Even if you don't have an hour to spare, go watch this talk by @pluralistic
EVERYONE should watch this.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
John Leonard
Tech journo interested in technological evolution and the way tech is changing the world - and us. Searchable tfr
Also #crapjokes #guitars #cycling #dogs #cats #etcetera #etc
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A post which, in its brutally simple message, lays waste to whatever it is that Donald Trump stands for.
"You'd think the Constitution was barely 15 years old, given how hard Trump’s trying to fuck it."
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Happy holidays, fediverse!
I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.
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Seems like a good day to remind everyone that Trump has sued over jokes, tweets, interviews, and news articles but not once over any of the countless accusations of child rape. — That silence says everything.
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they are idiots...
you can copy and paste the text from some of the epstein files to unredact it...
absolute idiots...
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The 2025 Headline of the Year Nominees
🧵
A 2006 contract between the Post Office and Fujitsu shows that both parties were aware of bugs in the Fujitsu’s Horizon accounting software, and also that Fujitsu could take control over the system, contradicting statements by the Post Office in its action against hundreds of sub-postmasters accused of fraud, some of whom took their own lives.
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Good god
“At least six career staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were suspended with pay this summer after organizing a polygraph test that the agency’s acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala, failed.”
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Pigs in Spaaaace!
The AI bubble has been kept inflated by journalists uncritically reporting whatever CEOs say as they frantically pump the stock. Right now, you can observe a wonderful example of this by searching the Web for "orbital data centers". My recent search turned up pages of links, including SpaceX’s Lofty IPO Valuation Hinges on Big Bet on Outsize Growth from Bloomberg's Bailey Lipschultz, Sana Pashankar, and Loren Grush:
A couple of weeks ago an anonymous engineer posted Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea:
Steven Clark reports that Investors commit quarter-billion dollars to startup designing “Giga” satellites:
Starcloud's "5GW" satellite could power over 8000 2027 Nvidia racks in 2035 but it would be 50,000 times larger than a satellite that is much larger than one "on par with the largest satellites that have ever been produced".
The next question is "How many racks does one data center hold?" Yasir Shinaishin of ABB wrote in New Strategies in Design to Meet the Demands of AI Data Centers:
Source But the useful life of the racks in earth-bound data centers is less that 5 years. In space the chips are subject to high levels of radiation, which as the anonymous engineer explains, is bad news:
That is not to mention that they will be burning vast amounts of fuel and burning up more than 5 huge satellites a day in the upper atmosphere, which would cause vastly more pollution and damage to the ozone layer than described in Global 3D rocket launch and re-entry air pollutant and CO2 emissions at the onset of the megaconstellation era by Barker et al or Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery by Revell et al.
Thiele et al Fig. 2
But even that isn't the biggest problem. In An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions Thiele et al show that we are close to the Kessler syndrome:
What are these investors smoking?
To buy into SpaceX’s audacious $1.5 trillion valuation in a listing next year, investors will need to have faith in Elon Musk’s equally galactic vision for his rocket and satellite maker, from orbital data centers to lunar factories to human settlements on Mars.I chose one that ought to be more credible than Musk from Scientific American. Jeremy Hsu's Data Centers in Space Aren’t as Wild as They Sound reports that:
In early November Google announced Project Suncatcher, which aims to launch solar-powered satellite constellations carrying its specialty AI chips, with a demonstration mission planned for 2027. Around the same time, the start-up Starcloud celebrated the launch of a 60-kilogram satellite with an NVIDIA H100 GPU as a prelude to an orbital data center that is expected to require five gigawatts of electric power by 2035.To do Hsu justice, he did point out a few of the problems. But follow me below the fold for more.
A couple of weeks ago an anonymous engineer posted Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea:
In the interests of clarity, I am a former NASA engineer/scientist with a PhD in space electronics. I also worked at Google for 10 years, in various parts of the company including YouTube and the bit of Cloud responsible for deploying AI capacity, so I'm quite well placed to have an opinion here.You should absolutely read the whole thing, it is magnificent. I don't have this background, but I don't need it to know that they are a terrible idea. All I need is arithmetic.
The short version: this is an absolutely terrible idea, and really makes zero sense whatsoever. There are multiple reasons for this, but they all amount to saying that the kind of electronics needed to make a datacenter work, particularly a datacenter deploying AI capacity in the form of GPUs and TPUs, is exactly the opposite of what works in space. If you've not worked specifically in this area before, I'll caution against making gut assumptions, because the reality of making space hardware actually function in space is not necessarily intuitively obvious.
Steven Clark reports that Investors commit quarter-billion dollars to startup designing “Giga” satellites:
K2 is designing two classes of satellites—Mega and Giga .... The company’s first “Mega Class” satellite is named Gravitas. Gravitas will also deploy twin solar arrays capable of generating 20 kilowatts of power.Gravitas can launch on a Falcon 9, but Giga-class satellites need Starship. In Power: The answer to and source of all your AI datacenter problems Tobias Mann reports that:
...
K2 says Gravitas is “on par with the largest satellites that have ever been produced.” But K2 won’t stop there. The firm’s next satellite iteration, known as Giga, .... Underpinning Giga is its ability to generate up to 100 kilowatts of power per satellite ... Examples of missions Giga can support include AI computing
Today, Nvidia's rack systems are hovering around 140kW in compute capacity. But we've yet to reach a limit. By 2027, Nvidia plans to launch 600kW racks which pack 576 GPU dies into the space once occupied by just 32.So the largest satellites ever can power 14% of a current Nvidia rack. The next generation that requires Starship to launch can power 70% of a current Nvidia rack. By the time they can launch it, it will power 17% of a contemporary Nvidia rack. See, progress!
