I don't think the comment you are replying to is giving up leverage. It's simply pointing to the OP that what he seems to be upset is not the thing itself, which everyone does, but only that he knows about it or ignores others doing the same.
All LLMs inherit bias from their training data, and xAI’s argument is that Grok is being steered to counter that bias rather than simply inherit it. You can disagree with whether they succeed, but the act of steering isn’t automatically suspicious when knowing that every major model is steered. The relevant question is whether the steering moves the model closer to truth and neutrality, or just replaces one bias with another. At least with Grok, some of that intent is unusually explicit. I’d rather have multiple competing approaches to steering than a monoculture where every model quietly optimizes for the same idea of acceptable answers.
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad preference if this was an actual dichotomy. Not all types of manipulation is equal, and when you at least try to hide it shows at least some respect for the user.
That said, I don‘t believe this dichotomy is real. Personally I don‘t use AI, political manipulation is however only a relatively tiny part of my reasoning for opting out.
I’m pretty sure I used plan mode today and it continued when I didn’t respond quickly enough. Though now I can’t recall whether it was Claude or Codex. In either case terrible default.
I'm usually at my desk, and get a notification when it stops to ask a question, so I've never accidentally had it timeout yet. Still an annoying change.
i wanted the librem5 to be awesome.
some things really bothered me about it , as a smartphone alternative:
shitty screen
shitty camera
shitty cpu
shitty battery life
shitty os
shitty support for modern video codecs
shitty physical security
if i cant take decent pictures, watch locally stored hd h264/265 videos, have a full day of battery life, and resist cellebrite extraction attempts... what is it really good for.
they shoulda targetted it as a secure hotspot for a wifi only or tethered device, rather than the smartphone usecase.
Very interesting! Definitely some jargon I’ve not come across before.
“The chips were made on a n-on-n+ epitaxial substrate to provide latchup control, extensive guard rings around transistors were used and hardened oxides”
This is standard semiconductor manufacturing jargon.
"Substrate" here refers to the silicon wafer on which the integrated circuits are made, which at the end of the manufacturing process is cut into individual chips, which are then packaged as CPUs in this case.
An epitaxial wafer is a wafer on which epitaxial growth has been done before the rest of the manufacturing process. The wafers are cut from a huge crystal that has been grown from molten silicon. Initially they have a uniform concentration of doping impurities throughout their volume.
Epitaxial growth means that an extra layer of silicon is grown on the wafer and the growth is done in such a manner that all the layer is a single crystal and its lattice continues the crystal of the wafer, without interface defects.
The purpose is to have a different concentration of impurities in the extra layer, compared with the base wafer. N-on-n+ means that the initial wafer contained N-doping impurities, e.g. antimony, in a very high concentration (+), so that its electrical resistance would be minimum, while the "n" epitaxial layer also contains an N-doping impurity, e.g. phosphorus, but in a much lower concentration, so that it has a high electrical resistivity.
Both the fabrication of silicon wafers and the epitaxial growth are typically done by other companies than those that make integrated circuits, so the IC maker, or a silicon foundry like TSMC, buys epitaxial wafers according to a certain specification and they use them as the starting material in their manufacturing process.
"Latchup control" is a term specific to CMOS integrated circuits. In CMOS there exists a parasitic thyristor (a.k.a. SCR) composed of 2 parasitic bipolar transistors. If the parasitic thyristor turns on, it applies a short-circuit on the power supply, causing a huge electrical current spike, which normally destroys the integrated circuit, perhaps also other things if the power supply is not protected against short circuits.
In order to prevent the latchup of the parasitic thyristor, the structure is modified in various ways to reduce the gain of the parasitic transistors. If the gain is low enough, the thyristor cannot turn on.
Using a simple n substrate (which is cheaper) results in a high gain for the parasitic pnp bipolar transistor. Using an epitaxial n-on-n+ wafer reduces the gain of the pnp, lowering the probability of latchup.
Guard rings around transistors (which are made by diffusing certain doping impurities and then possibly also covering the diffused ring with a polysilicon or metal ring) have various purposes, typically related to preventing the electrical breakdown of the transistors at lower voltages than intended. This is especially important for radiation-hardened devices, because the most frequent effect of the passage of a ionizing particle through the semiconductor would be to generate mobile charge carriers that could cause the electrical breakdown of a transistor.
