I know what—I have an even worse business plan!

[woe2you@beige.party]

@shinydan @cstross HTTP 418.

[emily_s@mastodon.me.uk]

@cstross I mean I've seen the proposals for project Orion. Datacenters in space are dumb but not instantly apocalypticly dumb.

I mean they are apocalypticly dumb, but over a long time scale than a single launch.

[infoseepage@mastodon.social]

@etchedpixels @cstross You might be thinking of Asimov's story Reason, in which the main computer onboard a power beaming station develops religion and a rather skewed view of the universe and the humans are horrified because they're unable to wrest control from the robots who have become disciples of the main computer and if the beam drifts even a little bit it would fry anything it glances over on the surface.

[cinebox@masto.hackers.town]

@cstross nobody wants to invest in my plan to put water treatment plants in orbit.

[zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cstross Okay, let me see if I have a handle on this…

⁃ Musk wants to IPO SpaceX.
⁃ So he wants to merge SpaceX and his AI company, because SpaceX looks better if he can glue in the $N-billion investments that he's getting for AI stuff.
⁃ He shouts “AI datacenters in space!" This has no business or economic meaning; it's just stringing VC buzzwords together for a SpaceX/XAI merger.
⁃ Nvidia says “Sure, boss, we can do you an AI-in-space chip.”

[zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cstross My assumption would be that Nvidia asks for a giant bucket of money and eventually gives Musk an off-the-shelf chip with a “SPAAAACE" sticker on it. But I don't know. The kabuki theater could get deep on both sides.

[wordshaper@weatherishappening.network]

@zarfeblong @cstross Jensen is as much a carnival barker and public bullshitter as Elon, except he's actually competent and doing far fewer drugs. I have no doubt he'll play along with this nonsense as long as it boosts his stock, and as soon as it stops he'll loudly slam the idea to get a second stock bump from his cleverly dodging some stupid.

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@cstross Wait a sec, I'm just going to start up a company to run the cabling for them down to the ground.

[notthelbcguy@mstdn.social]

@zarfeblong @cstross Nvidia will loan SpaceX $10bn in advance customer preferential loans, which SpaceX will turn around and give straight back to Nvidia to fund custom chip development, and both companies together will claim to have added $20bn in shareholder value.

[tubemeister@mstdn.social]

@cstross Special orbital datacenter GPU version.

That's going to be, what, an S3 Virge, to make the power and heat requirements vaguely within cooee of realistic?

[chu@climatejustice.social]

@zarfeblong @cstross

Huang, and the entirety of TW will play along as long as they can to keep the US happy. The Chinese threat is such that they will smile and nod to just about any level of stupidity right now and hang onto what they see as their lifeline of survival.

I don't know how long this can last though.

[gbargoud@masto.nyc]

@cstross

I keep trying to buy access to the output of that one space based fusion reactor but I need the rest of the building to agree to using our rooftop for that

[marcink@stolat.town]

@zarfeblong @cstross Or they tell him that technically all data centers are already in space.

[gyrosgeier@hachyderm.io]

@zarfeblong @cstross also, disrupting the market for solar panels

[redsakana@infosec.exchange]

@zarfeblong I think it's the other way around. SpaceX IPO as-is would be fine, a lot of people want to buy it, they have actual tech, product and revenue. Meanwhile xAI is, even by AI company standards, a piece of shit burning through money and recently also losing quite a few top people with not that much to show for it.

Musk would still like his AI though, so the idea is to have people who want to buy SpaceX subsidize xAI. He is also astroturfing the numbers and pulling strings to get the SpaceX+xAI monstrosity into one of the big indexes so index funds would effectively prop up the price. See yesterday's piece on Alphaville: https://www.ft.com/content/59adbe42-ca30-47f3-9cda-5415945e9368 (registration probably required) @cstross

[mhd@tilde.zone]

@cstross Next we know Big Orange will give up Greenland and lay claim to all possible orbital slots.

[seachaint@masto.hackers.town]

@zarfeblong @cstross Probably it'll have an optimised sleep instruction, given that's what it'll spend most of its time doing because of heat buildup

[zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@redsakana @cstross Hm, I did not think of the other way around. Makes sense though.

I will keep an eye out for financial commentary.

[markgritter@mathstodon.xyz]

@zarfeblong @redsakana @cstross yes, SpaceX is a home for X AI (and X) because it's got revenue and demand already, so it can paper over some of the financial mess. But SpaceX is already way overvalued because launch demand from non-Starlink sources has not picked up, and Starlink while profitable is close to its maximum addressable market already (there are not a billion extra Starlink users to be found.)

I think Patrick Boyle did an OK job walking through it in this video: https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE

The combination of Space and AI keeps retail interest high to try to get into the indexes in an accelerated schedule before reality hits.

[adamrice@c.im]

@zarfeblong @cstross Except that Musk wants to build his own chip fab (with blackjack and hookers (probably literally with blackjack and hookers)), so he’d have no need of Nvidia in his completely baked fantasy world.