We already have medicines that treat the problem. We've had it solved for a long time. We didn't need to genetically modify flies to solve it then, and we don't now.
> We already have medicines that treat the problem
We do have treatments of screwworm infestations, but it involves physically removing the larva and usually removing tissue as well as systemic treatments like antiparasitics. It's labor intensive and not cheap.
It also doesn't actually fix the _overall_ problem because screwworms will happily lay eggs in wild mammals too and so you will constantly be treating your livestock.
> We've had it solved for a long time
Yes, we solved it with mass releases of sterile flies over decades.
Yeah we did have it solved for a long time. We had no screwworms at all in the country. That was a great solution that lasted decades. Why would having to do all the work of applying medication, paying for the medication, animals that you catch late dying of infection and paying for those animals, people occasionally getting screwworms, pets dying to screwworms, etc etc etc be better or cheaper?
Also they don't genetically modify flies they still just irradiate the larva.
> We didn't need to genetically modify flies [...]
"Involve transgenics" is broad enough cover the intern doing literature reviews on related subjects. The discovery process on an unfamiliar domain is a jargon/term of art minefield, and the phrases that fly past me turn in to shibboleths.
We didn't need to genetically modify them, we just sterilized them with x rays and the released masses of sterilized flies into the population. We had that tech in the 50s and wiped them out in the 60s. The best treatment we had was eliminating them from the United States and that's no longer reality.
No... that sounds an awful lot like revisionist history trying to force a utopian ideal where none exists. If anything, the advent of the Internet and social media in particular has made us more tribal, not less.
The majority of the Internet is geared towards feeding the hedonistic treadmill of porn, cat pictures, selling things, influencer chasing, faking happiness on Instagram and trolling political sides on X or Blue sky.
If the options are "launch in the rest of the world quickly and get to the EU later" or "launch everywhere at once years after the competition" PMs and execs are going to choose the latter every time.
I figured, just wanted to verify, because while the former seems like the obvious answer, it could be argued with a straight face that Apple's strategy is in fact the latter. Or something like it.
The third option is: launch in a way that is compliant with EU rules everywhere. Except they don't want that as they want to retain their outsized market power.
There are a ton of jobs that pay as well or better with lower requirements, even outside the bay area. Anyone with that level of experience, Python and a low level language isn't going to take you up.
I'm not normally in agreement with the "you're not paying enough, there's plenty of people" crowd, because I've been on the hiring side too and know what a crapshoot it can be... But you're definitely offering too little for those requirements.
I responded to the point someone made- there's an excess of workers in America. Firstly, when there's an excess, wages are supposed to lower, even for Americans. Secondly, even if there is an excess, there was no evidence of that in my experience. In addition to the full time role we also interviewed interns in fall, and in my experience they were all either immigrant or children of immigrants.
You don’t see an excess of workers because the compensation was too low. Your requirements were such that you were realistically competing with Meta and Google offers for $400k+ and $200k was your max possible compensation.
I did not post the full job description word for word to not doxx myself. But the job description explicitly mentioned that anyone with the right aptitude should apply, don't have to qualify for every requirement. We hired a recent graduate with relevant research experience.
$200k is very middle of the pack for a salary offer in the bay area, and most places will push total comp up with stock and such, whereas OP mentioned that 200 was the UPPER bound, meaning they wouldn't be offering it to a junior developer.
I may have also misread the degree requirement as being higher than it was, but I think my point (prior to the edit) stands- for the posted requirements, the offered salary is low compared to other available jobs.
I'm sorry you all have lost your minds. I live and work in the bay area. $200k for someone who is 26 is far more than enough and should absolutely be able to get you a qualified person for the job description given above.
It's a middle of the pack/low salary offer in FAANG but the vast minority of developers here work at a company like that. It's hard to remember that sometimes.
> and will allow you to make a call from their phone.
People can be wildly reluctant to just hand over a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment to a teenager in a busy street and hope they don't run off with it. Smartphone theft is still a thing.
When I was homeless I would just ask people to call on my behalf. If it was an innocuous message about 10-50% of people would be willing to do it. I've even gotten people (complete strangers) to make phone calls for me while I was in handcuffs and everyone thought I was the bad guy but even then they were willing to make a call. You don't ask for the phone, you ask for someone to relay the message.
What hellscape are you living in? I have never had anyone try to trick me like that. I'm not saying theft doesn't exist in Denmark, but it is not something I have ever considered when helping a person out.
Any tourist area with a lot of people is going to be an area with potential for pick pockets and other theft of opportunity types. Even Vatican City has a crime rate often upwards or in excess of 1.5 per resident, and that's only what is officially recorded. Most people don't bother reporting a loss when there's no chance the police can do anything about it anyway.
The vatican city, having essentially no residents, would obviously be an outlier in any statistic measured against residents.
I take your point though, but I have to wonder who in their right mind would go to times square to ask to borrow a phone. Surely you'd go somewhere less busy.
I would assume that you cannot merely walk in to the nearest Apple car store and get a new car the same day if something bad happened to your car, so I don't really understand your statement as there is no equivalency here to exploit in your analogy.
I mean, you can go get a new car the same day, hence rental places while insurance figures everything out.
