ATT was paid by the government to do that. I doubt the commercial market can support those costs.

Supranational, at the EU level.

Um... is there another way to read this?

>I think most of the opposition really wants is stability and a return to normality. Blowing shit up is diametrically opposed to that goal.

So there isnt terrorism because most opposition dont want to blow up data centers? You are identifying opposition as potential domestic terrorists. As opposed to saying there just arent these type of domestic terrorists. Which have nothing to do with normal opposition.

And then you seem to imply there may be reason to resort to domestic terrorism?!

>Maybe only once most people realize that normality isn't coming back will that change.

Space launches have never been "safe". It's always a risky endeavor for a variety of reasons.

But concerns over space junk are vastly overblown. Orbit is a big place and satellites can maneuver to avoid the riskiest paths. And if data center satellites ever actually get launched (might never happen) then they'll be in low orbit where any junk will burn up within a few years.

Lowest bid small reactors would be nothing like the more or less properly built old ones.

GP is a russian shill that should have been kicked off HN long ago.

7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable

Morelli explains this principle or commandment as follows: "With rare exceptions, people tend to join the victorious cause. In the case of war, the preference of public opinion depends very much on the apparent results of the conflict. If the results are not good, the propaganda must disguise our losses and exaggerate those of the enemy." [0]

It's the same in Russia, if you are wondering

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...

They are used to it. USA and Russia were "trading favors" in Syria for a decade. Unfortunately for Russia, those "favors" are now hitting Moscow.

You also set up Hormuz and tariffs and spread discord between EU citiz ns through speeches of high officials and threaten Greenland, causing us to prepare to defend on multiple fronts while often publicly supporting Russia too.

Are you sure the missiles are support?

The only reason the war has turned lately is because the USA was the greatest defensive shield for the Russians, by demanding that Ukraine not cross the red line of the border.

I'm not sure the US has given Ukraine any long range missiles.

The ones hitting the data centers are I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Point_FP-1

I don't think the US even has any like that to give.

The long range strikes only started after Trump's "you have no cards" oval office shindig where he basically told Zelensky to surrender and cut aid. After that Trump lost a lot of influence to protect Russia.

Yeah, apparently the US does all the work. Meanwhile, Trump is asking Zelenskyy to stop the strikes.

> 1Tbps

That's a pretty tall assumption when every other customer is trying to copy their own data at the same time through the same tiny pipes and off the same spinning rust.

The typical customer also doesn't do their own backups, but rather relies on the infrastructure provider (that's a major selling point after all).

If we take the damaged Amazon data center in SA or the OVH fire as data points, the timeline appears to be measured in weeks and months, rather than hours.

In any case, I doubt that in 2 days most larger companies could even figure out where their data is and develop a strategy to copy it.

I think the energy facilities being hit are mostly refineries - not storage, and anyways any bulk storage is just temporary for bulk transport for export or to the front, etc, so having it in 25gal cans wouldn't be very helpful!

Russian air defense is multi layered and relatively strong, so one of Ukraine's main strategies so far has been just to overwhelm them with volume. You want mass volume cheap and cheerful, not expensive ones, unless for the occasional strategic target.

Ukraine only has limited number of more capable missiles/drones like Flamingo FP-5 and Neptune, although now the FP-7 is about to hit volume production, followed by the FP-9, as well as Europe-supplied missile and anti-missile systems, so it remains to be seen if this will change Ukraine's strategy ... I tend to doubt it - they will have firepower to retaliate much harder, and at further distance, when they want to, but I expect they don't want to unilaterally escalate.

Ukraine has backups and redundancy in allied countries. Russia has been doing the opposite recently, trying to reduce their dependence on foreign infrastructure, which now bites them in the ass since it concentrates them into a small number of physical locations in strike range of Ukraine.

Backups with nowhere to restore to don’t do you much good.

Every country is a democracy, some are just temporarily repressed ones :)

The original tabletop version of the Shadowrun RPG from FASA came out in the late 80s. We (friends and I) started getting into it in the early 90s.

