FaceDeer

Could well be, I’m sure there were lots of poisonings and whatnot that earlier forensic science misattributed to natural causes.

But it could also be that murderers are getting more savvy too. There have been so many CSI-style shows, police procedurals, and so forth that it doesn’t take a great genius to know how to make it a lot harder for police to identify you. Like, if you made an untraceable “ghost gun” to shoot someone with, don’t carry it around in your backpack for days after shooting the guy. Sheesh, basic stuff.

Honestly, the “distractions” are at this point so far far worse than the Epstein files themselves are that I do kind of want to focus on them.

Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.

Would be nice if the Fediverse had more of that.

There are three or four different “Technology” communities. But there might as well just be one, it’s the same bubble in each of them.

They’re not putting up just one satellite. It’s going to be a constellation. The constellation as a whole will be equivalent to a data center.

Also, it won’t cost them millions of dollars to launch a single satellite. That’s why this project is paired up with Starship development, the two go hand in hand. Starship makes the launches cheap, Starmind gives Starship the scale of demand a ship like that needs for its economics to work.

The actual Starmind satellites will have 175kW of compute on them, Scott made that video before the specs were released so he assumed a minimum package. But all of this scales linearly, if you double the power usage you just double the size of the solar panels and double the size of the radiators. If a 20kW satellite works then you can bolt ten of them together and get a 200kW satellite that works too.

I suppose one could, They’re going with 160 m² radiators (double sided of course) so they won’t need heat pumps, though, I guess they found that to be a better tradeoff of mass and complexity.

In another comment regarding these books, you said:

They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

So it really seems you’re just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don’t care about the books or who they go to in the end.

Here’s the usual video I use for this issue, a walk-through of the equations on how things cool in space where Scott Manley runs the numbers and shows that it’s perfectly reasonable with a modest radiator panel.

What temperature are you assuming for the radiators? At 80° Celsius (353 Kelvin) they can do 880 watts per square meter. And bear in mind that radiator panels are double-sided, so that makes 1760 watts per square meter of dedicated panel. 80 degrees is what these chips are meant to run at, if you wanted to you could use a heat pump to make the radiator panels even hotter and they’d get much more efficient - according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law thermal radiation goes up proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Shouldn’t be necessary here though.

There’s a whole lot of answers in here saying cooling is impossible or super hard, and that people whose literal job is building satellites haven’t thought of this. Or that the people whose literal job is building satellites haven’t though about all sorts of other basic stuff like “you can’t do maintenance on satellites” or “there’s radiation in space” or whatnot.

Yes, they’ve thought of all those things. Those aren’t useful answers

The main advantages continuous high-power solar energy, different regulations being in play (it’s "outside the regulatory environment), and in the case of SpaceX it provides synergy with their own rocket launch business. They’re creating their own demand, allowing everything to be cheaper in bulk.

Yes, it’s to “raise the stock value.” Isn’t that why companies do anything? Doing a thing that produces value is going to raise the value of the stock of the company doing it.

First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don’t really care about either, they just don’t like AI.

But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who’s going to take them that values them more than that?

Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

Well, who’s talking about buying?

How else do you think they got the books?

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.

They were numbered in the order that they were “discovered” (or theorized, in the case of population III). Similar to how exoplanets around a particular star are designated “a”, “b”, “c”, etc. in order of discovery, so they usually end up not in any particular order in terms of orbital radii or size. Sometimes letters end up skipped when a letter is assigned and then it’s discovered to be a false positive.

So there’s logic to it, just not the logic one might prefer.

Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.

I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.

Mass and complexity are not equivalent. I doubt that a mountain is more conscious than either.

I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?

There are often things in nature that have natural “division points” along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don’t find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It’s possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we’ll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that’s putting the cart before the horse, we don’t know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.

If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.

I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.