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Starbase, LA

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Re: Starbase, LA

#391

Post by tootie »

sockaddr wrote: post #74

Elon-types won't "dig us out" of our mess. Removing parasitic elements in government spending and policy will. This starts with politics. We first need a healthy, educated, engaged, and safe population. All else follows. These are all things Elon actively works against. You aren't part of his future.

This is almost certainly false. The vast majority of government spending goes directly to people that need it or debt service. There is very little outright fraud as DOGE quickly learned. The only meaningful target for cuts is military. And the only solution to debt is higher taxes.

Re: Starbase, LA

#392

Post by tootie »

> We’re committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana

Does each job pay $30M?

Re: Starbase, LA

#393

Post by etc-hosts »

mandolingual wrote: post #357
thegrim33 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so interesting to me that the whole "futurism" concept got co-opted into some sort of political propaganda machine. All the articles are negative hit pieces, they're all reductive, they're almost all political in nature. I used to go on the futurism subreddit years ago and it's all the same there. You'd think "futurism" would be about .. promoting new technology, ushering in the future, you know .. futurism. Not…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism It's always been political

Mussolini and other Italian inventors-of-Fascism figures were closely allied with the Futurism movement and Marinetti.

https://www.booksontrial.com/mussolini-and-marinetti-a-timel...

Re: Starbase, LA

#394

Post by WalterBright »

jryan49 wrote: post #375
WalterBright wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Present some evidence that he cut NSF spending.

A quick Google search will show you... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/26/nati... You're just willfully ignorant

Asking for evidence is not "willfully ignorant". People making claims have the onus of backing them up. Anyhow, the link to the canceled projects is:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

I looked at maybe a dozen at random, and only one seemed to have anything about scientific research. Of course, that is not a complete survey, but none of them looked important. I'm sure there are a few that are important.

Which one(s) do you think are most important?

Re: Starbase, LA

#395

Post by ggreer »

UltraSane wrote: post #385
ggreer wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of solar panel gets only 140 watts per square meter in space? Even with efficiency as low as 20%, you'd get 1 megawatt from 3,700 square meters. And you'd design the satellite to minimize heat transfer between the panels and main body, because panels can run at higher temperatures than the computers. Since heat radiation goes up with the 4th power of temperature, the panels would not need large radiators. I…

That includes overprovisioning for times the satellite is behind the earth. And the Tesla robotaxi is still a embarrassing failure.

I'm sorry, but you do not know what you are talking about. If you'd read the Starcloud white paper I linked to, you'd see that the plan is to put satellites in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, meaning they would be in constant sunlight and the backs of the solar panels would radiate to deep space. No orbital compute project is planning to put satellites in an orbit where Earth blocks the sun, as that would require large battery banks to power the computers while in shadow.

Re: Starbase, LA

#396

Post by ethbr1 »

modeless wrote: post #255
jubilanti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Futurism is a focus on the future. The future may be good or bad. Your desire to focus only on the upsides (for you) and not want to hear about the consequences, externalities, or dangers is one of the most "political" positions a technologist can have. Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.

Yeah, I hate modern science fiction. It's almost all terrible. Sci-fi written in the time of actual ongoing world wars and the Cold War's constant threat of instant nuclear annihilation was far more optimistic, and far more imaginative.

Read more solarpunk then?

Re: Starbase, LA

#397

Post by ineedaj0b »

rurp wrote: post #143
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being down-voted (and so shall I) but I think you're right. Despite all the animosity towards him, Musk is doing things that are economically meaningful for our nation. We'll need a few more of "him" to dig us out of this situation I reckon, but overall I still hope it's possible. (Anyone asking antagonistic questions can go ahead and save their fingers, I won't respond to the petty comments.)

Few Americans have done more than musk to destroy state capacity and to enable corruption on a massive scale, all while enriching himself to an unprecedented degree. That's great for him and his cronies that he has gotten so wealthy doing it, but he's been a huge net-negative to most humans. I get that rockets are cool and a lot of people in the tech bubble think that starlink is the greatest thing ever, but most peo…

[flagged]

Re: Starbase, LA

#398

Post by WalterBright »

nrr wrote: post #334
WalterBright wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem. Once you understand engineering, transferring that skill to another engineering discipline is not that hard. For example, the equations for Newtonian mechanics, electronics, beam design, rotating inertia, etc., are interchangeable. > his competence to build orbital data centers Since nobody has yet built…

> I implemented float-to-string for my compiler's printf back sometime before 1985. It's a medium difficult problem. It might have been medium difficult back in 1985, but the state of the art has progressed in the intervening 40 years. The constraint of correctness makes things trickier because it further imposes three requirements: completeness, uniqueness, and determinism. Unless the implementer has the skill to pr…

There was no test suite for it available that I could use for correctness checks, so I did what I could.

I also implemented IEEE 754 floating point in asm. For that I did have an exhaustive test suite, and passed it 100%.

Re: Starbase, LA

#399

Post by carlosochoa »

tootie wrote: post #392

> We’re committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana Does each job pay $30M?

Not all the money is going towards salaries. I imagine that steel and concrete cost quite a bit in the specific configurations required by the project.

Re: Starbase, LA

#400

Post by ineedaj0b »

archagon wrote: post #382
Rover222 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ironically, this is the most Reddit-brained kind of comment imaginable.

Everyone who’s someone has moved to Twitter (or bluesky), even PG does not comment here like he used to.

Reddit is dead, the investors know this, their only income source is selling data to AI companies, and discord ate the “build your own community” lunch.

Talk with someone from a lab and they’ll tell you weighing Reddit data too highly results in more “hallucinations” so even their product is bad..

All the high signal commenters left Reddit, and they’re leaving here slowly too.

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