Your well come.

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

In short no. Longer answer? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Seriously, parts fail. It’s going to cost more to get a HDD into space than it will cost to buy the thing in the first place. Even if you design the system so that it doesn’t require maintenance, you’re going to get parts failing regularly. If you’re not going to have an astronaut living up there and doing repairs, you’re eventually just going to keep losing capacity. I suppose that you could design it so that eventually when 30% of a module/rack has failed you just give up, eject it, and let it burn up in the atmosphere. But, then you’re going to require regular deliveries of new racks to the datacenter just to keep things at the initial capacity.

Then there are the power requirements. Yes, you get “free power” from the sun, but a 1 rack server might need 5000 W, for which you’d need about 20 square metres of solar panel. And, that’s per rack, and assuming you never go into shade (like behind the planet). If you want to be close enough to easily transmit data back and forth, you’re probably going to be going into the planet’s shadow pretty often, so you’ll need maybe double that. And, of course, the bigger the solar array, the more it’s going to be heated up by the sun, so the more heat you’re going to need to dump.

And, cooling is the killer. On earth, cooling a datacenter is a major issue. The old systems used air conditioners which required lots of power. The newer systems use evaporative cooling. None of those work in space. The only thing that would work is to radiate the heat. But, radiating heat is hard. You’d need a big structure, and you’d need to ensure it’s never exposed to the sun, or it will heat up instead of cooling off.

Then there’s getting the data in and out. Let’s assume the DC is mostly doing compute tasks, not IO tasks. It’s training AI models, not hosting videos. Even then, you’ll need to send data up and get it back down. On earth you can lay fat fiber optic pipes to your DC, bury them underground, and never have to worry about it. A DC in space would need to communicate via radio or lasers, and that would require either multiple ground stations or short bursts whenever the DC happened to be overhead. And, whatever solution you came up with would only get a fraction of the data you could send via fiber optic lines.

Really, the only real advantage of a DC in space is the free power. But, install a bunch of solar panels next to your DC on the ground and you’ve got essentially the same thing now. The difference is that you can rely on traditional, reliable, cheap cooling methods, you can send in a tech to replace a dead hard drive, and bandwidth is much simpler.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

Was it even his ear? I don’t think the blood was fake, I think he actually did get injured. But, I’m not convinced it hit his ear at all, unless it was multiple really shallow scratches that all healed very fast and with no damage visible after a few days.

If you’re going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you’re not going to be left with many options.

Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.

subsequently getting ousted for putting ethical concerns before short term profits.

The irony is that there are no profits. The companies selling generative AI are losing such vast sums of money it’s difficult to wrap your head around.

What they’re focused on isn’t short-term profits, it’s being the biggest, most dominant firm whenever AI does eventually become profitable, which might take decades.

Machines are not designed by hermits who have no knowledge of the outside world. They’re tools, but they’re tools designed with a purpose and with or without safeties designed to keep them from maiming or killing people. The design of the machine can be used to talk about the responsibility and morals of the machine’s designer. And, certain machines are so unsafe that even if they theoretically can have a useful purpose, the dangers of the machine being misused are so great that the machine shouldn’t be permitted to be sold.

In Arrested Development, George Bluth designs and sells the Cornballer, a machine to deep-fry cornballs. It was made illegal after it caused serious burns to anybody who used it. Part of the purpose of showing this device on the show is to reveal the character of George Bluth. It shows that he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t care enough to design a safe device, and who continues to try to sell it in Mexico even after it’s made illegal in the US because of how unsafe it is.

Yes, in this case it is people who are submitting papers full of fabricated data using ChatGPT as a tool. But, that doesn’t mean that ChatGPT is simply “neutral” in this whole thing. They’ve released a tool that lacks safeties and that is effectively “burning” science. The positive potential uses of ChatGPT are what, writing a dirty limerick in the style of Shakespeare? Meanwhile, the potential pitfalls of using it are things like having it convince a suicidal person to kill themselves, sowing confusion and making it harder to find good science, giving people unsafe medical diagnoses?

Step one for gun control should be gun control.

Sure, a functioning mental healthcare system is important and should be pursued in parallel. But, clearly, there’s a major issue with the availability of powerful guns. That needs to be addressed before, or at least at the same time as mental health.

