Don't you think it's a _bit_ ignorant thinking the engineers at now several companies known for their genius didn't think of it? There's a meme for this kind of armchair drive-by commenting.
And the preliminary design shapes aren't unknown. They just have huge ass solar panels and radiators. Plenty of space in ... space.
Literally no one is saying it’s impossible. You claimed it’s not impractical, which is totally different. And yes, as of now, and likely for years to come, launching huge ass panels and radiators into space for data centers is going to be economically impractical, as compared with building the same amount of capacity on earth.
And why haven’t these genius engineers delivered on basically any of Musk’s promises on time? Or at all, in many cases?
You have the entirely wrong impression of people here. TONS of people are saying exactly that, and trying to disqualify the whole debate.
>likely for years to come
Starship is putting its first business payload to orbit in two days. The craft represents making mass to orbit magnitude(s) cheaper. Read the text on your side mirrors.
>any of Musk’s promises on time
I find this argument so frivolous. Ok, so they've made what was considered impossible, _late_ on a few occasions? And they visibly iterate, showing failure, as if it makes them somehow worse?
It does kind of sound like you are not the engineering type, or at least don't work with actual hard problems.
The smartest people are still geniuses and the smartest even if they're late, while no one else is ahead of them.
> The only reason I see in putting those things in space is to do illegal things.
Consider a global human population, fractured into historically formed nations and power blocs. Consider corruption and clans taking up a fraction of positions of power at a certain duty cycle. It's unavoidable legislative bodies would eventually abuse control of technology, for those points in time yes, doing the right thing becomes doing the illegal thing, but only because corruption attained such powers.
> Otherwise the economies do not make sense.
The economics at what scale? At scales of earthly compute, earth is cheaper and more maintainable. At stellar scale, the power simply isn't available on Earth, so the most economic path is whatever is the most economic space ML datacenter path.
What the heck are you talking about? Basic grounding problem: who the god damn hell is going to be buying your AI compute from space if the situation on Earth has deteriorated that much? You know that place where 100% of your customers and the hostile legislative bodies would be.
Storage access isn’t, though. You have to read every byte of a (non-sorted) file to find words in it. And whether it’s disk or RAM, the bandwidth is usually a key constraint.
That’ll be just as true for an ASIC NN as it is for good ole grep.
When storage bandwidth is a big enough problem, that will get addressed.
NVMe v1 wasn't released until 2011 and there was no hardware available until 2012. Before that the fastest drive interface was 6 Gbps SAS. Then we got 4 GBps (32 Gbps) with NVMe v3, 8 Gbps (64 GBps) with v4, and 16 Gbps (128 Gbps) with v5. V6 is slated to double again. v7 is currently planned to double that. This is less than 15 years of progress.
In the 1990s, we went from 33 Mbps to 66, to 100, then 133 with IDE. We went from the 40 Mbps of 1986's SCSI 1 to 80 of SCSI 2 in 1994. Since then parallel SCSI has gone to 80, 160, 320, 640 (Ultra 2 wide), 1280 (Ultra 3), 2560 (Ultra-320), and 5120 (Ultra-640) Mbps.
SAS has also gotten faster, with 6 Gbps, 12 Gbps, and 22.5 Gbps. NVMe is still lower overhead and lower latency.
Memory bandwidth can also be addressed. Stock servers with EPYC are 16 channel DDR5. That's 409.6 GBps. Four channels of DDR3 was only 102.4 GBps. Video and accelerator card memory bandwidth is also increasing.
Sometimes cars crash, but per car there were only a handful of casualties.
Sometimes airplanes crash and per event there were many casualties, which makes it high profile.
While car crashes are often analyzed amateurishly, and little to no attempt is made in exact accounting of responsibilities, for traffic participants X,Y (or Z) and very seldom in the local road regulator / maintainers. If shared liability can't be proven because no one attempts listing all possible contributors, little to no feedback occurs.
When an airplane crashes, every potential contributing facet results in mandatory changes (perhaps this facet did or did not contribute, but we now realize this facet could have contributed now and hence could contribute to similar situations in the future, constantly improving safety (every 'needless' sharing of liability acts like a warning mechanism for relevant subsystems).
One could argue the road incidents should receive similar treatment, so that even if the bulk of responsibility ends up misplaced by the legal system, it still permits forcing feedback on all involved parties.
I think multimillion dollar missiles hitting a children's school with similar numbers of casualties as an airplane crash deserves the kind of treatment airplanes receive.
If that is the case, then we should treat all parties as potentially sharing liability:
The current administration for disbanding the organization that used to double check the targets.
But also the Iranian regime which re allocated a building on a military compound for housing of all possibilities, children, think of the statutes of Rome forbidding the use of human shields.
But also -and nobody wants to hear this- the international community which sets international law, both international peacetime laws as well as international rules of war: why don't we as an international community require every nation to maintain public signed whitelists of civilian facilities (like children-age schools). Quid pro quo: allegations by any nation A of non-civilian use of whitelisted sites declared purely civilian by nation C should force nation C to allow an international consortium, including nation A to inspect said site, to check its not being used as a human shield.
Perhaps the international community needs to look into the mirror and think how we could prevent these situations in the future given everything we know today, instead of just choosing your favorite scape goat in a specific story...
I believe boring solutions like contestable whitelists could prevent this:
either Iran would have preferred whitelisting the school long in advance according to such international law, but then tolerate inspections which may uncover say military use, or it would have kept the facility secret but under such international law it would have a hard time explaining how a children's school popped up out of nowhere on a targetted site without ever declaring it on the whitelist
Doing a RAM swap and then selling the resulting unit as if it were a Raspberry Pi of the higher RAM capacity might be construed as trademark infringement[0]. And in general it's fairly difficult to make arguments in antitrust cases that boil down to "yes, your honor, everything they're doing is within their rights but I don't like it".
[0] At the same time, the scammers could probably get away with this by putting "Upgraded to 16GB!" in the title of their eBay listings or whatever, in the same way that fraudulent storage devices are labeled as "upgraded" (read: lying about their capacity). That doesn't impact the antitrust analysis though.
I certainly agree that such a reseller should clearly state the modification, and not pretend its an authentic RPi 8GB unit.
But if this is the real concern, they could just display the fact that "Unoriginal RAM detected" to inform the user its not a vanilla RPi Foundation product, so buyers understand the situation, but continue booting normally.
For every user asking questions and facing issues for such-or-such firmware or software support they need in their projects, that same user would have appeared regardless if their Pi came from RP directly or through a reseller.
Every board sold would have been an extra user, the reseller isn't adding full users (although they may increase the indirect customer base!), so even gaining a user through a reseller increases the amortization divider for the support burden.
Now lets consider RAM chip support burden, the original Pi RAM chips can have issues generating support burden, and so can the reseller RAM chips. Unless RP foundation refuses to upstream link training / RAM bringup patches from resellers, there is no real additional support burden.
In fact if RP were a little more creative, they could have tried contacting the resellers to explain they can continue their modding business as long as they advertise it clearly as modified, and to inform them they will be receiving units that didn't pass the RAM tests from the automated lines, since they're going to desolder the chips anyway, this can save costs for RP foundation.
in those jurisdictions where either price discrimination or locking hardware are not illegal, it is typically perfectly legal to reverse engineer for compatibility purposes. So nothing prevents such resellers from upping their game and learning a thing or two about link training and general SDRAM bringup.
Once they have acquired the knowledge legally in such jurisdictions the product just flows in the other jurisdictions anyway.
Courts upheld the monopolistic position of microsoft etc. for decades, but respect has no finality, "re" + "spect" to review, so later such companies were fined for their decades long transgressions.
But during those decades it may appear legal to the average consumer.
All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
> All of this is pretty irrelevant from a legal perspective.
> Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
I'm not asking for help to figure this out, and of course RP is allowed to shoot themselves in any foot they like.
Consider Europe where such reverse engineering is perfectly legal for compatibility purposes. Let's consider an idealized scenario, there were no security bugs or other issues with the product that would justify reverse engineering RP blobs in public. When they do something like this, they are GIVING CARTE BLANCHE to public reverse engineering efforts to attain compatibility with other RAM chips. Why would you provide legal cover in some jurisdictions for others in publicly reverse engineering your own products by introducing artificial incompatibility?
