Refreshing to see model announcements without claiming #1 in some benchmark. The amount of documentation seems very immature [0]. No system card provided - compared to Opus 4.8 which shipped with a 246 page analysis [1].
I don't think so at all. Models are trained in many ways and are changing aggressively, resulting in different patterns in different regions, domains, languages, and will be different 3, 5, 10 years down the line. Having everyone try to learn and adapt around how to stay within very magical, fuzzy, and ever-changing boundaries to avoid appearing to be an AI, instead of focusing on producing good writing or communicating as it is natural to them, seems like a recipe for bad thinking and arbitrary reactions.
The syntax is of course attractive (coming from Rust), and I'd love to replace more of my posix scripts with something saner. I struggle understanding whether the utility of having language literals for IP addresses, IP prefixes, and AS numbers is worth it though [0]. It seems like the confusion added by having custom built-ins like this for one particular domain, in addition to the unclear scoping (what could later also deserve being a language literal), combined with special-case errors as famous in e.g. the YAML Norway problem, makes it seem like such features are better left as some general extension / macro / library capability.
Nix is a language with built-in support for URI literals typed as strings [1], which is a source of confusion and edge-cases, and I believe the feature is now discouraged in general use.
Shout-out to the React Compiler for those that have not tried it. It's very easy to configure and can automatically deal with many cases of useMemo / useCallback / memo to reduce boilerplate in code: https://react.dev/learn/react-compiler
The term non-player character (NPC) will become ever more relevant. I used to dislike it as I felt everyone adds signal, but if all you are doing is relaying information then that is effectively what you become in that context.
One issue with this argument is that there are very few engineers that have had the opportunity to design satellites that are; this large, are designed for mass manufacturing, rapid iteration, failure allowance, and with access to a reusable launch vehicle with the capability of Starship (where it's also unknown what launch mass capability they will end up reaching).
The satellites built by SpaceX so far, and their engines, are quite unlike most previous space engineering due to these reasons. Given the undeniable success they've had in building Starlink, with each version growing considerable in size, I just don't see which engineers would be able to fully rule out the math that SpaceX might be working on here, exactly because there are so many parts of the total equation and where SpaceX are moving outside the previous design envelopes in many dimensions.
Of course I'm personally not convinced or able to know whether this is economically sensible - I just believe it's very difficult to fully rule out given the track record of SpaceX - and given that there doesn't appear to be any singular insurmountable thing that needs to be figured out here. Hence why I said in my original post that this is why I'm excited to see the design space explored.
> The point is that they're absolutely not in isolation from other challenges because designing something to radiate heat at maximum possible radiative cooling efficiency is not considered to be a problem, solving the unit economics of launching the required radiators tonnage and burning 100 tonnes of rocket fuel to per tonne launched that's the problem.
I was pointing out relative coupling, not absolute coupling. The coupling between the different design decisions involved in Terafab or Starship seems far greater as there are so many design levels to unite jointly - while figuring out the structural and thermal design of these satellites appears to be something that to a greater degree can be resolved with less design constrained coupling - i.e. making it more feasible to figure out with a lower number of people.
> Optimizing for local circumstances is a benefit to doing things on earth: if having a production line and the ability to plug into wherever energy happens to be cheapest was better we'd all be sticking inference chips in shipping containers and not worrying about HVACs being relatively inefficient at cooling.
I did not reference energy cost directly. In many countries there are year-long lines for data centers to even be allowed to connect to the grid, which is why many also resort to local gas turbine power plants etc. Having a cost effective (the unknown is if/when this becomes possible) method of deploying large units of compute without dealing with this power access issue - zoning issues - local policies etc - appears to be one of the large attractions to this endeavor, in addition to being able to avoid longer term scaling issues. Inference sticks are not cost effective at scale now and that does not seem to be on the horizon. Space based compute however seems to be a more open question depending on your timeline.
I read the comment that I replied to as these challenges being a large prohibitor to this development, and I pointed out that these seem like challenges that can be dealt with mostly in isolation from other challenges and in particular not require a large number of engineers to deal with.
Of course the major exercise becomes about total cost efficiency, but I think a large attraction is that once you've solved space deployment sufficiently, you don't need to keep dealing with local circumstances and power production adaptations to every new site you're dealing with on Earth, as it's more about producing a set of modules you can keep launching without individual adaptation - not about "space being cold".
