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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.)

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[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

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!

SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.

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.

[-] xyhhx@nso.group 3 points 4 days ago
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

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

[-] xyhhx@nso.group 4 points 4 days ago

@froztbyte thats one thing but im still interested in the physics of the insulatory effects of the vacuum 👀

[-] benchase@ohai.social 6 points 4 days ago

@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

[-] xyhhx@nso.group 5 points 4 days ago

@benchase oh shit, i knew that (when shopping for water bottles) but didn't put two and two together

@froztbyte

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago
[-] Reach_the_man@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

no matter means no heat transmission through conduction (=particle motion), only radiation

[-] xyhhx@nso.group 3 points 3 days ago

@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?

[-] Reach_the_man@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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

[-] xyhhx@nso.group 2 points 3 days ago

@Reach_the_man that clears it up for me! thanks for taking the time to answer

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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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