491–500 of 1001 posts
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Cooling by mass effect style yeeting hot chunks of metal out the back. Where will they go, nobody knows!
When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.
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You're thinking of outer space. At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. there is plenty of altitude above the karman line where there is enough atmosphere to dissipate heat. Furthermore, i don't know if they figured it out, but radiation can dissipate heat, that's how we get heat from the su…
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space. Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
SpaceX: "we're going to put datacenters in space"
HN comments: "obviously we'll need to move human civilization into space first for this to make sense. checks out."
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I think people underestimate how quickly heat radiates to space. A rock in orbit around Earth will experience 250F/125C on the side facing the Sun, and -173C/-280F on the other side. The ability to rotate an insulating shield toward the sun means you're always radiating.
I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening. In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you wan…
That is the goal of Starship though. The ISS has a mass of 400 ton, the goal is to need only two cheap launches of Starship v4 for that.
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> win the AI race I keep seeing that term, but if it does not mean "AI arms race" or "AI surveillance race", what does it mean? Those are the only explanations that I have found, and neither is any race that I would like to see anyone win.
Big tech businesses are convinced that there must be some profitable business model for AI, and are undeterred by the fact that none has yet been found. They want to be the first to get there, raking in that sweet sweet money (even though there's no evidence yet that there is money to be made here). It's industry-wide FOMO, nothing more.
Imo I would be extremely angry if I owned any spacex equity. At least nvidia might be selling to china in the short term... what's the upside for spacex?
Also why talk about training not inference? That needs data centers too and could be what they're intending to do.
So this post is clearly not an effort to objectively work out the feasibility but just a biased list of excuses to support the author's unsubstantiated opinion.
I'm convinced that >30% of this comes from ideas leaking out of fiction such as like Neuromancer , and percolating through the minds of wealthy people attracted to some of the concepts. Namely, the dream of being a hyper-wealthy dynasty, above any earthly government, controlling an extraterritorial Las Vegas Fiefdom In Space. (Which in the book, also hosted a powerful AI.) Then they work backwards, trying to figure o…
I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.
If they get 3/10 things right, and 60 Minutes highlights those in the next interview, they’re set!
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Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.
> every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power So it's dark 50% of the time on the moon... just like here on Earth.
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> he did jumpstart the EV industry. He has put up satellites every week for years. He is still a net benefit to all of us. Talk to any former SpaceX or Tesla employee. They will clue you in that both were successful in spite of Elon, not because of him. The Cybertruck was really the first product he saw to completion from his own design. And well...
I think you under appreciate him a bit here. No he's not a super genius. He's probably not even a good engineer. But he is a) a total a.hole and b) a tremendous bullshitter. There are circumstances in which you need such a person to succeed (see also Steve Jobs). He yelled at people for 10 years straight and he was crucial in facilitating capital to build these very capital intensive products. A regular smart person…
why is lying at the edge of committing fraud so respected?
I would not assume cooling has been worked out. Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build…