This is literally something my conspiracy-addicted mom says all the time.

According to her, this is why, for instance, you won’t find articles articles on “turbo cancer” in the mainstream media.

I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.

Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time.

Maybe, in my mind I was picturing a situation where someone had lots of property and didn’t realize that anything had happened. I see your point though, that in theory you’re depriving them of the use of it whereas with copyright infringement there isn’t even a second where they can’t enjoy their own property. They only potentially lose out on a sale.

Sneaking into a concert that isn’t full is probably a better analogy. You get the experience of the concert without paying for it, and the venue owner maybe loses out on a sale without knowing it.

Also, “piracy” or “copyright infringement” isn’t theft in any sense.

A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It’s not that you have it. That’s why the punishment for “mischief” where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.

Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You’re not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you’re doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you’re depriving someone of anything, it’s depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.

If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.

But you really have to be masocistic to even want to drive in Zürich during the commuting times.

Yeah, and if you do, you’re going to be passed by buses, bikers, even pedestrians. I just love that Zurich buses pick up some passengers, go into their bus lanes, pass all the cars, then get their own light. Meanwhile the Mercedes is sitting at the red light just waiting.

The North American approach (because Canada is guilty too) to transit is to just throw a bunch of busses at the problem and act like they’ve “solved traffic”.

Nobody thinks they’re “solving traffic”. In most of North America, buses are seen as transportation for poor people. Cities feel like they need to supply them because poor people need to get to their jobs, but it doesn’t have to be a good solution.

In Switzerland where they actually do try to solve traffic with buses, those buses have their own dedicated lanes, their own stop lights, etc. Plenty of rich people still drive because it’s a status symbol or something, but buses, trams and trains are the fastest way to get from A to B. Cars are forced to yield to bus traffic. The result is that buses are fast and predictable, so everybody’s happy to use them, which means they get increased investment, which leads to even better bus service, so even more people use them, etc.

Which instance?

Most of the time the fact there’s a beginner-friendly option doesn’t mean that there aren’t also options for more advanced users. This is especially true with Linux.

On phones both Apple and Google lock things down so much that your options are limited. That’s mostly an issue with monopolies not with phones. Macs have a bit more freedom than phones by default, Windows has a bit more than that, then you can go back to Mac if you’re willing to hack around and run QT apps and so on. But, I can’t imagine a Linux distro that didn’t let you ditch a beginner-friendly UI for something more powerful.

I’m still hoping that the success of the Steam Deck will get the ball rolling. Steam Deck success might lead to more games that work really well under Linux. That means less of a reason to keep using Windows. More people using Linux might lead to more software being fully available for Linux, which might get more people to use it. I still think eventually you’re going to need non-hobbyists to come in and smooth a lot of the rough edges. But, stage 1 in that whole process is getting more people using Linux, and maybe that’s actually happening now.

(It also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft keeps shooting themselves in the foot with things like the Cloudstrike bug, and the Windows Recall snoopware failure. Long may that continue.)

I don’t think Linux Bros will ever find a way to appeal to women newcomers. I think it will take a company that can afford to hire UI/UX designers, marketing people, etc.

But, that’s hard because there’s a chicken / egg situation. Selling a Linux-based computer to the general public is going to be very difficult because of the network effects around Mac and Windows machines. Everyone else uses them and so there are people you can ask for help, there are software vendors who make stuff for the platform (also with nice UIs meant for normal people). I can only see someone spending money to make a mass-market friendly Linux in some limited circumstances.

One situation where a company might make a truly user-friendly Linux distribution is if a company like Valve decided to make a game console. They already have the Steam Deck which is doing really well, but nobody’s going to be doing their taxes on a Steam Deck (although they could). But, if they made a desktop-replacement game console that could both play games and also act as a normal home PC, they could afford to spend the money needed to sand the rough edges off the experience.

Another situation might be if a big country mandated Linux for something, either for government computers or for kids in schools. They’d probably have to have a support contract for that, and whoever was supporting those systems would want them to be as user-friendly as possible so they didn’t have to deal with as many support issues. So, if say Brazil mandated that all government employees switch to Linux, that could result in some company making a Linux desktop experience that was comparable to Windows.