brucethemoose
@brucethemoose@lemmy.world
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 4 hours ago:
That’s interesting, but what’s the point? If it’s like 2 DGX boxes in each satellite, spaced out, the interconnect between them is going to be very slow, and the individual computational power of each satellite will not be that impressive.
And if you connect them all in one constructed mesh and wire them together, well, you’ve made a 200MW datacenter! The economies remain the same.
If hardware gets more power efficient, well… Then why do you need to go to space anymore?
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 4 hours ago:
100kW? Nvidia BGX 200 servers are 14kW each, not counting the interconnect, or anything else. According to nuggets I’ve read online, we’re talking 200 megawatts for an Earth-based AI datacenter these days, without something exotic like underclocked Cerebras WSEs
Plugging 200 megawatts into this:
www.calctool.org/…/stefan-boltzmann-law
I get about 0.46 square kilometers, depending on the coolant temperature and ultimate efficiency of the system.
I have no clue what the construction of such a monstrosity would look like, but if it was a simple 0.5 inch aluminum sheet, it would weigh like 15,000 metric tons.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 5 hours ago:
Well, that’s just it. Facebook makes so much money it doesn’t even matter, they can just write it off and Zuckerberg faces zero consequences.
This is the same. These guys could burn many billions on space data centers, get zero returns yet face zero consequences, essentially leaving the rest of the world with the bill/wasted work.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 5 hours ago:
Fair.
I’m pretty sure that’s a plot point in some cyberpunk-ish sci fi.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 5 hours ago:
Plugging it into this formula:
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php
I get a circular radiator at least a kilometer wide, assuming the radiator is quite efficient, a rather modest datacenter, and very hot coolant (70C).
…Realistically, the coolant temperature would need to be much lower, and dissipate much more, so the area gets very large real quick.
I cannot emphasize how expensive a functional 2km+ radiator would be in space. It’s mind bogglingly expensive.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 8 hours ago:
Heat is radiated into the vacuum for fre
When you combine that with a mesh network like Starlink, the need for laying fiber lines disappears entirely
Citation needed.
And on water usage, I will point out that gas generators and evaporative cooling are only used because other methods (geothermal, big radiators, heatpumps) are somewhat more expensive.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 8 hours ago:
I mean, a future where we can manufacture electronics and spaceflight tech off Earth is far, far away. Like so far a lot of other technologies are going to scramble the economics anyway.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 8 hours ago:
I’m pretty sure that’s the point TBH.
Kinda scary when the context is these kinds of corporate systems, though.
- Comment on ..? 14 hours ago:
Yeah, there’s all sorts of crazy political purity tests on Lemmy, and associated misuse of slurs.
And on Wikipedia:
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On one side, my MAGA-adjacent family is starting to question it as “liberal biased”… as they leave Fox News blasting in the background.
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On the other, tankies and some different leftist extremist leftists dismiss it as propaganda.
That’s a good sign, to me. Its never been perfect and has problems, but extremists trying to tear its credibility down is a sign of just how valuable it is.
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- Comment on ..? 15 hours ago:
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 16 hours ago:
That’s because science literacy is pretty low.
And to be fair, the average person doesn’t need to understand vacuum thermodynamics. The issues is when a few of those “average people” are now billionaires making decisions, surrounded by yes men and feeds instead of experts informing them of reality.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 16 hours ago:
It doesn’t matter.
It’s a fantasy in these billionaire’s heads, a meme, and no one is telling them no. So they’re going to fund it, whether it makes any sense or not.
- Comment on Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea. 16 hours ago:
It’s not speculation. Nvidia themselves have run experiments with GPUs in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography (eg newer chips).
- Comment on Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS 1 day ago:
So do all the Microsoft subscriptions they already buy, yet they’re extremely popular anyway?
- Comment on Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS 1 day ago:
Businesses will adore this. I can guarantee a lot of us will be forced to use these at work, like Teams and CoPilot.
- Comment on Asus and Dell announce new mini PCs for Windows 365 | Goodbye local OS 1 day ago:
Especially for businesses. At work you’ll have no choice but to use something like this.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 1 day ago:
But the point is that Valve could easily be Amazon some day. All these little companies taking their first anticompetitive steps could.
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 days ago:
Eh, the context I was thinking of is that they are constantly playing “safety theatre” where it absolutely doesn’t matter. They’ve tried to kill open models and basically capture regulators by misleading or outright lying, for their benefit.
In other words, this is a case of “a broken clock is right sometimes,” and I think they knew Trump will back down.
- Comment on Silicon Valley Rallies Behind Anthropic in A.I. Clash With Trump 2 days ago:
Yeah… Microsoft and Google have a list of employees to fire now.
Trump will back off to some extent, to avoid inflaming stock markets (and his Big Tech friends heavily invested in Anthropic).
And Anthropic will fire a few people and make money somehow.
That’s about it.
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 days ago:
That’s basically always been the case anyway, except for Gemini for long context, perhaps.
And, of couse, prioritize open models over API. It’s:
Open training models > open weights models > restrictively licensed open models > open weights models over API > Claude/Gemini > don’t bother with OpenAI/Grok
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 days ago:
Anthropic is self righteous and self serving.
Like, I like local LLMs more than most and Anthropic models are great at the moment, but don’t mistake Anhropic for having a spine.
- Comment on President Donald Trump bans Anthropic from use in government systems 2 days ago:
Talk in other comment sections is this means Nvidia (or AMD, or Cerebras, or Intel or anyone) can’t legally supply Anthropic with hardware.
So it effectively kills the company?
And at the other extreme, a lot of Big Tech (like Palantir) is heavily reliant on Anthropic, which would unsettle the oligarchs and likely force Trump to walk back.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform.
One can make similar points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
I think they’re talking about Steam key resellers, which I wasn’t referencing. That’s a whole other thing (and can indeed be priced lower than the main storefront, I believe).
- Comment on DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media 3 days ago:
Way too many DVDs are interlaced/telecined though.
Or worse, some hellish combination through the producers editing mixed stuff together. It makes scaled footage, panning, and some motion look really awful once you notice it.
- Comment on DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media 3 days ago:
Dark scenes on a poor quality TV can look awful.
But many times they’re encoded dreadfully anyway, and DVDs tend to be better in this respect.
Interlacing is awful though.
- Comment on DVDs are the new vinyl records: Why Gen Z is embracing physical media 3 days ago:
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
Yeah…
That’s how Amazon worked at first.
- Comment on Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy— Amazon, its vendors, and competing retailers are price fixing, hiking up prices for consumer products 3 days ago:
I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam or competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten do delist your game.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon or about Amazon services that have helped them. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed.
- Comment on Facebook is absolutely cooked 1 week ago:
Also, this is not that far from Instagram. And even with real women it always felt slimy to me.
And… weird. What’s the appeal?
