sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
7hr ago
Ascend 950 SuperPod has an area of 1000 square meters for the actual scale-up compute unit that works as one GPU.
Uh, okay. Manhattan has an area of 20 square miles. What's the relevance to space radiators?
«Redwire Q-Rad Deployable Radiator (commercial, TRL 5-6): 3.5–4.9 kg/m² areal density. Source: Redwire radiator datasheet lists; brackets our StarThink V1 assumption as plausible near-term path.» Let's say 4. This is just 8 fucking tons. This is peanuts. At $100/kg it'd be merely $800000 for delivery, 8% of Starship capacity, or four more big Starlinks. 1 megawatt of compute costs… let's see, a modern-ish GPU that draws 1 kW in a rack can go for $20K at least, and actually we'll see prices creep towards $50K. Well there you have it, $20 million as the floor (and GPUs are just ≈40% of BOM). 1 megawatt is 8760 MWh/year. Google tells me wholesale electricity in the US is like $45. Almost $400K a year of free power. None of this matters of course, when inference margins are >80% even with hardware depreciation, and all that matters is deploying as fast as possible, as much as possible.
Hmm. What is StarThink?
I think it's quite clear that mass is not the concern I raised wrt the size of the radiators, which is why my post did not say anything about mass. Huge radiators cause drag and are vulnerable to micrometeorites. Redundant cooling loops can mitigate micrometeorites, but then you need bigger radiators.
But since you brought it up - the radiator you posted is solid state, SpaceX says they will use circulating liquid radiators, same for starcloud. I expect this is because circulating liquid radiators scale more than passive radiators like the one you are looking at. Just a guess on my part, though.
Now, StarCloud says each data center will be 5GW. They are cagey about how exactly they will dissipate 5GW, but with a simple water/glycol loop we are looking at 50,000 kg/s of flow which is massive. All those pumps will of course also need to be cooled.
On top of that, the radiators need to be filled with coolant. Back of the envelope math, again for a simple coolant loop, suggests perhaps 100,000 tons of coolant in the radiator, so we're looking at $10B just to get the coolant up there across hundreds of launches and nothing else. They do not go into the math of this in their whitepaper, probably because single phase liquid coolant is totally infeasible.
You don't know the relevant numbers in any of the involved verticals, and for some reason (unfathomable to me) you want to believe that the numbers support your (quixotic but perplexingly popular) case against compute in space. They don't.
Tedious bluster. Please save it for Twitter.
sarker
competency crisis actor
10hr ago
It's puzzling to respond to a report with numbers worked out with an appeal to authority and a "it's not an issue". Puzzling, but perhaps typical of this discourse.
Please show the math.
sarker
competency crisis actor
14hr ago
The economic case for asteroid mining is also dubious as far as I can tell.
Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.
Indeed, and I have seen people discuss that a niche for space datacenters might be processing satellite data up there rather than beaming it down (for latency and availability reasons). Perhaps, presumably you wouldn't AI-scale DCs for that so it might be more feasible.
sarker
competency crisis actor
17hr ago
the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis
You won't see this because you've blocked me, but this isn't true and several people have tried to do the math. Here's the most recent. To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters. The article doesn't discuss solar panel sizing, but using star cloud's numbers of 400 W/sqm we're talking about 2500 sq m before we consider redundancy. And that's just power and cooling for a single MW. In fact, it seems to me that it's the space DC boosters who refuse to engage on this and show their work.
There's nothing "wrong" with it per se, but most people don't want to do it and historically speaking most people have never wanted to do it and have generally not done it in times and places of low infant mortality.
sarker
competency crisis actor
21hr ago
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
— John Donne, "pre-WWII"
sarker
competency crisis actor
21hr ago
The kind of sex that avoids the possibility of conception either sucks, or you've got your wife on a hormone regimen.
Non hormonal IUDs exist, and so does cycle timing.
In my marriage we disagreed on the timing of children. As a result we have some regrets that we resist lingering on, but I'm now convinced it probably shouldn't have been our choice to make. Who should want to accept the burden of a choice like that?
Unless you want to have 7+ children, your options are:
-
Contraception
-
No sex
-
Marry your wife shortly before menopause
In the first two cases you are still stuck with the burden of deciding when to have kids.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
He might. Of course, he might also get along with a future Democratic admin, as he did in the past.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
the implosion of the Democratic Party as a nationally competitive entity. The national party is losing the fundraising race badly
The immolation of the Democratic Party and the rise of Zohran Mamdani Thought would be a development not necessarily in Elon's favor.
The Dems next top prospect for President is apparently caught up in a corruption probe. Their bench is critically thin.
