Western individualistic thinking struggles with the concept of biological limits. Our genes influence nearly everything we do or are, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Years ago, I read the book "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein. I was particularly struck by how sled racing dogs are now bred for motivation to train, rather than just their physical running ability. That is, breeders select for genes that make it so fun for the dogs to run that they keep going, while the dogs not bred this way just give up when they feel a little tired.
The story made me really think to what extent is my motivation to exercise, or do anything for that matter, affected by my genes? And if this sort of stuff is genetic, is there any more point to punishing myself for laziness than to feeling bad for being too short?
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
I don't know if data centers in space make sense or not, but I'm really not liking these comments that say something is "too expensive" or "too hard" without actually crunching the numbers to verify if it actually is. It's like you point out a number of completely obvious problems with the scheme and immediately, without any detailed analysis or expertise (I know this, because surely you can't have expertise in all of the problems you cited) in the said problems, claim that they are completely impossible for anyone to ever solve.
> 1. every gram you need to send to space is costly, a issue you don't have at ground level
This is a one time cost. Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
> 2. cooling is a catastrophe, sure space is cold, but also a vacuum, so the cooling rate is roughly the infrared radiation rate. This means if you are not careful with the surface of a satellite it can end up being very slowly cooked by sunlight alone not including running any higher heat producing component (as it absorbs more heat from sunlight then it emits, there is a reason satellites are mostly white, silver or reflective gold in color). Sure better surface materials fix that, but not to a point where you would want to run any heavy compute on it.
I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center. If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done. If it is impossible, then this will not happen, but I'm a physicist myself and I can't tell without a very involved analysis whether it is impossible or not to get enough cooling power for this in space, considering all, possibly ingenious ways to engineer the surfaces of the data center to dissipate a maximum amount of heat.
> 3. zero repair-ability, most long running satellites have a lot of redundancy. Also at least if you are bulk buying Nvidea GPGPUs on single digit Million Euro basis it's not rare that 30% have some level of defect. Not necessary "fully broken" but "performs less good then it should/compared to other units" kind of broken.
I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
> 4. radiation/solar wind protections are a huge problem. Heck even if you run things on earth it's a problem as long as your operations scale is large enough. In space things are magnitudes worse.
Again, it's not a question whether this is "problematic"; everything about putting data centers in space is. The question is whether, with huge amount of work and resources, they can engineer a solution to overcome this. If they can, it's again a one time cost for the data center that might be offset by the running costs of the facility.
> 5. every rocket lunch causes atmospheric damage, so does every satellite evaporating on re-entry. That wasn't that relevant in the past, but might become a problem just for keeping stuff like Starlink running. We don't need to make it worse by putting datacenters into space.
> 6. Kessler Syndrom is real and could seriously hurt humanity as a whole, no reason to make it much more likely by putting things into space which don't need to go there.
These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
> I would assume the people designing this are "very careful" with everything they put in the data center
Which is very nice for Musk, who can spend 30 seconds running his mouth, and people jump to assuming that a) it's being designed, b) by skilled people, c) the math and finances works out already, d) that 'completely obvious' problems must simply be your lying eyes, and contort themselves to put all the effort into defending it.
Even though Musk has a history of lying announcements and not being able to deliver and the 'completely obvious' problems were actually problems that nobody solved. Where is the 2017 full self driving car? Where is the Vision-over-LIDAR success? Where is the Hyperloop that "would be able to whisk passengers from L.A. to San Francisco in just 35 minutes"? Where are the 2025 orbital refuelling test flights for the Moon and Mars schedule, and the plans for how to keep cryogenic liquid Hydrogen cold in Space? Where was the "funding secured" Musk lied about for taking Tesla stock private in 2018 when judges found there wasn't any funding and fined him $20M? Where's the person Musk said in 2011 he could "put on Mars in a decade"? Where's the uncrewed Mars ship in 2022 he announced in 2017? The human voyage in 2024?
> "I'm a physicist myself"
And if someone tells you they have found a quantum zero-point free energy room temperature superconducting over-unity perpetual motion machine, do you jump to their defense because you assume the speaker must be very careful and smarter than everyone else? Or do you say "sounds unlikely; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
> "I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed."
The ISS cost 100-150 billion, is "larger than a 6 bedroom house", and its solar panels can generate 250 kW. NVidia says their AI datacenter costs $50-60 billion, needs 1GW of electricity, and look at the size of it: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nvidia-worth-5-trillion-...
You're looking at that multiple-warehouses-structure which could sink the output of an entire nuclear power station, and going with "it would be cheaper if we launched that into space"?
Sure, until you need to replace or upgrade it. How long does a server on earth last for, how often does it need maintenance / replacing? And how long is the expected or desired lifetime for a server in space? Then calculate weight and cost etc.
> Maybe the running costs are cheap enough to offset this.
"Maybe" is hope, you can't build a business on hope / wishful thinking. And the running costs for data centers on earth can be reduced too if you build them the same way as a sattelite - solar panels + battery + radiative cooling gives you enough data to compare. But servers / data centers aren't built that way because of cost vs benefit.