Starcloud's "5GW" satellite could power over 8000 2027 Nvidia racks in 2035 but it would be 50,000 times larger than a satellite that is much larger than one "on par with the largest satellites that have ever been produced".
The next question is "How many racks does one data center hold?" Yasir Shinaishin of ABB wrote in New Strategies in Design to Meet the Demands of AI Data Centers:
It is not uncommon to see data centers of 1 GW with liquid-cooled racks with densities over 100 kW.Say 7,000 current Nvidia racks. So they need 10,000 Giga-class satellites to match one 2025 data center. Lets say they start launching in 2027 and launch 100 satellites/year. They can match one 2025 data center in 2127. Maybe the AI bubble will have burst by then...
Source But the useful life of the racks in earth-bound data centers is less that 5 years. In space the chips are subject to high levels of radiation, which as the anonymous engineer explains, is bad news:
For longer duration missions, which would be the case with space based datacenters because they would be so expensive that they would have to fly for a long time in order to be economically viable, it's also necessary to consider total dose effects. Over time, the performance of chips in space degrades, because repeated particle impacts make the tiny field-effect transistors switch more slowly and turn on and off less completely. In practice, this causes maximum viable clock rates to decay over time, and for power consumption to increase.But lets ignore that and asume a useful life of 5 years. Thus to keep one 2025 data center operating in space they need to launch 2000 enormous satellites per year, or over 5 per day. It is true that solar power in space is free, but launches aren't. Adding the cost of 10,000 launches to the cost of replacing the 60% of the cost of the data center that is the racks is going to make the already impossible economics of AI orders of magnitude worse.
That is not to mention that they will be burning vast amounts of fuel and burning up more than 5 huge satellites a day in the upper atmosphere, which would cause vastly more pollution and damage to the ozone layer than described in Global 3D rocket launch and re-entry air pollutant and CO2 emissions at the onset of the megaconstellation era by Barker et al or Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery by Revell et al.
Thiele et al Fig. 2
But even that isn't the biggest problem. In An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions Thiele et al show that we are close to the Kessler syndrome:
Here we propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the time it takes for a catastrophic collision to occur if there are no collision avoidance manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 2.8 days, which suggests there is now little time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 121 days.Co-author Prof. Lawler wrote:
One of the scariest parts of this project was learning more about Starlink's orbital operations. I had always assumed they had some kind of clever configuration of the satellites in the orbital shell that minimized conjunctions, and we would see the number of conjunctions grow over time in our simulations. But no! It's just random! There's no magic here, it's just avoiding collisions by moving a Starlink satellite every 2 minutes. This is bad.Even if we haven't rendered low earth orbit unusable in the next few years, a constellation of 10,000 huge satellites in low earth orbit would rapidly self-destruct and guarantee humanity lost access to space.
What are these investors smoking?
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To spell this out clearly, the reason RAM has quadrupled in price is that a huge quantity of RAM that hasn't been produced yet has been bought with money that doesn't exist to populate GPUs that also haven't been produced to go in datacenters that haven't been built powered by infrastructure that may never exist to meet a demand that doesn't exist at all to make profit margins that mathematically can't exist while economists talk about this thing they call the "rational markets hypothesis".
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Check out the anomalous warmth across the #Arctic and #Antarctic over the last three months. And actually, all latitude bands averaged unusually warm too.
Plot shows zonal-mean temperature anomalies, where latitude = y-axis (not scaled by distance). GISTEMPv4 data using their 1951-1980 baseline.
@Hansonthebike I was franky incensed
Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at Japan’s oddly retro (to Western eyes) websites, China’s reverse engineering of top-spec chipmaking equipment and North Korea’s ill-gotten crypto hoard.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/japan-s-weird-websites-asian-tech-roundup
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I understand the urge to pretend Xitter doesn’t exist, but it does exist. And you all need to know just how much toxic nonsense is being broadcast to millions every day. It’s carpet bombing the world with MAGA bullshit every hour of every day. THIS IS JUST 3 MINUTES of the home feed. Many of the same actors like “Gunther” are repeated dozens of time an hour (I follow none of them. They are forced into my timeline.) This kind of relentless propaganda can, does and will to impact far 1/2
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The European Commission lost the Chat Control 2.0 battle over access to end-to-end encrypted data. By the summer 2026, they will be back with their next attempt: Going Dark. This time some EU member states want to include VPN services.
The Going Dark initiative, or ProtectEU as the Commission now calls it, wants to “enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner”. This is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt.
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John Leonard boosted:
McDonald’s USA
— Employee: $15/hr, no benefits
— Big Mac: $5.79
McDonald’s Denmark
— Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension
— Big Mac: $5.49
Tell us more about how raising the minimum wage would affect the cost of hamburgers.
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Thames Water is not having a good day. In fact it's having a shit day.
#ThamesWater
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/edm-map
@jim_easterbrook @robtherunt Hive-mind to the rescue!
@jim_easterbrook https://www.hive.co.uk/Help/Delivery last first class delivery 20 December.
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