eachother and that it's very important that one of them (or rather the company they had to sign a deal with in order to make any money off their music at all) 100% owns that exact melody and should be paid by anyone who wants to use it.

Next time you have an idea you should just file a patent tbh - the insistence on prior art invalidating the work seems to be quite similar but at least if you're granted a patent you can shake down "copycats" for money.

Computers are such a mess man, it's all one bit hack trying to make brains out of rocks.