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Starcloud
71–80 of 325 posts
Re: Starcloud
#72I had a good laugh. - You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price. - You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet. - You need a heat transport mediu…
Also: repairs. Every time I read someone’s story about large-scale ML training, a bunch of it is about identifying failing or flaky equipment and fixing it. That’s not so easy in space.
Re: Starcloud
#73is this a joke? isn't cooling in space a really big problem? how does it make sense to run a data centre with huge cooling requirements in a place where cooling is very difficult to accomplish?
Re: Starcloud
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to do all of this with current technology. Just... Why? The cost would be exorbitant; even with really clever deployment tech, the launch costs are gonna be dominated by solar panels and radiators. This is a super cool idea and seems like perfect investor-bait. That's about where it ends.
Perhaps a hedge in case apocalyptic scenarios disable or reduce networks on the ground?
Apocalyptic scenarios where terrestrial communication methods going back over a century are no longer feasible, but we can still readily talk to space? And maintain/replace the stuff we have up there?
Re: Starcloud
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free in the sense of astronomical capital and operational costs.
r&d sure, not sure about ops as you can probably just detach a faulty module and launch a replacement.
Stationkeeping is not free, satellite monitoring is not free, and any replacement to any component is now a multi-year, at least 1+ million dollar affair (or most likely a complete replacement, since not many satellites have done in-situ repairs).
Re: Starcloud
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free in the sense of astronomical capital and operational costs.
r&d sure, not sure about ops as you can probably just detach a faulty module and launch a replacement.
Not an expert in this area, but I think that that "just" is hiding a lot of complexity. Plus you also need some remotely operated robots to mount the replacement.
Re: Starcloud
#77[flagged]
Ok, but could you please follow HN's guidelines when posting here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? They include:
"Please don't fulminate."
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
Re: Starcloud
#78I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing. At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel beca…
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if the only energy they get is coming from the sun, then they only need to dissipate that same amount of heat (minus whatever energy was needed for beaming data down to Earth).
Re: Starcloud
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Can you please not post comments like this? Thoughtful criticism is welcome, of course, but this sort of thing isn't. Besides breaking the site guidelines, it takes threads in less interesting directions and evokes even worse comments from others. We're trying to avoid that here. " Don't be snarky. " " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us somethin…
Really, on second look, snark still feels justified here. The issue is with TFA. There is little room for a thoughtful comment in response to something transparent.
Some type of submissions will invariably not result in very deep discussion, when the topic itself is so shallow.
Re: Starcloud
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an answer in their whitepaper[0] - see Table 1. tl;dr - power is continuous and free via solar array [0] - https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
> “We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology… there’s no way to get there without a breakthrough… we need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something” -Sam Altman It's kind of depressing that the only way to make this tech better is to feed it more energy. (And apparently now to send it to space)
It's also interesting that everyone is convinced the same capabilities can't be realized with drastically less compute.