Also from a consumer perspective, RP tries to place itself front and center in maker communties, emphasizing modularity, not just hobbyists, also companies build and design end products using RP units. All of these companies must now be wondering where RP Foundations exact red line resides: can we resell an RP board in a Kiosk we made? or only for as long as it doesn't compete with RP's future Kiosk modules? Today its the RAM upgrade, but tomorrow RP modules may refuse to boot some popular Kiosk hardware intentionally. What prevents RP Foundation from eventually "not copying" end-application hardware like a Kiosk design from their customers, and then enforcing compatibility only with RP Kiosks?
So not only are they providing legal cover for public reverse engineering efforts, they are scaring part of their customer base.
> There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
That's a very shallow interpretation of law, looking only at what RP is or isn't allowed to do.
There's generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like reverse engineering for compatibility or security applications illegal either.
The part replacement isn't being blocked? The OP's CM5 with replaced RAM is still a working CM5 according to him. And fully functional compared to before the replacement.
"Each chip is programmed with the timing settings and storage size settings of just the RAM we ship it with, and doesn't know how to boot with anything else." I don't know if you could call that "blocking." I mean you could call it that but I don't know if that's legally what it would be.
So European institution following this discussion would be wise to ASAP formally request RP Foundation to describe it either as a blocking security mechanism, or just a compatibility issue.
Between current inaction and eventual action, it settles the position of RP foundation, so they can't switch back and forth between "these people are circumventing security" vs "its just an unintended incompatibility", as long as they don't reveal their position its neither here nor there.
>This sounds insightful until you find yourself debating with the CEO for the eleventh time about how his high-school understanding of the physics involved breaks down in a particular case.
> ... This is just a list of someone's ideas for equivalently difficult (and transformative) unsolved problems in biology. ...
I think GP was saying the proof of the pudding is in the tasting: the longer a problem has provably resisted resolution the more difficult it is considered...
bombastically decorating a problem as equivalently difficult does not make it so.
Well, if LLMs actually turn out to solve some of the Millennium problems, at least some of these biology problems are almost certainly at least as difficult. Certainly solving any of them would be Nobel-worthy if biology nobels existed (and solving some of them would likely easily be worthy of a medicine Nobel). It's not like these are new problems whose difficulty is unknown!
The Millenium Prize problems didn't only withstand decades/century of resolution, they also withstood the same test of time in ridicule of the challenge statement.
This list of "Millenium Problems for Biology" contains such brainfart level "analogies" that there the list will be ridiculed, for the question / challenge itself displays a lack of understanding of the subject in question. Science is also asking the right questions.
Consider for example:
> 10. Protein Amplification Chain Reaction:
> Demonstrate exponential amplification of arbitrary peptide substrates.
> Specifically, demonstrate input-protein-dependent synthesis of new, full-length, sequence-faithful covalent polypeptide copies from amino-acid monomers without a nucleic-acid template or preformed cognate scaffold, in a single pot reaction. For the challenge to be considered complete, at least 100 random peptide sequences of at least 50 amino acids each must be preregistered, synthesized, and pooled. It must then be shown that the abundance of these peptides in solution can be amplified at least 1000x with at least 90% sequence accuracy on a per-residue basis. Reasonable modifications may be added to the peptide sequences to facilitate post-amplification analysis if necessary, provided they are not active in the amplification. Methods that rely on explicit sequencing of the peptide are not permitted. Methods that rely on reverse translation to generate a nucleic acid intermediate are not permitted, because they are duplicative with a separate Millennium Problem.
The analogy is very clear: to amplify DNA or RNA one uses PCR, basically throw the desired product in a cauldron with monomer building blocks, then by repeated heating and cooling the lone monomers find their permitted locations on a complementary pre-existing strand, and form the new polymer strand.
So it seems natural to ask for a generalization to protein polymers, except every biologist or chemist knows its nonsense: proteins don't have a complementary strand! You can't demand chemistry or physics to magically copy without a complementary template!
You may ask "but if that were true, how can we already have PCR for RNA?"
Well pretty simple: while this is done routinely, its only possible indirectly: convert the RNA to double-strand DNA, use PCR on this DNA and then convert the amplified DNA back to RNA!
The demand to not involve sequencing or the hypothetical reverse translatase from one of the other problem statements turns this one into a non-existence theorem, but the challenge doesn't describe a winner for demonstrating its impossibility!
I assure you that any chemist or biologist being asked why we dont have PCR for protein, will understand your lack of knowledge, and explain how PCR works, so that you understand that PCR was only possible because of the complementary strand!
This list will be ridiculed for being not even wrong.
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