We felt a lot of it was… unnervingly believable in multiple aspects. As in, what parent mentioned.

I do not look forward to the “Seretech Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Seretech_Decision), “Shiawase Decision” (https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) or similar sorts of judicial rulings in the real world. True nightmare fuel.

——-

Somewhat… prescient, is the Shiawase Decision.

This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.

After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.

Obviously your biggest customers would be in active warzones, or areas worried about soon becoming warzones.

Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.

Given how quickly this technology is proliferating I think that could change. Numerous non-state groups are using drones offensively in Africa and Colombia. If a drone hit something like a refinery and there was significant impact, don't you think the status quo could change quickly?

believe it or not but legislation can change pretty quickly when shit actually hits the fan

Russia has serious supply chain restrictions against them making life pretty difficult and expensive.

The air defense systems for merchant vessels will need to be modular and portable. Many countries have legal prohibitions on armed civilian ships entering their waters. Which is stupid but won't change quickly.

These are a lot more expensive and difficult to deploy. They weigh several tons. You can't just strap one to a $200 quadcopter and fly it over.

The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.

You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.

to use a GBU-28 or similar you need to establish air superiority first

If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.

Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.

In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.

Batch processing could be done in solar orbit.

The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.

As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.

No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.

Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.

The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.

If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.

(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)

Smart munitions for the early warning, signal intelligence, and radar, second wave is dumb, fast, cheap munitions for kinetic solving.

I think the Wildberries strikes were a unilateral escalation on the part of Ukraine and the current escalation cycle has ensued from that.

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That's true, however they don't use this capability like it's infinite. They only utilize this when Russia does something similar or plans of doing something similar leaks.

I'm not a fan of wars, regardless of where they happen. OTOH, I still believe you can fight relatively clean or be an unethical bully. If the war is unavoidable, I prefer to be the former.

I also commend Ukraine's ingenuity and bravery, as well.

Still not necessarily wise to voluntarily escalate an air war when you have very little air defence. But hey what do I know

I don't know what sites you frequent but strikes on distribution centers by both sides has been covered by mainstream US news.

Do the sites you frequent mention that Russia does double tap strikes to kill civilian first responders or that they have stolen thousands of Ukrainian children?

Russia has been hitting civilian logistics centers for years now. At least 2 of my packages were destroyed :C

Complaining about an information bubble while being in one is pretty funny.

That's because it's nonsense. Russia has been targeting Ukrainian civilian logistics for years.

You frequent bad sites then. Don't make a conspiracy based on your own bad media consumption.

I don't know the hardware inside the data center, and it might not be a "AI" data center to begin with. NAND is a big problem, but DDR4 memory is not AFAICS, and if you need CPU power for serving stuff, getting it is easy.

If you need high performance or AI operations... GLHF!

my Arm/Android set-top box of choice for, ahem, streaming subscriptions, is up 50% in price despite no changes to the design since I bought it 2 years ago. And that's on aliexpress where margins are limited.

I believe China can just build and send them their way. They build a lot of these.

If you’re using AI to describe SI - super intelligence - you’re THE ENEMY.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s shipping containers or even privately owned houses, filled with optically controlled or autonomous drones, sitting near high value infrastructure around the world. Mirroring those Ukrainian trucks.

its much more widespread than you think

I hate to break it to you, but about those elections...

You know, things like coups exist. In many, many other countries leadership as bad as Russia's would have been ousted in a military coup long time ago, and the new regime would have pursued saner policy.

What are we Europeans supposed to do anyway? Negotiate about peace with leadership that isn't interested in peace? If history teaches us anything, it is that Russia's leadership respects only military force.

I'm not blaming ordinary Russians who indeed have very little power over anything, except that significant portion of them who support the war. But I am blaming the oligarchy, the elites who actually have some power, and yet let things continue like this.

