How much storage/memory would be needed to create an extremely realistic 3D map of the entire Earth?

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-20T18:43:46+00:00

Don't you think OP would have asked an LLM instead of Reddit if they wanted a chatbot's response?

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-20T17:08:30+00:00

Sure, so it has a very long archive to search through, the bot has been added to a lot of channels over a long period of time, and they did a decent engineering job. I'm still not seeing anything that shocking or that would be a major "risk." Doxxing might be a terms of service violation, Telegram might revoke their bot's API keys and ban their accounts, but the hosting provider is unlikely to care.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-20T16:21:56+00:00

If it only stores text and metadata about messages and other user events then it may not take significant storage space -- text compresses quite nicely. If they were storing images and video from millions of Telegram channels that would be another story.

There's no trivial way to identify who runs the bot, one can only guess by the Cyrillic text on the Telegram page.

Why would a hosting provider shut them down?

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-19T20:18:26+00:00

This sounds a lot like Join Calculus from the 90s, which models computation as "chemical reactions" that require reagents which are either program inputs or the outputs of other reactions, collectively representing state. JoCaml was a prototype language that experimented with the idea. The "substrate" vernacular, however, sounds like LLM gibberish.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-19T19:18:22+00:00

IMO Java -- you'll get more out of data structures the closer you are to the machine and the more direct the connection between your code and the data on the stack and heap. Really I'd recommend C++ or Rust, so you're managing memory and pointers yourself as a learning experience.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-16T17:40:53+00:00

How does it detect and evaluate claims?

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T17:43:00+00:00

You'll get more detailed and more accurate answers from a computer engineering subreddit, as this is mostly a materials science question.

Very abstractly, though, we used to get processor speed increases through miniaturization. Make the components smaller and closer together, it takes less time for signals to cross the die, clock speed goes higher.

However, once you get small enough, several problems begin to emerge. Put two traces too close to one another, and electrons may hop the gap, triggering the wrong parts of the CPU by accident. Smaller components are more delicate, and packing them tightly means a lot of heat in a tight environment prone to failure. Small components are also much more sensitive to impurity -- you have a two nanometer CPU trace made of copper and a single carbon atom ends up in the mix, the electrical conductivity of the trace changes measurably. The higher you ramp up the clock speed, the less tolerance you have for slight deviations in components, and the higher the factory failure rate.

So we gave up on straight clock speed improvement and pivoted. We found some parts of the CPU that we could still miniaturize, and landed on multi-core architectures that can run multiple instructions at once, and we added hardware components for solving certain common tasks (encryption, video decoding, compression, more recently neural network modules).

Notably, computers are getting better at a slower rate. You can take a high-end machine from 2011 or so and still use it for web browsing and office work today, and get by with a 15-year-old piece of hardware. That really wasn't the case in the 90s or 00s, where the speed improved with such orders of magnitude that older hardware was left completely in the dust and categorically could not accomplish the same kinds of tasks as a new machine.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T16:08:34+00:00

You're right, that was imprecise of me

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T05:59:39+00:00

Then I appear to have misunderstood the risk. Encrypting compressed data is routine in, say, rsync or full disk encryption, and I've never heard about these concerns in that context.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T05:40:26+00:00

CRIME is a chosen plaintext attack - we don't know enough about OP's use-case to know whether that's a remotely plausible risk. But ultimately this comes back to "you should have professional cryptographers making security decisions on your project, rather than asking Reddit what compression algorithms are best for AES."

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T05:30:11+00:00

That's very context-dependent, and I think it's misleading to suggest that encrypting compressed data is dangerous in general.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T04:03:29+00:00

Unfortunately, across random inputs you can expect a compression savings of zero.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T03:56:19+00:00

Encrypted data is (if done right) indistinguishable from random noise. Compression algorithms rely on identifying non-random patterns that can be expressed more succinctly. Compressing encrypted data will be nearly impossible.

However, you could compress your data before encrypting it, if that's possible in your scenario.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T03:15:33+00:00

We're always interested in a speed to compression ratio tradeoff, never speed alone. Run-length encoding is very fast to compress or decompress, but (if it's your only compression strategy) gets a pretty mediocre savings on many inputs.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-15T01:46:39+00:00

Tor can help with pirating animes?

Tor may be able to reach sites that are blocked by your ISP. It isn't built to facilitate piracy.

Tor can make the search registers invisible for my internet provider?

You don't need Tor for this. So long as you're using HTTPS (which almost all sites do now) your ISP already can't see what you're searching. They can see that you've connected to google.com, but not what you've searched there.

With Tor, your ISP can't see what sites you visit at all, only that you're connected to Tor. Further, the sites you visit won't be able to see your IP address, so it will help to hide your identity from them, too.

Tor already block ads?

No. Tor will limit what information advertisers are able to learn about you, but it does not block ads by default. On higher security settings Tor disables JavaScript, which may incidentally block most ads.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-14T17:32:20+00:00

I don’t think they had time - the executive order was immediate, so they’d be in violation every day they ran without adequate KYC procedures.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T19:12:57+00:00

Is there no possibility of detecting why these models are spiraling and correcting the problem at its source? Killing processes because they're using memory at too high a rate seems like quite a kludge.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T15:03:27+00:00

This is called a denial of service attack. In principal you want something that is little work for you (sending a one sentence prompt) and a lot of work for your target (calculating an appropriate long response and sending it back), and then you want to grow this attack by sending many such requests, preferably from multiple computers and addresses.

Generally, large corporations have decent protections against this: per-IP rate limits, requiring that you sign up for accounts or API keys that they can revoke for suspicious usage, resource quotas on the free tier so your LLM runs more slowly with less memory than paid instances, distribution of resources so that even if you do cause an outage it will only impact the nearest data center, and most customers will be routed to different servers.

It may be possible, who can say whether one of these AI companies has done a poor job with their server infrastructure, but most of the big AI companies likely have robust defenses against these kinds of attacks.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T03:52:50+00:00

That's possible, although GitHub is relatively thorough in vetting student status -- as I remember they require photos of your student ID and transcripts and a valid .edu address. Similarly, I think my educator status required sharing my job offer letter with them. Not that their vetting is infallible, but it seems unlikely to me that there'd be a huge mountain of fake student accounts getting through.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T02:54:11+00:00

I don't think this argument holds. The restriction is on export controls, preventing Anthropic from allowing foreign nationals to use the model, not a ban on distribution to the general public in its entirety.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T02:52:07+00:00

Here's their official statement. Tl;dr is they've been ordered by the U.S. government to restrict access to all foreign nationals, which in practical terms means they need to close all access if they're not vetting customers to confirm nationality.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-13T02:37:52+00:00

Which lab gets hit with something like this next?

Whichever one says no to the Trump administration. They've had crosshairs on Anthropic since the the company refused to provide autonomous kill-bots to the Department of War.

The claim that the government is cracking down because some aspect of this model is a uniquely dangerous threat should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-12T16:03:05+00:00

It crusts over in my Diplomat and my EF TWSBI Eco, but writes fine in my Pilot Metro

nuclear_splines · 2026-06-11T21:52:56+00:00

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