API keys were always secrets. They control billing for heaven's sake. If you had any per-call billed APIs (like some of the voice processing APIs) enabled on the project then they're effectively keys to your pocket book. Otherwise they're a key tool to manage denial-of-service attacks.
That happens in times of bullish markets and growing economies. Then we want a lot of SWEs.
In times of uncertainty and things going south, that changes to we need as little SWEs as possible, hence the current narrative, everyone is looking to cut costs.
Had GPT 3 emerged 10-20 years ago, the narrative would be “you can now do 100x more thanks to AI”.
I think you could build a product with it, but you need to carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual engineering work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them together.
In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for any moderately complex piece of software.
Code is also design. It’s a blueprint for the process that is going to do the useful work we want. When something bad happens to the process, we revise its blueprint. And just like blueprint, the docs in natural language shows the why, not the how or the what. The blueprint is the perfect representation of the last two.
It's kind of tricky though because if you want to have a good design, you should be able to do the implementation yourself. You see this with orgs that separate the design and implementation and what messes they create. Having an inability to evaluate the implementation will lead to a bad product.
Unless you're in a dense urban area, the effect of your air conditioners on neighboring houses is negligible. There's so much other thermal reservoirs around (like the ground and plants) as well as circulation from the wind that the extra heat from the air conditioner has only a small effect on the environment.
Compare the volume of your house to the volume of area around your house (including several hundred feet vertically, since that is easily part of the circulation). If you're cooling your house 20 degrees then that would correspond to heating an area 20x the size by 1 degree. How many times bigger is the circulating area around your house (100x? 1000x?)?
It happens often enough that the company I work for has set up a presubmit to check all of the AI generated and AI assisted code for plagiarism (which they call "recitation"). I know they're checking the code for similarity to anything on GitHub, but they could also be checking against the model's their training corpus.
I don't know, 10 years seems reasonable for development. There's not that much new technology that needs to be developed. Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs. Other systems may be able to be lifted wholesale with minimal integration. I think if there were obstacles to building data centers on the ground then we might see them in orbit within the next ten years.
The same things you are saying about data centers in space was said by similar people 10-15 years ago when Elon musk said SpaceX would have a man on Mars in 10-15 years.
We have had the tech to do it since the 90's, we just needed to invest into it.
Same thing with Elon Musks hyperloop, aka the atmospheric train (or vactrain) which has been an idea since 1799! And how far has Elon Musks boring company come to building even a test loop?
Yeah, in theory you could build a data center in space. But unless you have a background in the limitations of space engineering/design brings, you don't truly understand what you are saying. A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station. So by saying Elon musk can reasonable achieve this, is wild to anyone who has done any engineering work with space based tech. Every solar panel generates heat, the racks generate heat, the data communication system generates, heat... Every kW of power generated and every kW of power consumes needs a radiator. And it's not like water cooling, you are trying to radiate heat off into a vacuum. That is a technical challenge and size, the amount of tons to orbit needed to do this... Let alone outside of low earth... Its a moonshot project for sure. And like I said above, Elon musk hasnt really followed through with any of his moonshots.
> A single AI data center server rack takes up the same energy load of 0.3 to 1 international space station.
The ISS is powered by eight Solar Array Wings. Each wing weighs about 1,050kg. The station also has two radiator wings with three radiator orbital replacement units weighing about 1,100kg each. That's about 15,000 kg total so if the ISS can power three racks, that's 5,000kg of payload per rack not including the rack or any other support structure, shielding, heat distribution like heat pipes, and so on.
Assuming a Falcon Heavy with 60,000 kg payload, that's 12 racks launched for about $100 million. That's basically tripling or quadrupling (at least) the cost of each rack, assuming that's the only extra cost and there's zero maintenance.
Falcon Heavy does not cost 100M when launching 60 metric tons.
At 60 metric tons, you're expending all cores and only getting to LEO. These probably shouldn't be in LEO because they don't need to be and you probably don't want to be expending cores for these launches if you care about cost.
The real problem typically isn't weight, it's volume. Can you fit all of that in that fairing? It's onli 13m long by 5m diameter...
His time estimates are notoriously, um, aggressive. But I think that's part of how his companies are able to accomplish so much. And they do, even if you're upset they haven't put a human on Mars fast enough or built one of his side quests.
"We specialize in making the impossible merely late"
I note that their accomplishments tend to be in the past, prior to his Twitter addiction absorbing his attention. Tesla is a solid decade late on FSD, cutting models, and losing market share rapidly thanks to his influencer stunts. SpaceX has a solid government launch business, which is great, but they’ve been struggling with what’s been the next big thing for a while and none of that talk about Mars has made meaningful progress. Boring Company, Neurolink, etc. show no signs of profit anytime soon no matter how cool they sound.
Being ambitious is good to an extent but you need to be able to deliver to keep a company healthy. Right now, if you’re a sharp engineer you are looking at Tesla’s competition if you want to work on a project which doesn’t get cancelled (like it’s cars) and the stock price being hyped to the moon means that options aren’t going to be as competitive.
> Cooling and communications would just require minor changes to existing designs.
"Minor" cooling changes, for a radically different operating environment that does not even have a temperature, is a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and will actively heat things up via incoming radiation? "Minor" ? Citation very much lacking.
Then you picked the wrong thread to insert yourself, it's literally about that.
Which is funny, there are multiple other replies to you, explaining at length that while your ideas are physically possible, they are completely impractical. And yet you think they still could be "minor".
I do say it's predicated on cheap orbital launch. Clearly they expect Starship to deliver, and they're "skating to where the puck will be" on overall system cost per unit of compute.
But yeah, I didn't include that delivering all that stuff by truck (including all the personnel) to a terrestrial PV site isn't free either.
Investment real estate ruined the housing market. All of a sudden housing prices are expected to grow year over year as an investment. As more and more growth expectations were applied to housing, public policy (including zoning) changed to protect those expectations. Is it any surprise that there came a point at which it became too expensive?
Once problem we need to solve is how to unwind housing prices without financially ruining honeowners whose house is their primary/only wealth. Of course this problem is even more severe in areas of the country that are becoming uninhabitable due to changes in climate as it drives down demand.
Are you disagreeing with the parent post or agreeing with them? I first read your comment as if it was disagreeing with them but then noticed the parenthetical "(as well as US bond holders)" in your comment, which seems to support parent's position.
I work for a company that does some work on Internet advertising and one of the main issues that came up when we discussed supporting smart TV platforms was how we could protect our proprietary advertising audience data while still showing ads on these devices. Knowing what ads we show the user tells them what the user is interested in, which is valuable information for our competitors.
Unfortunately, we were not able to solve that problem, and instead to just use lower fidelity user models for advertising on smart TVs. That makes smart TV ads less valuable, but allows us to keep our competitive advantage on desktop and mobile.
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