> If achieving the cooling is only very hard and requires careful material engineering, then it can be worked out and they will get it done.
See, it's possible for sure - we HAVE computers in space, powered, cooled, running 24/7. The questions are whether it makes economic sense, both launch costs and running / maintenance costs. That's straight math, and the math isn't mathing.
> I suppose they could make something like the International Space Station, which would get regular traffic back-and-forth exchanging and servicing hardware as needed.
Sure, but the ISS itself cost ~100 billion to build and operate - probably more, this is based on a ten second search query. While I'm sure launches are cheaper than ever and will be even cheaper in the future, it's still tens of billions to build a data center in space, plus you'd need astronauts, supplies, hardware, etc - all a LOT more expensive than the equivalent processing power on earth.
> These are collective problems for the whole of humanity and will not concern an individual actor such as Elon Musk who wants to send more satellites into space.
True, so we as humanity should offer resistance to plans to launch thousands of objects into space unless they have a clear and definite benefit. I'm not worried about Starlink, it's a benefit to all the areas that don't have (open) access to the internet and they're in low-earth orbit so they'll fall back within 5 years. But I just don't see the benefit in putting datacenters in space, not when it's so much cheaper and more viable to put them on earth.
The problem is not the whole of social media per se, it is the monetization mechanisms used in the social media platforms. I'd think it would be better to ban the addictive algorithms, although it would be difficult or impossible to define precisely what to ban then.
Hacker News is a sort of social media platform, but I would have no problem with my kids using it without any sort of restrictions. The same is not true for Tik Tok or even Facebook.
I'd think that most people in science would associate the name with an optical prism. A single large political event can't override an everyday physical phenomenon in my head.
> how much does Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds really change the player as a person (even if the end of the latter is particularly emotionally poignant)?
I haven't played those games, but, in general, I guess it depends on what kind of change do you mean? Playing first-person shooters certainly transforms your brains in some ways; you become better at tracking small objects on the screen; your spatial reasoning likely improves; the coordination between you hands and eyes develops to respond to events in the game; etc.
If the bar for something being art is that it transforms the mind, it's an incredibly low bar for games. Any game, which is not ridiculously easy, forces the player the learn the controls and the rules of the game (otherwise the player can't progress). The more original the controls and the gameplay is (to the player), the more learning has to happen. For someone disagreeing with this, try watching someone play a first-person shooter for the first time in their life, and then compare it to someone who has been playing Counter-Strike for years. If the resulting difference in skill is not a result of the game transforming the brains of the player, then what is it?
What doesn't get talked about enough in these sorts of discussions is that the games have a certain tactile and/or rhythmic component to them that movies, music, and most other traditional art forms lack. To me, the most interesting part of any game is how the game "flows"; how snappy the controls are, how the game gives feedback to me pushing buttons on my controller. If the graphics are bad or the story is weak, the game can still be good if the gameplay feels good.
If compared to traditional arts, the closest thing to games would be dancing, because it also has an interactive/kinetic component to it like games. When someone criticizes for the lack of a mature, interesting plot or characters, it's a bit like criticizing a folk dancing performance for the same.
Just a side note, but for most of history, art was participatory. People participated in rituals, songs, dances, etc. It's only a recent idea that art is about consumption of what others have created.
Can you? I imagine e.g. Google is using material not available to the public to train their models (unsencored Google books, etc.). Also, the chat bots, like Gemini, are not just pure LLMs anymore, but they also utilize other tools as part of their computation. I've asked Gemini computationally heavy questions and it successfully invokes Python scripts to answer them. I imagine it can also use other tools than Python, some of which might not even be publicly known.
I'm not sure what the situation is currently, but I can easily see private data and private resources leading to much better AI tools, which can not be matched by open source solutions.
While they will always have premiere models that only run on data center hardware at first, the good news about the tooling is that tool calls are computationally very minimal and no problem to sandbox/run locally, at least in theory, we would still need to do the plumbing for it.
So I agree that open source solutions will likely lag behind, but that's fine. Gemini 2.5 wasn't unusable when Gemini 3 didn't exist, etc.
Yes, because local models can run Internet search tools. Even the big boys like openai etc I prefer the results quality when it's made a search - and they seem to have realised this too, the majority of my queries now kick off searches.
I've been a huge sceptic of the whole AI hype since the beginning now. Whenever I've tried any of the AI tools, the results have just been underwhelming. However, two weeks ago I tried Gemini (the pro version) and have been using it for various, random tasks and questions since then, and I've been pretty impressed.
There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations.
I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).
Years ago, I read the book "The Sports Gene" by David Epstein. I was particularly struck by how sled racing dogs are now bred for motivation to train, rather than just their physical running ability. That is, breeders select for genes that make it so fun for the dogs to run that they keep going, while the dogs not bred this way just give up when they feel a little tired.
The story made me really think to what extent is my motivation to exercise, or do anything for that matter, affected by my genes? And if this sort of stuff is genetic, is there any more point to punishing myself for laziness than to feeling bad for being too short?
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