How about this, I'll pick a random day in your future while you're out doing stuff to show up and break your phone in half. How much is that going to ruin your day?
Some people can't stomach the idea that some individuals can be blamed for their own bad behavior, so this lie that all crime must be society's fault is the only way they can avoid rethinking their worldview.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
As an ignoramus to these things.... there are only just so many Googles though. Having made a significant jump, are they really expected to continue that growth?
The bet is that demand for AI tokens will continue to grow exponentially. And that SpaceX will be able to deploy and rent out GPUs to serve those tokens faster than anyone else.
The wrinkle is that they are planning to deploy those GPUs in space. That’s what people are most skeptical about, I think!
Space data centers need years of time to design, build, and deploy, 5-10 at least, and that's after they solve their multiple very difficult or impossible problems. How will they cool them? There are just simple ideas like giant structures to radiate the heat away, but you say you need to put lots of mass in orbit?
Well yes it will be hard, and hence maybe not economical, and that’s why many people are skeptical of the business case (myself included btw).
But satellite cooling already exists (Starlink v2 satellites dissipate heat at over a kilowatt I believe), so that’s why other people find it plausible.
They also need Starship at minimum, which is now a 10+ year old project still exploding regularly.
Starship is at minimum a 2030 project at this point.
And even producing the volume of chips needed for the type of growth space data centers would need to have to justify this would be another decade if construction started now on those fabs.
I don't see how: Starship is a very long running project at this point, and progress has been incremental. Productionizing the basic logistics systems like turning around re-usable launch vehicle took years for Falcon 9, and Starship's haven't even done that yet.
By the end of the year if it's not landing intact yet, now you're 2027.
I'd say 2030 is optimistic (the 2028 moon landing with Artemis straight up isn't going to happen IMO).
Cooling in space does not seem like a hard problem to me. You absorb a certain amount of energy in a given time in the form of solar energy, you should be able to emit that. On top of that, in LEO you are only in solar orbit roughly 50% of the time
It is in fact very hard, and LEO is not "solar orbit". You want your datacenters in sunlight 100% of the time, to not need heavy batteries, which is possible, but cooling is in fact very hard
SpaceX already has 10,000 satellites on orbit that are basically preview versions of space data centers. They've already paid 5 years of that 5-10 year timeline you outlined.
the math doesn't work. a starlink satellite has ~10kw power consumption. A single ai optimized server rack (GB300) is 140kw. Starlink works because you get a massive benefit from putting networking in space for rural users. no one has made a convincing case as to why putting a data center in space is a benefit that can come anywhere near the drawbacks (inability to service, launch cost, cooling etc)
Even permitting isn't a clear win. You are changing from land permitting (where you can pick the location to be wherever you want) to launch permitting (where you have to coordinate with the federal government for airspace and water closures). Not to mention that with the current regulatory status, a rocket explosion can easily lead to a multi-month mandatory safety review that blocks all new launches.
> changing from land permitting (where you can pick the location to be wherever you want) to launch permitting (where you have to coordinate with the federal government for airspace and water closures)
One of these is orders of magnitudes longer and more complicated than the other. Land permitting always involves multiple layers of government. And most of them are causing months- to yearslong delays. (Power hook-up is another source of delay.) Launch permits are predictably issued by, essentially, a single regulator.
> a rocket explosion can easily lead to a multi-month mandatory safety review that blocks all new launches
Which is equivalent to a regular permiting delay.
The tradeoff is between the cost to launch radiator mass and the delays local and state governments cause in permiting. The first is mediated through launch costs. The latter through interest rates. And right now, the former is going down and the latter going up.
Plenty of world to jurisdiction shop beyond the US, most of which also has cheap land and plenty of sun, and for better and worse much of that world is less regulated than launch (and FCC spectrum licensing if you want your data back) and easier to skip the queue with comparatively small amounts of money. Hell, if you like your unit economics to be dependent on solving physics problems most of the earth's surface doesn't need permits at all...
Google and friends continue to see increased demand for their wares. The bet is probably that SpaceX is one of the best-placed companies to deliver incremental compute. They've shown they can build data centers fast.
Considering that most of the rules states would introduce would run a foul of interstate commerce, it seems like a good way to get ahead of pointless lawsuits.
Note that these rules apply to the development of AI, not any restriction on how it is used in e.g. schools, communications etc.
Interstate commerce has been redefined to mean both way less and way more than the phrase might seem to imply. States can for example introduce rules on emissions when no cars are manufactured in that state.
We’re currently in the process of revoking California’s exception. However that’s a more complicated legal issue than the feds get to do whatever they want.
Does the interestate commerce clause preclude state laws pertaining to implementation and usage?
For example, can a state outlaw public plate/facial recognition cameras, or usage of social network data and AI by local police?
You could still buy AI, but The People decided you can't use it on the public for anything and everything just because big tech profits.
Or has that become the point of the interstate commerce clause, that big companies can maximize profits in cooperation (lobbying) with one federal government, instead of being inconvenienced with the laws of fifty states, in this the richest country of the world?
States already have a wide range of very restrictive laws on the sale and use of firearms and alcohol. Neither of these categories get challenged on interstate commerce grounds, if they get challenged.
See sibling threads.
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