Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I read the white paper for this data centers in orbit shit https://archive.ph/BS2Xy and the only mentions of maintenance seem to be "we're gonna make 'em more reliable" and "they should be easy to replace because we gonna make 'em modular"
This isn't a white paper, it's scribbles on a napkin
there’s so much wrong with this entire concept, but for some reason my brain keeps getting stuck on (and I might be showing my entire physics ass here so correct me if I’m wrong): isn’t it surprisingly hard to sink heat in space because convection doesn’t work like it does in an atmosphere and sometimes half of your orbital object will be exposed to incredibly intense sunlight? the whitepaper keeps acting like cooling all this computing shit will be easier in orbit and I feel like that’s very much not the case
also, returning to a topic I can speak more confidently on: the fuck are they gonna do for a network backbone for these orbital hyperscale data centers? mesh networking with the implicit Kessler syndrome constellation of 1000 starlink-like satellites that’ll come with every deployment? two way laser comms with a ground station? both those things seem way too unreliable, low-bandwidth, and latency-prone to make a network backbone worth a damn. maybe they’ll just run fiber up there? you know, just run some fiber between your satellites in orbit and then drop a run onto the earth.
You're entirely right. Any sort of computation in space needs to be fluid-cooled or very sedate. Like, inside the ISS, think of the laptops as actively cooled by the central air system, with the local fan and heatsink merely connecting the laptop to air. Also, they're shielded by the "skin" of the station, which you'd think is a given, but many spacebros think about unshielded electronics hanging out in the aether like it's a nude beach or something.
I'd imagine that a serious datacenter in space would need to concentrate heat into some sort of battery rather than trying to radiate it off into space. Keep it in one spot, compress it with heat pumps, and extract another round of work from the heat differential. Maybe do it all again until the differential is small enough to safely radiate.
@corbin Isn’t this also the idea behind the Mathroska Brain gigastructure?