As problems go, radiation and cooling seem to have relatively low dimensionality compared to the other problems. It seems to be mostly a question of optimizing within the dimensions of dissipation / structure / deployment / service / cost / weight. When all is said and done, the cooling solution will end up being a module that can deal with some power dissipation, cost X amount, weight Y amount, have structural interface Z. This seems like something a relatively low number of engineers can iterate on largely isolated from other concerns. SpaceX does have 5000+ of them.
Comparing this to scaling the production of compute where they try to work outside the bounds of ASML (~40k employees) and TSMC (~80k+ employees), and where there is a huge number of degrees of freedom in many, many layers of the stack that have complicated interactions.
With radiation and cooling, SpaceX also has plenty of experience with both already given that they've had to solve this on existing satellites. Overall, Terafab just seems like a far harder challenge, and where I'd be more wary on timelines.
I fully agree on the reality distortions and valuation chaos surrounding Tesla. This does also follow from the company being very volatile and chaotic, which becomes harder to price. How do you accurately price in e.g. Optimus - it seems really hard to tell at this point - which I guess is also one of the motivators for these strategies.
However, in this particular trajectory, SpaceX did build the rockets and did build Starlink which is now the best global-scale wireless communication network for many use-cases. Stretching this trajectory to scale up the technology to facilitate in-space computing is vastly more grounded than Shakespearean monkeys.
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies.
> In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.
In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere.
SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built.
What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted.
Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
> And we are on the same side, to be clear. I want privacy.
I care about far more than privacy. These matters are about societal stability, the panopticon, societal robustness in cases of downturns or wars, the ability to counter the mass control capabilities of artificial intelligence - and much more.
> Android being locked down is the worst case scenario: private companies makes rules, an update is pushed, no platform for discourse.
Personally I'm blaming the lock-down on Android just as much on governments as I do Google, because I believe that they have failed greatly at finding ways to interact with modern technology. Instead of heaping ever more complicated requirements on the platform providers and issuing arbitrary fines, they could likely achieve much more by doing less - e.g. by saying "anyone must be allowed to run the software they want on the device that they own" and "when a person pays for a device they own the device" (I believe there are many other answers to this question that would scale far better than current approaches). Fundamentally, a big part of the problem is the many responsibilities and goals of the government where some of them run counter to allowing such freedoms.
> I like this! It's not "perfect", but i prefer this 1000 times over "let Google verify my age".
Personally I think this should be solved to a satisfactory degree by simply requiring anyone that wants to provide access to content that by law is age restricted to simply advertise this with headers similar to CORS that browsers must respect, such that the configuration of the browser blocks access to those not of age. It is then the responsibility of the parents to configure the devices of their children such that they cannot access age restricted content. It makes perfect sense to have a "child mode" for browsers and operating systems, where the person configuring the setup makes this determination without involving centrally approved systems. To the degree that such a solution would have workarounds I'm absolutely not convinced that the detriments of this is worth the additional costs on restricting the freedom of citizens.
> Now to tech details. Locking down network is impossible as long as decentralization is possible.
This is a plain incorrect view at scale. If the EU decides to either ban E2EE/require client-side scanning/require backdoors, then all major chat applications will have to adhere to this, and it will no longer be practical or possible to have an application like Signal installed on your phone. This means that when being investigated by the police, or e.g. when traveling and being searched, you will be breaking the law by having such an application and will by default be a criminal. The magical part of digital fascism is exactly that it is very effectively enforceable at scale. If you require all computers to only run software that is approved by the government, and you outlaw software that allow unsurveilled communication, then digital fascism allows you to enforce this to a previously unseen degree, exactly because you can prevent any computer from being allowed to run it.
These are quantum differences - not differences of better vs worse. They are also differences of societal and technological lock-in - as once you give up the ability to communicate freely you may never get it back. Right now; Tor, VPNs, Signal, are all legal to use within the EU. However, if you make them illegal and you enforce computers, operating systems, and networks to disallow them, then it becomes far more difficult for anyone to work outside the allowed bounds, both due to technical difficulty as well as criminal liability. This is digital fascism.
That is the exact point. A "best intentions" approach to e.g. solve age verification through a "privacy respecting" mechanism leads to the government mandating that only physical devices with the built in security verification mechanisms, as allowed via government approved signatures, would be able to run these age verification apps (because otherwise you could cheat the mechanisms). This is a direct attack on general purpose computing and facilitates digital fascism by requiring that all software is signed in a manner approved by the government (directly or indirectly).
