octoberfranklin

The energy needed to achieve orbital altitude is vastly less than the energy needed to reach orbit. About 1kg of rocket fuel will carry a small explosive and some tiny steel spheres to LEO altitude. The projectile will not be in orbit; it won't have escape velocity -- in fact it will briefly hit zero velocity (wrt the earth) at orbital altitude and then fall back to earth.

The very large cloud of shrapnel created will encompass LEO orbital height for several seconds. If an orbiting datacenter passes through the cloud during those seconds, the shrapnel will be moving at orbital velocity wrt the datacenter. In other words, just one piece will take it out.

With relatively simple rocketry (and, these days, an abliterated LLM to aid you) a dedicated luddite would have several opportunities per day to hit one of a constellation of satellites. If they wanted one very specific satellite they'd have one or two chances a year. The targeting and steering is not hard -- the orbital paths are publicly known and easily observable; you can use RF time-of-flight to implement exceptionally precise position/altitude/velocity measurements from the rocket (no need for GPS -- use your own transmitters on the ground). This is not hard. And it will only get easier as AI advances.

*I strongly discourage anybody reading this from doing the above.*

I'm posting it in order to show people that anti-sabotage is absolutely not a selling point for orbital datacenters. If anything, they are far more vulnerable to luddite attacks. The people channelling billions into this tech know this too. So their motive is something else. I don't know what, but it isn't this. The math doesn't work.

Status 403 Trace ID 0HNQ10T1IEVBA:000001B6

Terminals work so well because there's a huge frictional cost to adding to the protocol. That's what keeps the protocol simple, which is what keeps multiple implementations feasible. Unlike the web, where unless you have GoogleBux you can't afford to implement it properly.

When you book through expedia, you pay expedia and expedia pays the hotel.

and I don't get the sense that I'm treated resentfully at any of those properties.

Depends how full the hotel is (expected to be that night) and whether you have status with that hotel. When I used to use discount booking services it was always first floor facing the parking lot.

Mounting the HBM on the interposer has to happen before putting the interposer in the package.

So it's the "must be in-package" yield tests that drive this.

Almost worth the time I wasted reading through the steaming pile of trash that all the other comments on this story are...

Unless you want to claim that all your assets eventually become retirement assets... but then it's vacuous.

Musk is also very "out" about it. Kinda like how it's okay to be gay in the CIA, as long as you're out. Being in the closet gets you fired because it makes you blackmailable.

The hotels hate expedia but they can't opt out of it so they just degrade the product that is offered at expedia's discount rate -- and they degrade it in a way that expedia can't force them to stop (room assignment is always done at checkin).

Buy a shitton of these things, spend a year working on the unlock. If you find one, sell the shitton at 5x higher price (which is what happened).

That's why this works. The yield on those HBM stacks is excellent. The binned cards had failures in the logic die, and hyperscalers want uniformity in their clusters. That's why the mining market took the downbinned cards.

Not really.

If the fuses are for security, sure. But these aren't.

These fuses are for economic extraction. Doing it the way NVIDIA did it is a safety feature: it ensures that blowing a fuse will never destroy economic value -- it will never turn a card that was previously able to do something correctly into a card that can no longer do that thing correctly.

Already happened. All the agentic API dealers support x402.

I already pay some thousanth-of-a-cent for every webpage (pre-LLM era included) that my agents pull, simply for the privilege of going through a proxy with a squeaky-clean IP reputation (the fact that they charge by the byte keeps it clean -- scrapers can't afford that cost due to scale). That payment goes to the proxy owner not the website, but the point remains: I'm happy to pay that cost to eliminate hassles and headaches.

All that remains is to plumb part of that payment through to the website in exchange for a hard no-botwall (which implies no tracking) guarantee. It'll happen, and the websites that refuse will become irrelevant.

The future is bright.

Scrapers and bots put a ton of effort into anti-fingerprinting. Ordinary users? Zero.

Users care mainly about cross-site fingerprinting. Bot-fighting is concerned with single-site fingerprinting.

The good answer to your dilemma is x402: https://x402.org/ Nothing in life is free; you've been paying with your attention via ads, which is where the urge to fingerprint comes from (targeting). Agentic AI is rapidly killing web ads as a revenue source. It's time to stop kicking the can on micropayments.

Also, this article commits the common mistake of assuming that privacy means hiding in the largest possible cohort. That's bogus. You can also get privacy by belonging to many one-member cohorts -- i.e. fingerprint uniquely but differently to each site you visit and differently to a single site over longer timespans (like weeks). This is precisely what Brave's "farbling" does; farbled users have very unique fingerprints and yet they can't be tracked.

They targeted the CEO of the #1 GPU maker.

That's the real reason that this affair is a problem. It made him blackmailable.

Oh god the slop.

Only an LLM would describe DMARC as just "one DNS record".

We definitely know that.