> It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy

It doesn't matter, just like it didn't matter to British citizenry who endured the blitz that the Nazis had self-couped, and Germans couldn't vote Hitler out. The only 2 choices available are to roll over and be occupied, or fight back against the aggressor state.

Ah yes. And every russian living abroad has a hit squad following them forcing them to support the war.

  > It never amazes me to encounter people who still don't know that Russia is not a democracy, that Russians have no voice and can't influence the direction of the country, that Russia has no elections and Putin (self-proclaimed President) is not a democratically elected leader.

And none of this matters, because Russia has no tradition of democracy and has always been ruled by dictators who derive their legitimacy through other means; mainly through their success in expanding the empire. The more you steal and the more people die in the process, the greater leader you are. Putin is a continuation of that tradition and enjoys widespread support among a population that shares the same vision: that Russia is a chosen nation and that being conquered by Russia is a privilege.

Russian history offers an excellent counterexample in the downfall of the USSR when Gorbachev and others lost their legitimacy. Formally, they remained the top figures in the government; in practice, people gradually stopped following them over a period of a few years as everything was disintegrating (shortage of basic products, pointless war in Afghanistan, disasters like Chernobyl, etc). The people simply chose new leaders from among themselves and turned their backs to Moscow.

For example, a police station might've simply ignored orders from the ministry of internal affairs and instead followed the recommendations of a popular local figure (often a factory manager, uni professor, journalist, artist or writer). As districts increasingly acted this way, Moscow gradually lost control over the police force, which became decentralized and locally run. In the end, bosses in Moscow could yell all they wanted into a phone, but that did not move a single police officer on the ground.

Russian central government is currently nowhere near such loss of legitimacy. Tens of millions of people carry out the orders of their Führer every day. Some have stepped into a foreign country while carrying a gun. Others are milling artillery shells or programming cruise missiles. Some are sitting on HN trying to convince the world how their Führer has no other option than to murder Ukrainian children every night.

There is no pushback worth mentioning. Last year, out of 140 million people living in Russia, only 38 were arrested for anti-war protests. Add a few hundred more for anti-war posts on the social media. Completely insignificant numbers. Russians on HN will gladly explain how oppressive the climate in Russia has become and how difficult (gasp!) it is to protest, but they fail to recognize the downstream effects: that Ukrainians have to pay with their lives every single day for the cancer that the cowardice of Russians has unleashed. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are in mortal danger right now on the frontline, trying to stop what Russians are too afraid to confront themselves.

Either the Russian people are pro-war, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is good.

Or they are anti-war but helpless to stop it, in which case retaliation to defend yourself is also good.

Either way if your country's existence is threatened and your people are being killed you don't sit back and do nothing because you are scared it'll make the attacker unhappy.

That has been said for four years. Due to russians using mobile incinerators to conceal causulties (and war crimes), not even caskets arrives home. Most russians know this, but what does it help.

This is how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committees_of_correspondence#F...

When Navalny came back, over 300 000 people came out to protest, despite being terrorized. That did nothing. It's not like those people had guns and were ready to use them. And even if they did, that would only be an additional argument to use extra power of Putin's police state. Heck, if people did that, the very same "European anti-Putinists" would heavily condemn the violence and would support the crackdown on the "violent protestors" ("The future of the country is in stability and communication, not in violence. We urge people to lower their weapons. We support President Putin's attempts to keep the country stable and do what is necessary. We will send him an additional supply of tear gas and protest dispersal equipment. EU and Russia must stand together in these trying times.").

Holy mother of whataboutism.

So, most russians have already turned on ukraine. q.e.d.

How many settlemens still inhabited by Ukrainians has Russion controlled in the last couple of years? How many of those were liberated?

Tragically a lot Buchas happened[0], and there's plenty of videos of civilian executions - God only knows what atrocities are yet to be discovered in occupied territories.

All for some messed up sense of ethnic superiority.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...

Just look at the wikipedia article, it has multiple independent credible sources naming russians as the perpetrators.

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Would you say that about Germany during WWII?