Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
"Guys with guns" can be found to work for pretty much anyone willing to pay them. Organizations don't struggle to recruit hired guns for organisations that are illegal or regarded by much of the public as akin to the Gestapo, they're not going to collectively boycott guarding buildings housing the cute little chatbot on their phone out of social impact concerns.
People are how and why things work at all. Wealth hoarders obsessively try to eliminate "the human element" because people are also going to turn on you when you mistreat them long enough. Given that we're already talking about space-based data centers, economic efficiency has long gone out the window as a justification for the "need" to remove humans from the equation.
The problem is that try as they might, you can't have it both ways: society requires people cooperating in order to maintain the systems they take for granted but at the same time they do everything to disrupt cooperation and to isolate themselves from people because people have every reason to hate their guts.
It's the ultimate "anarcho-capitalist" folly: in order to enforce a vastly disproportionate property claim (i.e. significantly more than your "fair share" by many orders of magnitude) you need to be able to maintain a vastly disproportionate threat of violence (i.e. significantly more than you could physically deal out yourself by many orders of magnitude) but at this kind of scale the only way to do so requires you to rely on other people (because at some point even carrying around a nuclear warhead with a dead man switch would no longer be a sufficient deterrent) - states exist to solve exactly this problem (among other things) but they still rely on people cooperating. Even "transhumanism" doesn't solve the problem unless you go the Peter Thiel route and see the end of all human life as a possibly necessary part of the process.
EDIT: To pivot back on-topic: guys with guns may not be an acceptable part of the solution for some companies but they can very much be part of the problem. And considering what Iran and the Houthis (or Ukraine for that matter) have been demonstrating, sometimes even guys with very basic explosives and consumer grade electronics can be enough.
Container ships on popular routes. But they can be sent out to the middle of nowhere and they would be pretty safe I assume. Also, you may be able to just sink the datacenter's core part and only tether a few solar panels to it (or go nuclear). That way the target is minuscule, you get free cooling and even state-level attacks will have a hard time finding/damaging your data center.
If you can live with two seats, Porsche seems to have finally greenlighted production of the electric Boxster/Cayman. I believe that platform will be shared with Audi to make a lower-cost offering available.
The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.
The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.
So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.
It's like African geopolitics. The US comes to some African country and gives them a lecture about fiscal responsibility (mostly involving ways they get give America all their money). China comes to the same country and gives them roads and a power plant. America complains that China is exploiting African countries.
In my experience, some students are using AI to write code, but then have no idea what's going on. The "skill" of typing "Write a function to do [basic thing]" will not make them AI-native or help them in the workplace.
How many of them can read x64 or ARM assembly emitted by their compilers?
It’s how I deeply understand what a RAM lookup vs having it already in a register means for optimization.
Me, too, but we should both understand what we're talking about: a hobby.
It's like teaching cursive to schoolkids. All well and good, but don't you dare complain about limited classroom time for instruction in other, more important subjects.
Understanding how computer architecture works is a hobby? Is unimportant?
I built and deployed embedded systems robotics that protect water and oil pipeline infrastructure that costs billions of dollars if there is a failure.
That is not a hobby, that’s a career.
The tools I built just helped fix the fresh water access for my entire city of 2 million people. Explain to me what’s more important than people having access to water.
That's great, you sound proud of your work and you should be. But what about all the human pipeline-inspection crews you've put out of work with your robots?
That is a different matter. And you are probably wrong here as well. Plenty of people care about a program doing exactly what they want. Nothing more, nothing less. If not every one would have been writing programs in Ruby (not that Ruby is non-deterministic) .
AI is not an abstraction layer. If you work entirely on the level of prompting without any knowledge or understanding of the underlying code, you are not actually an engineer, but more of a half-assed technical manager. (And your job will be first on the chopping block.)
It's not a """free market""" when a company is able to use a government-granted and -enforced monopoly to keep people locked into the company's proprietary app store.
Engineering is the use of mathematics to turn science into technology. Statistics is mathematics, comp sci is science, and technology is the end product.
So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.
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