

I think it’s in reference to 


I think it’s in reference to 


I also use CodeFloe. While smaller, they have fewer guidelines around what is allowed to be there. While Codeberg is generally okay with people putting small private repos there, I don’t feel comfortable using what I view as a public resource for my private stuff.


(TL;DR: It would take >10,000 of the satellites described in the video just to move the two data centres studied in this paper to space)
I remember that video (been watching Scott Manley on-and-off since his KSP Interstellar series)
He’s right that you can cool 20kW just fine and I agree that 100kW is still very doable with today’s engineering. Let’s assume that a MW is also within reason, though I think we’re starting to stretch practicality there, as we’re now talking about about 2500m2 of radiator if I’m remembering right. That would be 25 radiator groups, each one 5 times the size of an ISS group. I bet we could manage that with a few years of development.
The two datacenters that were studied in the linked article were 36MW and 169MW. So just to replace those two you would need 200 of those pushing-the-boundaries-of-human-ability satellites. Or, if you look at the Starlink-sized satellites that Scott Manley was referencing, you’d need OVER 10,000. And that’s just two data centres in one state in one country in the world.
I don’t think its “impossible”, or that “it can’t be cooled”. I think that focusing on the possibility of space data centres takes attention away from the harm that terrestrial data centres are causing today. “It’s okay if we build these on Earth right now, because we’ll move them into space later”? There’s nothing as permanent as a temporary solution.
Let’s force these companies to go to space by charging them exorbitant amounts of money to build terrestrial data centres to compensate for the effects that they have here. What would it cost to cool the areas around those data centres back down again? 100 million? A billion?
(And BTW, I’m a software engineer that’s been working in the AI space since 2018, before LLMs went crazy. I’m optimistic about AI in general. I’m pessimistic about companies that are clearly dumping externalities out into the general public.)


The issue with space-based data centres is dissipating that heat, though. The ISS radiators can dissipate less than 100kW and they are the largest in space today, IIRC. Current land-based data centres already generate 100s of MW of heat. US Datacentres alone already consume multiple TWh of electricity/year.
I’m all for space-based data centres. But I don’t believe anyone who says they’re coming soon. One small space data centre would be 10 ISSs—the largest space architecture project to date.
I think what people who are pooh-poohing on space data centres are concerned about isn’t the literal heat issue, but that it serves the same purpose as the “Hyperloop”: not a real practicality, but serves to focus lawmakers attention in a direction that ignores a practical issue (with Hyperloop it was away from California HSR, which now has its own problems, but at least it was feasible)


The primary issue is that there’s a limit to how much energy you can get out based on the difference in temperature between the cold fluid (liquid or gas) and the hot fluid. With data centres it’s maybe 20°C? Based on that assumption and the Carnot Theorem you get a maximum work extraction efficiency of about 6-7%.
Unfortunately, in the data centres they obey the laws of thermodynamics.
It would work better in places that get colder, but unfortunately places like that don’t tend to have as much available electricity (or infrastructure).
We are starting to run up against fundamental laws of how much energy is required to do a certain amount of computation. i.e. In order to do a computation that moves a system from a state X to another state Y, there is a minimum amount of entropy change. That entropy change requires a certain amount of energy based on thermodynamics, known as the Landauer Limit.
We were already only about a billion times less efficient than the limit in 2012. I would wager we’ve improved computation per watt by 1-2 orders of magnitude since then. Which means we might only be 107 or so off of the limit. That sounds like a lot, but when you think about how fast we’re improving…
Common pattern - the acqui-hire.
“These people are working in a problem area that we want to do better in. We’ll buy their company for their expertise.”
Whether they keep existing products or not is not a major factor in the decision and gets evaluated later. Often, because they want the people working on something new the existing products are put into maintenance mode or shut down.
Source: Have been acquired for both talent and for product. Seen both.


It felt like a “Missed Connections” ad in a newspaper. (If you’re under 40, you might have to look up what that is)


My FP right now:



I work primarily in “classical” AI and have been working with it on-and-off for just under 30 years now. Programmed my first GAs and ANNs in the 90s. I survived Prolog. I’ve had prolonged battles getting entire corporate departments to use the terms “Machine Learning” and “Artificial Intelligence” correctly, understand what they mean, and how to start thinking about them to incorporate them correctly into their work.
Thus why I chose the word “LLM” in my response, not “AI”.
I will admit that I assumed that by “AI” Jimmy Carr was referring to LLMs, as that’s what most people mean these days. I read the TL;DW by @masterspace@lemmy.ca but didn’t watch the original content. If I’m wrong in that assumption and he’s referring to classical AI, not LLMs, I’ll edit my original post.


Ugh, I’m tired of point 2. Yes, LLMs have found a few patterns in large-scale study analyses that humans hadn’t, but they weren’t deep insights and there had been buried hypotheses around them from existing authors, IIRC (too lazy to source).


If China is okay with the sale that means it’s not good for the US. Danger, Will Robinson, danger!


I never beat Hollow Knight (yeah yeah, I know), so I’m working my way through that. I think I’m about half way? Obviously hard to tell.


For those who don’t know, Bluesky isn’t really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.
You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can’t just “stand up an instance”.
Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
(I know you’ve already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I’m putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).
I don’t frequent that world much these days, but I personally preferred the agent/pull model when I did. I can’t really articulate why, I think I feel comfortable knowing that the agent will run with the last known config on the machine, potentially correcting any misconfiguration even if the central host is down.
The big debate back in the day was Puppet vs. Chef (before Ansible/SaltStack). Puppet was more declarative, Chef more imperative.
I also admit, I don’t like YAML, other than for simple, mostly flat config and serializing.
I further admit that Ansible just has a bigger community these days, and that’s worth something. When I need to do a bit of CM these days, I use Ansible.
So wait… Did Puppet have a license change as well recently? Is this just preemptive because it looks like Perforce is starting to change things?


The Free Software Foundation requires “CLAs” as well. I have no fear that they’re going to rug-pull. I don’t think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it’s even a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn’t, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don’t).
JIRA Data Center: What am I? Chopped liver‽
https://www.atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center/jira
Agreed that JIRA is… not the greatest tool.


Which documents, you say?
What happened?
Shredded, you say?
How badly?
To bits, you say? Oh my my…
X2go is the successor to NX and works well IMO, though I’ve never tried Rustdesk to compare.
Don’t all devs rewrite their commit history before pushing? I have a hundred commits in my branch, and I rebase that shit into a single-digit number of commits that actually capture my intent.
(j/k, I know they don’t, I have read my colleagues’ MRs)