A two year long wiretap campaign that hasn't led to anything on Newsom. At this point if you aren't being investigated by the Justice Department you are simply not a viable presidential candidate.
HAKUTO‑R Mission 1
I mean, it landed, but I thought we were discussing soft landings rather than impacting the surface at a high rate of speed.
HAKUTO‑R Mission 2 (Resilience)
Same deal.
Counting only successful landings we're at 3600 kg. Chandrayaan-3 had a launch mass of 3900 kg, so SpaceX is only exceeding Japan.
I admit I was mistaken about 0, but copy pasting AI slop in response doesn't inspire confidence.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
And of course, straightforward murder is always an option.
There's no need to be in power for that.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
Indeed. Of course, SpaceX's tonnage delivered to the moon to date is 0, lagging the space programs mentioned above.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I could believe that SpaceX will be the most cost effective way to the moon. However, national space programs do not operate in a free market and it's a mistake to think that SpaceX could drive the Chinese or Indian space programs "out of business" any more than the East India Company drove the Portuguese navy out of business. To extend the metaphor, the only way SpaceX could monopolize the moon a la the EIC would be to shoot down any other rockets that try to land. Perhaps you believe this will happen, but let's say I am skeptical that it will pan out this way.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
Difficult to see how that happens for the moon given that at this point China, India, and Japan have landed on the moon.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
I suppose they might be useful for the history of philosophy, though I suspect that we are already indirectly aware of the philosophical hits of the era via citations in works that have come down to us. Would we benefit from having the full text of some lost work? I suspect not.
At least historical records have the advantage of being factually related to the world we live in. I agree that linguistics will not be upset by an Etruscan treatise but I think it would be cool if we can read the Etruscan texts, and it might provide some more insights on the Tyrrhenian languages which I think would be cool.
Basically, I would be much more interested in discovering new true facts than what is basically a fanfiction collection.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
It's a great achievement and I'm looking forward to more scrolls but it will be a tremendous disappointment if it's just philosophical or scientific scrolls. As far as I am concerned, philosophy has made almost no progress on the central question of human life (how does one live a good life?) since the ancient greeks and I doubt that uncovering some minor scribblers' writings will suddenly reveal the answer to that. As for science, the ancients were basically wrong about everything (see Aristotle on the number of teeth in humans) except for the things in which we've long far exceeded them.
Fingers crossed for something actually useful like missing history or literature or a treatise on Etruscan.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
I don't know anything about guitars so I'll have to take your word for it. But ultimately if there's so many companies to acquire and they still are being undercut it seems like the cost to entry to this field are not exactly massive and the bigger concern is regulation making stratocaster shaped guitars illegal rather than Fender somehow buying out all the competition. A fat monopolist with no moat is extremely attractive prey.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
This seems like a strange conclusion when above you write that Fender can't whack all the moles undercutting them from the bottom and is powerless to do anything about those taking over the top of the market. It's difficult to say how profitable Fender is since it's private but given that it keeps changing hands it's hard to imagine it's a flourishing business. Seems like the market is giving them their just desserts, and hopefully this copyright thing won't undermine that. What's the problem here?
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
I don't know that it's "surprising" per se. But I think that the rationalists would say that nootropics and the things you listed are not woo, so it's just rational to be into them, while they would readily admit that crystals are woo so it's irrational to be into them. In other words, the rationalists are being irrational by their own standards and are susceptible to the same things they claim to not be susceptible to. Everyone, rationalist or not, can agree on these facts.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
Let's start over. You initially complained that tech was 10% white. Looks like you retreated from that, now your new claim is that tech is <20% white Americans. But you can't tell how long someone, or someone's family, has been in the country by looking at their name, which is presumably how you got your initial 10% count. So I'm confused what the evidence is here besides "trust me bro", or what there even is to discuss.
I work in big tech and teams that are 30%-40% white American born are quite normal. I've never seen a big company that's 10% white, but maybe that's what's happening in WITCH. Can't speak to that.
I've also not faced obstacles to advancement despite being a white man. In fact, when I had an Indian boss (a naturalized citizen) he was very eager to push me for promotion and did so successfully.
As I would tell a progressive, have you considered that your lack of professional success is not due to discrimination? I wish Hlynka was here, he really was basically right about everything.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
They count hispanics, semites, and slavs in that.
Latinos are separately listed at 7.5% overall so even if every Latino is also white we're still at just under 40% white.
Slavs are actually white, if you feel that you are being replaced by Slavs I can't really help you.
As explained, it's a simple application of the Stefan-Boltzmann law.
2000 sq m is for a small DC. StarCloud proposes a radiator of nearly 8 sq km.
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