I still don't see any reason erasing bots and captchas from my online experience is bad. I hate bots and captchas. They add absolutely no value to my life. Conversely there is lots to be gained if imagine if something like X or reddit or whatever can anonymously verify that a user is a person and over 18 or 21 or 30 even (whatever) without having to directly handle identities. It's could be all the benefits of a bouncer checking for a pulse and valid ID without the privacy invasion. If done correctly it can also make fraud more difficult.
Because you're choosing not to see the obvious downsides. Wasn't this community the ones worried last decade about tech companies havesting their data for profit?
But sure, let's explain the downsides:
1. this isn't an all encompasing law. It's only for sites that host adult content. You know what people will do... remove adult content.
2. As we see this year, rules are useless without enforcement. I'm sure X or Reddit or whatever large companies will strike deals and be exempt. This will only harm the little sites who get harassed by vested interests.
3. There's been campaigns to try and assossiate LGBT to pornography for a while now. This will delve beyond porn and be used to enforce yet more bigotry. This "think of the children" rationale is always their backdoor to stripping away freedoms, and I sure don't trust it this time.
4. On a moral level, I care more about retaining my pseudo anonymity than about worrying over bots. I'm not giving my ID.ME in order to interact on a games forum, for instance. The better way to address this (if these people actually cared about it) is to force companies to disclose with commenters are being operated via bots. Many websites have API's so that would eliminate many of them, even if it's not perfect.
5. This execution sounds awful. On a general principle, I do not want people sued over state laws that they do not reside in. Why should California need to comply with Floridian laws? This is why porn sites impacted simply block those state IP's. The Internet is more and more connected, so you can imagine the chaos is this is generalized more, instead of actually taking hold and making federal laws. This is half hearted.
One response to flaws in the law is to oppose them. Another response is to find common ground and embrace and extend.
It won't harm anything. Even now as these things spread nationwide something like Stripe or whatever will pop up and fill the need as a service. It used to be essentially universally required to prove your age using a credit card. There was/is a company that specializes in that. I can't remember its name but it was ubiquitous for porn access for quite a long time. Those over 18 confirmation banners used to be much stronger than the merely souped up cookie notices they have become today. Age verification as a service is trivial (particularly with the rise of phones) and someone will build a system that does a much better job preserving anonymity than credit cards ever did. At this point all you need is something like a passkey or FIDO token and a way for something to vouch age during account creation.
The article concludes that age verification must repeat every 60 minutes. And when there’s doubt about safe harbor, better safe than sorry. There’s a chance you’ll look back at captchas with relish.
> Just in time for the Fourth of July, last week the Supreme Court effectively nullified the First Amendment for any writers, like me, who include sex scenes in their writing, *intended for other adults*
There you have it. The author already is self-aware of the appropriateness of their creation for minors.
All that's needed is an easy way for the author to click "intended for adults" on whatever material they are creating and the entire article becomes nothing more than yapping into the wind.
Substack can easily build that as a feature for example. Reddit already has that with its "NSFW" flags (but does not currently verify accounts are actually 18yo+ adult humans).
Generally, it seems like silicon valley has become so entitled to taking the mile that the threat of taking back an inch brings out the hysterical Chicken Little fursona.
Substack and Reddit are huge websites. What you’re talking about kills self-hosting. Ironically, your idea for regulating this reinforces the VC-driven Silicon Valley capital-intensive model and kills independent, community driven low/no-capital websites.
Nuclear thermal was killed for pretty good reasons, one of which is the focus on nuclear-electric instead, which is better for this mission (along with a strong push by a refueled chemical stage in high Earth orbit).
This is just untrue, and you’ve provided no citation, either.
The silicon gates in GPUs just don’t wear out like that, not at that timescale. The only thing that sort of does is SSDs (and that’s a write limit, which has existed for decades, not a new thing).
Electromigration tends to get worse with small sizes but also higher voltage and temperatures. I could see a GPU wearing out that quickly if it were overclocked enough, but stock consumer GPUs will last much longer than that.
since electromigration is basically a matter of long, high-current interconnect, I guess I have been assuming it's merely designed around. By, for instance, having hundreds of power and ground pins, implying quite a robust on-chip distribution mesh, rather than a few high-current runs.
Wouldnt it depend on work loads? My GPU that kicks into high gear for maybe 2-3 hours a week will probably do decades of use before chip degradation kicks in. The power capacitors will give out long before the silicon does.
