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Starcloud

ycombinator.com

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Re: Starcloud

#151

Post by p1necone »

amelius wrote: post #135
echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

Read the "Thermal Management" section, page 8 ...

I read it, it sounds like they also understand it would require more engineering effort and size/weight/materials than cooling something terrestrially.

Re: Starcloud

#152

Post by dfltr »

echoangle wrote: post #103

I’m still not sure how people can believe this, this makes zero sense to me. There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem. And you need more redundancy because the radiation will crash your computers. And launch is very expensive of course. And the whole presentation is completely ludicrous. Look at table 1 in the linked PDF and tell me you’re serious. There is no additional cost…

There should be a whole checklist of "Things that were still a hard problem in The Expanse" that any space-related startup has to answer.

Re: Starcloud

#154

Post by thot_experiment »

> passive cooling

what the actual fuck? my boys joseph and ludwig would like to have a word with y'all

in ideal conditions, your gpu putting out 600W will need about a square meter facing deep space to keep it at 80c, this idea is absurd on first principles alone, maybe if you have heat pumps you can push this but then you're dealing with on orbit fluid loops that you can't maintain, as i said, what the fuck?

Re: Starcloud

#155

Post by echoangle »

vermilingua wrote: post #141
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got to the comma in the first sentence from the webpage and immediately went to the comments because I had the exact same thought. Given Y Combinator's vetting process, I'm sure they would have tackled this problem somehow - maybe by feeding the heat into another process? It will be interesting to see how they've solved this.

> Given Y Combinator's vetting process… The vetting process of the fund that quite famously invests in the founders over the idea?

I hope that’s what’s going on here. They can’t seriously fund something like this and expect anything close to the pitched output.

But I also wouldn’t fund the founders here because they have to be incompetent or grifting. I seriously don’t see any other way, it’s that ridiculous.

Re: Starcloud

#156

Post by jamessinghal »

jrflowers wrote: post #121
Invictus0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it--are the founders just grifters? How did this startup even make it off the drawing board?

It’s only a grift if they know they can’t solve the cooling issue and they falsify data around their proposed solution and they publicly embarrass their investors a la Theranos. Outside of that, accepting money and saying “I will simply solve the enormous problem with my idea by solving it” is not only normal, but actively encouraged and rewarded in the VC sphere. Suggesting that that way of operating is anything sho…

I'd argue that some of the assumptions made in the whitepaper are so egregiously optimistic that they cross the line into grifting, but it's impossible to know the true intentions of the founders.

For one, the cost they ascribe to the space bound solar array being only $2 million for 40 MW is pretty out there.

Re: Starcloud

#158

Post by thot_experiment »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #143
echoangle wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The radiators on the ISS aren’t passive though, they have actively pumped fluid loops to get heat from the hot parts into the radiators.

That's interesting to know. But since it's space, how do they then cool down the hot fluid?

Blackbody radiation, see (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law)

Re: Starcloud

#159

Post by jamessinghal »

azinman2 wrote: post #120
matt-p wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely most "AI" DCs are spending less than 9KW on cooling for every 100KW of servers. If you were that bothered about getting that to zero, you could literally sink them into the ocean, build a heat network so the town can take the heat for free or use any of a dozen more established and practical ways to do that.

Please don’t suggest heating the ocean! Someone might just go to try to do that. The ocean is already warming too much!

It's a bit demoralizing how many suggestions in this thread would have significant environmental effects beyond what large scale AI training already has.
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