matsPod
K. Ryabitsev-Prime 🍁If an LLM is used for military purposes, then the datacenters hosting the LLM become legitimate military targets.
Meko #nowar@monsieuricon the question is finding datacenters that doesn't host these LLMs 🫠
Bill Nottingham@monsieuricon I have wondered at what point Ashburn, VA becomes a primary target just based on disruption potential in general.
You S Blues@notting @monsieuricon Honestly, I think it already was. That corridor had been DoD since I moved away in the 80s. Consolidation with the cloud has made destroying obviously critical civilian infrastructure now co-habituating there makes it a go to for “warfighters”.
@notting @monsieuricon And that’s not even taking into account the location of gov.cloud
Alexey Skobkin@monsieuricon Mr. Yudkowsky, you won't fool me! Please log in!
Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦Yes, and well how are all those datacenters (and/or Amazon nuclear power plants) protected against foreign missiles?
@mcepl You don't need power plants, just the pipe bringing the water in for cooling.
??? How come you don't need more power? Those computers don’t run on water …
Bee O'Problem 
@mcepl @monsieuricon taking down the cooling of a data center at a minimum will cripple its ability to function as equipment overheats and shuts down. Depending on how badly overheated the equipment gets you could end up with destroyed hardware and even fires in the data center.
Taking down power infrastructure would force the data center to use local backup power generation but otherwise keep running. It would also likely cause a lot of collateral harm
meI know data centres are designed with multiple fibre and power circuits/ routes to them.
Do they also have multiple water pipes to them as well?
patter@monsieuricon @mcepl never underestimate what 1 guy with a well positioned backhoe can do
Lee Hauser@monsieuricon @mcepl Nah, too easily repaired.
Gaëtan Perrault@monsieuricon But that means we might start seeing attacks on AWS data centers, and who would do that?... Oh... 🤔
But think about how much damage happens to US operations when US East 1 has a DNS problem. If you have control of a rogue plane, landing that on the Pentagon might be a symbolic thing, but landing that on the data center would have huge economic impacts.
I think tech nuts have long understood these risks. But they were always tail risks that businesses like to ignore. This attack is going to bring a lot of those tail risks to the forefront.
🟥 Eveline Sulman 🇳🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦@monsieuricon fair enough
Roy -- the dull oneYes, folks! Even your little town can now take its place on the Mutually Assured Destruction target map.
ZenHeathen 🇨🇦@monsieuricon And they're often trying to locate them in neighbourhoods.
Paul Wilde 
@monsieuricon good job they're not massive buildings that can be seen at night with thermal imaging and are absolutely bloody everywhere.
Zuri (he/him) ❌️👑 🕐 CET@monsieuricon "The datacenter hosting my girlfriend was obliterated. Now I'm in mourning and I have to recreate her from scratch."
Who would have imagined this sentences possible a few years back?
Juliette@monsieuricon Now, don't go giving someone ideas... 😁
Nonya Bidniss
emeritrixGood to point this out to craven legislators when you're explaining why they should not allow these in your town.
Luci ☯⚛@monsieuricon speaking of which I wonder how Trump's ballroom project is going
Hiisikoloart@monsieuricon
I wonder is this one of the reasons they plan them near where people live so militaries would be less likely to strike them down.
I wonder is this one of the reasons they plan them near where people live so militaries would be less likely to strike them down.
Khleedril@monsieuricon But those same data centres are holding my photograph collection.
fan boy 🪭@monsieuricon
> legitimate military targets.
For everyone conducting "legal" wars.
Faraiwe@monsieuricon actually doctrinally true, according to Law of Land Warfare, yes.
Jérôme Petazzoni@monsieuricon I hear you, but why would that be more true for an LLM than any computer system in general?
Jim Lind@monsieuricon Does that mean that defending data centers becomes a concern? We deploy troops to those giant warehouses?
Mark T. Tomczak@monsieuricon Absolutely true and not even a new category of threat.
It didn't get much airtime past local media, but folks in the greater Philadelphia area were not excited to learn that the drones in the Afghanistan war were being piloted from non-publicized facilities in their backyard. As far as I know, they still are.
mds2 (Michael Sch-sko)@mark @monsieuricon kinda sounds like a natural consequence of Sherman's "total war" theory. War is a logistics and production problem, thus all industrial and logistics infrastructure are potential targets.
@areactis @monsieuricon Agreed. The first thing to understand about Americans fighting war is they don't fight fair. They basically never have, and they've never really embraced, as a culture, the virtues of it. They'll respect some rules (if we think respecting them is either zero-cost or increases the odds of winning the war by minimizing complications). But this is the country that
fought the Redcoats by attacking as irregulars and generally refusing to form lines
fought the Civil War as Sherman did (as you've noted)
brought the state-of-its-chemical-art to World War I
did what everyone knows it did in World War II, which was so profoundly awful that it's one of the few times in the history of war that everyone vowed never to do that again and (please God let it stay true) actually didn't do again
busted out the chemistry set again and came up with extremely novel defoliants (and carcinogens) for Vietnam
mounted bulldozer shovels to the front of tanks in Desert Storm to turn enemy trenches into insta-graves
used sea-fired missiles in Yugoslavia, intel be damned
used drones in Afghanistan, intel be damned
Americans don't fight to win wars; they fight to end them, often by the shortest observable path. It's one of the things that makes them extremely dangerous and extremely awful if they're the ones that start the war.
Nfoonf@monsieuricon @jwz if the war is fought by drones the people that manufacture drones or parts of drones become targets to. You see this in Ukraine. Russians target civilian workers not soldiers.
Tyrone Slothrop@monsieuricon …and so does any data center where such an LLM may not currently be hosted, but where it might conceivably be shifted if its primary data center were disabled.
Which is, uh, basically all of them.
🔥 Mireille Sillander 🔥@monsieuricon It would be such a shame is something were to happen to those. Such. A. Shame.
ale canque@monsieuricon that's why we need small federated, street or neighbourhood level appropriate civic tech data nodes rather than big commercial data centres. They could still access citizen data for a fee and if the data owners agree..
Peter B.@alecanque @monsieuricon I'd invite #digital #longterm #preservation and #GLAM institutions to take this on 😄
At a recent professional convention, I hosted a workshop on local LLMs for in-house training:
Imagine #GLAM with #publicmoneypubliccode offers those "local" nodes and services to people.
#ZFS + #Nextcloud + #Ollama + #OpenWebUI, etc: Setup by (#ansible) #pianoRollHowtos and "apt install ..."
@p3ter @monsieuricon absolutely, with exo and llamafile you could efficiently share resources across well connected mid or low end devices. Really good for data/tech sovereignty, privacy and availability even if the wider internet is cut off
@alecanque @monsieuricon It would make perfect sense to build that up together with schools and unis: so kids and local providers can learn and work on-site.
We know how internet-stuff works, and giving resources to #foss makes sense IMO.
curtosis@monsieuricon @arclight And that means your business isn’t insured against that risk!
Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse