That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei.
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.
> but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code
It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.
So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.
I suspect you are greatly overestimating the average organization's ability to run a Git server themselves and keep it secure, while also overestimating how evil GitHub and LLM's providers are.
Nothing to do with LLM providers, more that giving private source code away to clouds and expecting them not to steal it day 1, is utterly naive and irresponsible.
> From April 24 onward, interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out. [...]
> This program does not use:
> Content from your issues, discussions, or private repositories at rest. We use the phrase “at rest” deliberately because Copilot does process code from private repositories when you are actively using Copilot. This interaction data is required to run the service and could be used for model training unless you opt out.
So yes, pieces of your private code can end up in training data if you're using Copilot with it and don't opt out.
The Reddit comment said "your private repo context will be used to train their AI models by default" which is an inaccurate summary.
It's easy to see the benefit in DC's in space if you look at a few ingredients:
1. The recent Iran drone attacks on AWS data centers
2. Growing anti-AI and anti data center sentiment at home, plus Larry Fink (ceo of Blackrock) in a recent interview being terrified of dissident groups using consumer drones to attack data centers.
3. Anthropic, Grok, and other AI vendors becoming more and more integrated into defense and military, plus increasingly reliance on AI for other national surveillance systems
Data centers are and will be targets, both for national military attacks as well as home grown dissident attacks, so they are proposing to move some of the critical workloads to somewhere that the only group that can attack the data center hosting the workload is a nation state with space launch capabilities. That significantly reduces the number of actors that can attack the data center. And if the US wants to they can probably bomb all the other space rocket launch facilities worldwide in less than 24 hours, leaving extremely limited capability to attack a space hosted DC.
Is it insane? Probably, but the US has done insane things with military budget before, and will continue to do so for a long time. If you are Elon, its a great time to milk that US defense budget for some more R&D, and even if the main project doesn't work out, he's still going to be able to keep some innovations within the company and apply them to Starlink and other more realistic endeavors.
Even with this benefit of the doubt, even stretching our suspense of disbelief as far as it can go, we are basically talking about a niche military application that inherently has a limited market value.
In other words, we can just assume this concept is possible and makes sense some level of financial sense for military, government, and high sensitivity use cases.
Well, find me a military contractor worth $1.5 trillion. Lockheed Martin is worth 1/10th of that.
Put Lockheed Martin and AT&T together and you’ve got about 1/5 of a SpaceX IPO target valuation.
Even if we make this assumption that the technology is marketable and has merit, it’s not like every company or government agency is going to want to switch to this technology. There are already a number of alternatives that can mitigate many to all of the risks that it solves.
The cost and complexity right now to deploy global services and their disaster recovery replicas to multiple distant data centers in the terrestrial world is already extremely low. Often, these features are offered as an off-the-shelf service.
California could sink into the ocean and my users wouldn’t even see a blip of downtime. Unless they live in California.
Heck, build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want. That would be cheaper than launching them into space. They might even be easier to defend than satellites and space DCs because a foreign adversary can’t just launch a missile up in the sky to get to it.
Going back to not really suspending disbelief as much, I also think performance and latency is going to be an insurmountable problem. Right now as we speak Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario?
I can toss pennies per hour at Amazon for a relatively small VM with like 4GB of RAM and they’ll give that thing a 15 gigabit connection.
> Starlink residential service is about 10x slower than my home fiber connection at the same price. How is this technology going to compete with data center level infrastructure even in an optimistic scenario?
Where I live in New Zealand the only good internet provider is Starlink, so all my internet is through Starlink. The latency is about 20ms, so while yes you are technically correct that is 10x slower then 2ms, it isn't a major deal breaker.
You are probably thinking about light and fast API calls, where latency is more noticeable. But if you are doing an inference or LLM job that is going to take several seconds of token generation before the full response is available then the difference between 3.002s and 3.020s is negligible.
> build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want.
This is the defensive build. The US has a tendency to optimize for offense.
Let's roll forward another few decades, and imagine a classic dystopia scenario: pervasive worldwide surveillance systems, armed drones and robots everywhere, etc. Where does the data from those surveillance systems get crunched, and where do the drones and robots get controlled from? Probably not from one central system in one place. That would ironically be too high latency. These systems would most likely end up as generic shells with minimal on board smarts, controlled by AI "brains" up in LEO, 20ms away via radio. The AI observes from overhead via it's surveillance systems, and it acts via it's robot bodies down on Earth.
It sounds like sci-fi, but you have to remember the world is full of megalomaniac nerds. They love this type of stuff, and if they think someone might be able to build it, then they want to be the one to build it.
I think that vision you paint of satellite-commanded robots makes reasonable sense. At the very least, we can assume it does.
But then I go back to my original question where I ponder whether that vision results in a gigantic company.
I look at some of the contracts I found some news articles about: Space Force has a $437 million (not billion) contract with ViaSat and SES, the Pentagon is said to be spending $13 billion on LEO satellite programs.
And we can’t forget that SpaceX doesn’t actually make any of the robots. They only make the communications stack.
AT&T has a market capitalization of about $150 billion, for comparison.
If the only benefit of space-based datacentres is a hedge against infrastructure attacks in a world war then we are in an awful place.
I'm not disagreeing with you but peace is far more prosperous for humanity than blowing the worlds' retirement funds on datacentres-in-space as a military endeavour.
Also. I would not fully trust argument that all possible adversaries are incapable of attacking them. Possibly with cascading effects at least when you get size of satellites planned.
It’s trivial to attack things in space if you also have stuff in space. Just ram your cheap satellites into the other guy’s. Do it right and the destruction will cascade.
How easy is jamming starlink? I don't think it is as easy as jamming gps. As I've seen numerous warning from Russia that they providing starlink to Ukraine is bad idea. That they're going to shut it down etc. But, starlink is still being used in Ukraine.
Prior to these events, the prevailing consensus in the defense community was that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Starlink were nearly impossible to jam effectively. Their defense relied on the satellites' constant rapid movement and their ability to "frequency hop" to avoid static interference. The blackout in Iran has shattered this assumption.
Agreed. The "Tesla backed into objects, one into a pole or tree at 1 mph and another into a fixed object at 2 mph" stood out to me in specific. There is no way that any human driver is going to report backing into something at 1 or 2 mph.
While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.
My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.
People are acting like a space data centre would be running a traditional workload. No, it's probably running a military one, some sort of AI powered modern version of Dead Hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand). Autonomous warfare could get real dark, real fast.
My dark theory is that the goal is to run an AI overlord in space such that it is difficult to counter it from Earth.
If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then there is some reason why they want this workload running at great physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to protect the workload from us.
What is a workload that is something that people would probably want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.
It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to attack the platform.
It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen, there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions, and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it firsthand.
Downvotes are a tone. It’s the equivalent of yelling “shut up” and “stupid” at things that might require a little thought. That’s what makes the communities worse, not the odd comments that get dragged under by reflexive negativity.
So far in this thread the majority of Hacker News users have decided they don't like the tone of your comment, therefore they have downvoted your comment.
If you don't see the irony, let me point it out: this is a real time demonstration that your following statement is not an inevitable thing:
> eventually converges on the same thing in the end: a place to dump out ugly things
When a community has the tools for self governance, then it can resist influences that it does not appreciate. In the case of Bluesky in specific, you may not be familiar with how easy it is to subscribe to labelers and blocklists. This decentralized self governance model allows anyone to curate their Bluesky experience, and it allows sub communities to collectively govern in ways that filter the cesspool and remove the ugly things.
In short, the fact that you are complaining about downvotes while simultaneously saying that it is inevitable for communities to devolve into places to dump ugly things is highly ironic. One thing that you are complaining about, is the solution to the other thing that you are complaining about.
You’ve collapsed my comment into a crumpled up pile of ideas that you hate. Your description doesn’t resonate with me and describe what I had to say. And I notice the article itself is now flagged and dead, because of downvotes too.
You’re bringing a Reddit analogy to HN and they are not equivalents. On HN there is no downvote. Something unwelcome gets flagged for review. After sufficient flagging the content is removed not just buried. It’s not calling it “stupid” it’s saying “hey buddy maybe this isn’t the right place for this.”
You can’t seem to depolarize yourself from extremes. You call your original post “highly intelligent” and equate any disagreements as being shouted “stupid” at like those are the only two options here or something when they are not.
This is a real issue. If a robot is fully AI powered and doing what it does fully autonomously, then it has a very different risk profile compared to a teleoperated robot.
For example, you can be fairly certain that given the current state of AI tech, an AI powered robot has no innate desire to creep on your kids, while a teleoperated robot could very well be operated remotely by a pedophile who is watching your kids through the robot cameras, or attempting to interact with them in some way using the robot itself.
If you are allowing this robot device to exist in your home, around your valuables, and around the people you care for, then whether these robots operate fully autonomously, or whether a human operator is connecting via the robot is an extremely significant difference, that has very large safety consequences.
In case anyone else is wondering about practical ways to reproduce these effects, I did some quick searching:
Most chocolate / cocoa products are processed in a way that destroys 80%-90% of the flavanols. You either have to buy specialized high flavanol cocoa powder (what the study used), or you would have to be consuming multiple cups of matcha tea, or squares of dark chocolate ever day. You'd likely also want to add high flavanol foods like blueberries, blackberries, and cherries to your daily diet.
As someone who spends a lot of time sitting, and also has a family history of heart issues, it sounds promising. I'm planning to give it a try.
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.