But it someone is running an LLM 24 hours a day, might not go for as long.
We are flying blind, both on those claiming short life span and those who are not.
You need less batteries in orbit than on the ground since you're only in shade for at most like 40 minutes. And it's all far more predictable.
Cooling isn't actually any more difficult than on Earth. You use large radiators and radiate to deep space. The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays. "Oh but thermos bottles--" thermos bottles use a very low emissivity coating. Space radiators use a high emissivity coating. Literally every satellite manages to deal with heat rejection just fine, and with radiators (if needed) much smaller than the solar arrays.
Latency is potentially an issue if in a high orbit, but in LEO can be very small.
Equipment upgrades and maintenance is impossible? Literally, what is ISS, where this is done all the time?
Radiation shielding isn't free, but it's not necessarily that expensive either.
Orbital maintainence is not a serious problem with low cost launch.
The upside is effectively unlimited energy. No other place can give you terawatts of power. At that scale, this can be cheaper than terrestrially.
> The radiators are much smaller than the solar arrays.
Modern solar panels are way more efficient than the ancient ones in ISS, at least 10x. The cooling radiators are smaller than solar panels because they are stacked and therefore effectively 5x efficient.
Unless there are at least 2x performance improvements on the cooling system, the cooling system would have to be larger than solar panels in a modern deployment.
This is false. It’s pretty straightforward to prove using Stefan-Boltzmann. Radiating from both sides at 300K, a square radiator that’s 1 meter on a side emits 920W.
Additionally, you wouldn’t use cutting edge 35% triple junction cells for a space datacenter, you’d use silicon cells like Starlink and ISS use. 22% efficient with 90% full factor, given 1350W/m^2 and thus 270W/m^2, to provide enough power for that radiator you’d need a solar panel 3.4 times as big, and that’s if you were in 24/7 sunshine. If you’re in a low orbit that’s obscured almost half the time, it’s 6-7 times as big.
Why do people keep making these obviously wrong claims when a paragraph of arithmetic shows they’re wrong? Do the math.
No, I mean like you crumple to the ground and cook to death if there isn't someone close enough to grab you within a few minutes. 212F ambient air. Like the inside of a meat smoker, but big enough for humans.
DC's aren't quite there yet, but the hot spots that do occur are enough to cause arc flashes which claim hundreds of lives a year.
It's all contingent on a factor of 100-1000x reduction in launch costs, and a lot of the objections to the idea don't really engage with that concept. That's a cost comparable to air travel (both air freight and passenger travel).
(Especially irritating is the continued assertion that thermal radiation is really hard, and not like something that every satellite already seems to deal with just fine, with a radiator surface much smaller than the solar array.)
It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.
Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.
The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.
The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.
Well sure. If you think fully reusable rockets won’t ever happen, then the datacenter in space thing isn’t viable. But THAT’S where the problem is, not innumerate bullcrap about size of radiators.
(And of course, the mostly reusable Falcon 9 is launching far more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined, launching about 150 times per year. No one yet has managed to field a similarly highly reusable orbital rocket booster since Falcon 9 was first recovered about 10 years ago in 2015).
Space is very bad for the human body, you wouldn't be able to leave the humans there waiting for something to happen like you do on earth, they'd need to be sent from earth every time.
Also, making something suitable for humans means having lots of empty space where the human can walk around (or float around, rather, since we're talking about space).
Underwater welder, though being replaced by drone operator, is still a trade despite the health risks. Do you think nobody on this whole planet would take a space datacenter job on a 3 month rotation?
I agree that it may be best to avoid needing the space and facilities for a human being in the satellite. Fire and forget. Launch it further into space instead of back to earth for a decommission. People can salvage the materials later.
The problem isn't health “risk”, there are risks but there are also health effects that will come with certainty. For instance, low gravity deplete your muscles pretty fast. Spend three month in space and you're not going to walk out of the reentry vehicle.
This effect can be somehow overcome by exercising while in space but it's not perfect even with the insane amount of medical monitoring the guys up there receive.
Good points. Spin “gravity” is also quite challenging to acclimatize to because it’s not uniform like planetary gravity. Lots of nausea and unintuitive gyroscopic effects when moving. It’s definitely not a “just”
Every child on a merry go round experiences it. Every car driving on a curve. And Gemini tested it once as well. It’s a basic feature of physics. Now why NASA hasn’t decided to implement it in decades is actually kind of a mystery.