"Hardened oxide" is a more ambiguous term, but I assume that here it refers to high-quality oxide, i.e. which has a high value for the electrical field that can be sustained without electrical breakdown.
Because not every problem is a coding problem or not entirely solvable through code. Other tasks include legal, philosophical, financial, investigative, and combinations of these and others.
What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail.
When I started my own business, everyone thought it was doomed to failure. Friends, enemies, acquaintances, all of them.
Except my dad. He believed in me, though he had no idea what I was doing.
Musk is in good company with the crazy people who build the first tunnel under the Thames, the nuts who laid the first transatlantic people, the morons who dug the Panama Canal, and the fools who built the first transcontinental railroad.
I have a certainty that I don't want to make a bet predicated on SpaceX needing to generate revenue from their AI products that is equivalent to several thousand dollars for every human in a middle income and up country.
I'd bet in SpaceX. I'll not bet on musk grafting in a failing AI business for financial shenanigans.
Unless SpaceX knows something about thermodynamics that no one else knows, we can be pretty fucking sure that they have an incompetent mouthpiece or they are committing securities fraud.
I'm not sure I get it. Obviously, computers can work in space--a Starlink satellite is basically a computer with a radio attached. Satellites use radiators for cooling without violating any laws of physics.
I assume you think that SpaceX will never be able to build/deploy a radiator big enough? But that's not a physics/thermodynamics question, that's an engineering question. And I think SpaceX has some pretty good engineers.
Help me out and tell me how you can be so sure it will never work.
You could also launch people from LA to NYC via rockets instead of using airplanes without violating any laws of physics. But we don’t, because we have airplanes already. What problem are data centers in space solving? Cooling is probably the hardest issue to deal with for data centers, so why would you give up convective cooling you get for free on Earth?
I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space. The utility of satellite internet has been known for decades before Starlink came around.
A hedge that as it gets harder to build datacenters in communities over water, power, noise, space, tax, etc reasons that space is a new frontier for them. Consider that solar power works better in space.
Also, satellites may be able to do processing of data in-orbit.
>I don’t know why you’re jumping from starlink to data centers in space.
You just mentioned it - cooling. Consider Starlink a POC of radiating computer heat in space. A datacenter would need a scaled-up version, but it is not impossible, although it could be impractical if the cost of compute doesn't rise enough.
You agree that space data centers are physically possible, but you just don't think they will be economical (i.e., cheaper than terrestrial data centers). Is that right?
I don't know if they will be economical. But that will depend on a whole bunch of questions that nobody knows the answer to: How will the demand for AI grow? How much will opposition to terrestrial data centers increase the price? How cheaply can SpaceX launch mass? How cheaply can SpaceX build data center satelliters?
Maybe you know all those answers. If so, I envy your stock portfolio.
They won't be economical for many reasons - one of them is cooling. Putting several kilowatts of radiators on a Starlink satellite is a justified cost because the Starlink satellite must be in space. Putting a hundred megawatts of radiators on your AI DC in space is ridiculous because that's too big of a radiator (how do you keep it structurally sound?), air cooling on the ground is a million times better and there's no good reason for it to be in space.
Again, “What I find silly is the certainty that critics have that SpaceX will fail”.
I doubt you’ve done enough investigation to conclude that. Watching a couple a YouTube videos about how data centers in space are dumb doesn’t count.
For one, it’s not one big hundred megawatt-scale datacenter, but many smaller rack-sized satellites.
Two, there are many trade offs SpaceX can make to reduce the overall cost. The radiated power is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so anything they can do to increase the temperature drastically reduces the size of the radiators, including custom silicon, heat pumps, etc. There’s also novel radiator technology like liquid droplet radiators that could be worth developing.
Third, there are reasons to put it in space: solar panel efficiency, no cost for land, less regulation, no NIMBYs, etc.
Materials other than silicon would be an interesting idea, but I doubt even SpaceX is that crazy.
Not only does cooling increase with 4th power of temperature as you said, but power is abundant, so it may actually be practical to use more power to run chips of a different material at a higher temperature. That's a great idea, if it can actually be pulled off.
There's nothing inherent about electronics that makes it stop working around 120 degrees - that's just the practical limit of silicon. Other materials can withstand higher temps but may not be as practical in other respects like bandgaps.
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