Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
look at the depth of this grifting
a whole One (1!) H100! in space!
note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!
compute! in space! "what do you mean 'compute what'? compute!" I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it'll run Gemma![0] magic!
scan-time "inference", like you'd definitely know every parameter you'd want to query and every result you'd want to have, first-time, at scan! there's a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.
and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that's before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list
good god.
I guess the one good bit here is that it isn't the "we're gonna micromachine them in orbit!" bullshit fantasy, but I bet that's not far behind
[0] - "multimodal and wide language support" so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs... input... and... response... which again goes back to all those pesky "interaction" and "network" and "storage" questions.
This is something the writers of the Mass Effect series got right, and they were doing a sci-fi trilogy, not handling a literal space mission!
This will be easy thanks to the "Benevolence of the Rocket" equation as seen on Trashfuture.
Tf is a sneer machine
unless they talk about ukraine, then they're just a bunch of sorry vatniks.
Oof, really?
unfortunately. hard to say if this is caused by them being primarily contrarians or because alice is too much into warsaw pact nostalgia, or because it's edgy; edgelordism and reflexive contrarianism cause so many people to lose the contact with reality.
Heh I haven’t seen that, will have to go look
If we knew how to use hot air for rocket propulsion we could just shove saltman et al in there and solve multiple problems at once…alas
@froztbyte but this article clearly states that the vacuum is an advantage!
> Instead of relying on fresh water for cooling through evaporation towers, as many Earth-based data centers do, Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.
<cry>
just as the tshirt goes: my opening sentence was not for nothing
this reminds me of that episode of justice league unlimited where the superheroes are all on a satellite and batman says getting it built was just
though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working
Batman's superpower is being a billionaire, there was probably some Shenanigans^tm^ involved
i don't think it's fair to assume that a billionaire who dresses up like a bat to extra-legally fight crime necessarily engages in shenanigans when donating a satellite to his vigilante friends
@froztbyte Maybe it’ll mine bitcoin?
@froztbyte "vacuum is an insulator" oh well TIL
@BlueMonday1984
Yeah heat management in space turns out to be pretty fucking hard. You could ask “who knew?!” but there’s that whole space program thing…
I presume that they’re not in fact blind to this fact, mind you. You cannot be doing actual astro tech design without it (your object would never make it to launch - there’s too many blockers that’d stop it), but the properties of heat generation from a H100 are known, and thus whatever they’re applying to deal with it very can’t be lightweight/little
@froztbyte thats one thing but im still interested in the physics of the insulatory effects of the vacuum 👀
@xyhhx @froztbyte “vacuum is an insulator” is what makes a high-quality double-walled thermos high quality — there is no air between the outer and inner walls
@benchase oh shit, i knew that (when shopping for water bottles) but didn't put two and two together
@froztbyte
exactly so :)
no matter means no heat transmission through conduction (=particle motion), only radiation
@Reach_the_man so wait, is not heat a form of energy (or a result thereof)? can energy not dissipate through a vacuum?
or is it that the energy dissipates less effectively when it can't transfer itself *as heat* through a medium?
heat is describing the average kinetic energy of the material's particles, with no contact it can't transfer as kinetic energy, only through photons emitted
@Reach_the_man that clears it up for me! thanks for taking the time to answer