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Comment by keepamovin

4 hours ago

All right, so how is it that all you geniuses out here are totally right about this, but all the dullards at SpaceX and XAI, who have accomplished nothing compared to you lot, are somehow wrong about what they do every day?

I know being right without responsibility feels amazing but results are a brutal filter.

14 comments

keepamovin

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raegis  3 hours ago

I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

  • keepamovin  3 hours ago

    Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.

    That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.

    I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.

    • woooooo  1 hour ago

      Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.

danmaz74  1 hour ago

This vision doesn't come from those great engineers, but from Elon, the guy who promised Hyperloop, FSD in 2 years 10 years ago, and lots of other BS

adventured  3 hours ago

There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.

  • keepamovin  2 hours ago

    I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.

    • nkozyra  1 hour ago

      I think there's a scenario where that's true: one where the head of your company is collaborative and deferential to expertise.

      There's another scenario, though: one where the head of your company is a bull in a China shop, whose successes have come almost exclusively through a Barnum-esque scheme of cascading bravado and marketing genius without much expertise, but a marvelous ability to sell any idea purely via unearned gravitas.

      The former is less sexy: I've compiled loads of talented people, and we're going to solve very hard problems, even some that seem impossible.

      The latter is very sexy: I'm a genius and we're going to accomplish the impossible in one year via sheer force of my grand will. And even if it doesn't actually happen, I'll sell you on the next vision.

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