This is not hyperbole - Android will be locked down in only 115 days [0]. Further, in order to enforce such an age verification mechanism, you will end up requiring all software to either account for why it would not need to be integrated, or integrate with such a government mandated mechanism. This introduces accounting, surveillance, and approvals for every possible use-case. How would an online forum dedicated to discussing political topics survive? They would have to prove that they are complying with such measures that increase the barrier to operate and ensures that any forum or other arena of interaction would have to be accountable and justify how they are verifying interactions within the bounds of these laws and mechanisms.
Further - beyond locking down devices you would clearly need to lock down networks and communication in order to enforce such restrictions - which leads to deeper and broader filtering / scanning / monitoring - and preventing workarounds such as VPNs to ensure that all thoughts and actions are within these government set bounds.
Further - it is essential to realize that the outcome of this is not the best case of a single measure - the outcome in many cases will be the combination of measures taken by many different governments across the globe that each cut away certain freedoms.
Again - this is not only about age verification or digital wallets - it is the continuous pattern shown clearly through a range of actions made over time by the EU to introduce client-side scanning, age verification mechanisms, locking down devices. It's not all in place yet, but it is certainly being aggressively worked towards. All of these mechanisms will directly facilitate digital fascism as it will literally become illegal to effectively read, think, communicate without it being inside the remaining allowed bubble set by the government.
Another post on the front page of HN just now is about France seeking to dismantle end-to-end encryption. It is then not about the best possible view of a single measure in isolation, it is that these measures will lock in digital fascism broadly unless you are able to see what they facilitate when combined.
I don't care for a limited and selective best-possible interpretation of a subset of measures viewed in isolation. The point is that a broader set of vectors are being used continuously to gradually ensnare and limit digital freedom.
This is not a misleading headline, this is a document from the European Parliamentary Research Service that calls out VPNs as a technology that may need to be moderated in order to enforce restrictions such as age verification.
As you are calling me out - specifically answer how restricting access to VPNs would benefit the freedom of thought, communication, and information within Europe, and not be something that - together with other measures - can help facilitate digital fascism.
Speaking from the POV of my country, you absolutely have prime minister + minister level understandings that seem to plainly be based on issues such as "we need to stop children from bullying each other on social media", "we need to help police surveillance to stop crime", "we need to protect people from internet porn" etc, and it seems to be that the political capital and will to create these measures comes from short-term attempts to solve certain problems, without being able to understand how a broader set of these measures will together create digital fascism.
Beyond that I fully believe there are intelligence agencies, advertising agencies, military interests, IP control interests etc that are all working very diligently and in more targeted ways to each achieve their goals better by pushing for specific measures and helping to amplify moral panics to build the necessary political capital.
Age restrictions + VPN bans + encryption restrictions + client-side monitoring + restricting general purpose computing.. It's just rapid descent into digital fascism set up by people who have no ability to see how the dots will end up connecting.
Annoying to see slop like this on the front page taking up people's attention. Resource utilization connected to new infrastructure that is planned to be scaled exponentially is clearly important to analyze. Instead of research and insight this post just facilitates ignorance on the topic.
It's frustrating to see how shortsighted and tech-illiterate politicians are on these topics. This article from Norway today presents the attitude of the minister of digitization as simply "Social media companies are making billions and we expect them to adequately implement age verification systems with solutions that respect privacy and we will fine those who fail at doing this".
The fantastic irony is that in some weak attempt to protect against the "evil big tech companies" they directly facilitate increased mass surveillance and removal of individual rights, instead of choosing more scalable and robust answers such as funding and promoting the development of protocols and open standards that can be applied voluntarily and in a decentralized manner to help mitigate these problems.
I have computers side by side on my desktop running Linux, and it is amazing to me how I can call `wormhole send --message hello` and receive it on the machine next to me, knowing that only I can receive this message, without it running through an age approval mechanism, without it being client-side scanned, and without being logged in some government database.
This is the century of AI and robotics - technologies which can facilitate great concentration of power and wealth. Gradually introducing mechanisms that facilitate digital fascism seems like a really bad way to guard us against this.
[0] https://docs.x.ai/developers/models/grok-4.5
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8