18 points praccu 20 hours ago 13 comments

smallerize 39 minutes ago | parent

I still can't think of a use case for this besides making it difficult to shut down illegal AIs.

ls612 34 minutes ago | parent

The entire concept of an illegal AI is something I hope never comes to pass.

AtlasBarfed 24 minutes ago | parent

AIs are already doing illegal things

ls612 12 minutes ago | parent

AI doing something illegal and AI being illegal are very different things

smallerize 9 minutes ago | parent

Well, that's what I meant primarily. An AI that is doing something damaging.

BurningFrog 30 minutes ago | parent

The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.

randomblock1 25 minutes ago | parent

You do, though. The FAA/AST govern launches. I'm no rocket scientist but building a rocket and launching it is probably much harder than building a small data center.

avaer 37 minutes ago | parent

Google taking a lesson from the marketing school of Musk? Public spectacle to boost stock price?

Havoc 32 minutes ago | parent

> poem confirmed success:

What a load of horseshit. A model running on a ESP32 running off a questionable powerbank supply with dodgy coding and worse storage reliability can do that.

The only thing anyone cares about is whether the (economic)math works on put AI in space.

aftbit 16 minutes ago | parent

Putting AI in space is a silly idea. How do you cool it reliably? How do you handle rad-hardness? How do you even get the gear up there? It's one of the most expensive places to put mass.

Using geothermal power or floating solar arrays in the ocean makes way more sense. It's much easier to access, you have water for a heat sink, and you're far away from anyone or anything that would really care.

More controversially, if geothermal or solar doesn't pan out, you could power it via nuclear microreactors (just what I want floating in my world's ocean) or gas that would otherwise be flared off from a deep sea oil well (CO2 non-withstanding).

smallerize 6 minutes ago | parent

It is expensive, but the radiators won't necessarily push the state of the art. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil... The current test is to see how big an issue rad-hardness actually is.

loufe 12 minutes ago | parent

This was a completely vapid article. I expected some technical details at least, but instead it's an LLM generated poem confirming it worked in a short interval, which nobody doubts it would. All eyes are on long term heat dissipation and the impact of radiation and success of radiation hardening meterials and processes.

smallerize 7 minutes ago | parent

That was a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606 This is just a status update, which the title is pretty clear about.