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I already don't use the speakers, TV tuner, or multiple inputs of my TV. That's what I have a sound system and streaming box for.

Plenty of uranium available from Canada, Australia, and Namibia

FWIW Russia produces less than either Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Their machines have always lasted. I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.

What a shame I didn't discover this sooner -- I finally sent my 11-year-old TrueNAS system[1] through the one-way Linux door about a year ago because I gave up on any hope that something like this would come along and I didn't see another way to keep it current.

The migration path went smoothly but I preferred the FreeBSD setup if only because it forced me to do something a bit more interesting in my spare time. I do quite a lot of Linux work in my day job and it was nice to occasionally work on something that was surface-level similar but subtly and not-so-subtly different.

[1] Over 11 years I have replaced every component (even the CPU/motherboard) at least once except for the case. Migrating from MBR to UEFI was "fun".

It's not just a patent fee, IC-card support takes special hardware that enables the low latency of the transaction. Only Android phones sold in Japan (including Pixels) get it installed at manufacturing.

Oh, Matthias Wandel, of course. This would have been back when he was writing software for Blackberry instead of his current semi-retired woodworking YouTubing

Yes, top hats were one (but not the only) use of beaver fur

The step that a lot of people leave out is the revising: it is worth the human hours to go over the outputs of AI for this kind of thing with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is usable, readable, accurate, etc.

If US backed NGOs were distributing life saving medications (e.g. for HIV-AIDS via PEPFAR, to give only one example) and then that distribution was withdrawn, causing recipients to die because they could no longer access medication, what other conclusion should we draw?

Probably not. As you point out, it's a typesetting tool like LaTeX, not a page layout tool.

You could probably write a template that does the right thing, but that's true of LaTeX as well.

For the sake of completeness, the Four Colour Theorem was proved with the aid of a computer in 1976, although there were, er, quibbles with the original published result not finally put to bed until 1989. It was the first major theorem to be proved with computer assistance (Appel and Haken broke the theorem down to ~1400 configurations that were all computer verified).

For certain values of "reality". It doesn't take a financial analysis to tell you that it is bananas that Tesla (~1.3T) is worth more than four times as much as Toyota (280B), and yet.

I bet you could build a fully off-grid DC that didn't guzzle water for less money than launching a rocket today, and there would be thousands of people lining up down the block to sell you more than enough land to do it a thousand times for cheap. This just isn't happening yet because it is still quite possible to build on-grid DCs supplied with fresh water for cooling despite what some people would have you believe.

And then when you build on the ground you could even send people to it to swap hard drives and GPUs when they inevitably fail or upgrade them to keep them current. At lower rates of failure than they would in space because we have a planetary magnetosphere protecting us from cosmic rays.

> In our downside scenario, orbital data centers won’t work or offer any advantage over terrestrial ones

Technologically, will they work? Shovel enough money at the problem and there's no reason they shouldn't. Rack up some GPUs in a shipping container, attach a couple of solar panels to the outside, zip-tie a Starlink to the door. Except for the little problem of heat. Space isn't cold, it's more of a giant Thermos bottle, and they gotta park in full sunlight, which is famously the only thing supplying the heat that keeps the entire planet alive. Good luck to them with their radiator setup.

But economically? There's no chance. Too expensive to get into space, too many auxiliary systems required, no maintenance is possible, and, given the lead time of prepping payloads for launch versus the rate of new developments in AI hardware, likely badly behind the times if not outright obsolete on the day of liftoff.

There is no shortage of land despite what some in the media would have you believe. Those same solar panels work at ground level. DCs don't have to be water guzzlers or grid destabilizers. They'd be better off by every metric solving terrestrial problems for the same money.

Of course they won't work. It's ludicrous that we have to even entertain the thought of otherwise.

Curious parallel to iRobot (Roomba): first mover in new product segment, became genericized name for things in that segment, in the end, (possibly in GoPro's case) could not compete in that segment