Does anyone understand the math behind this bit?

> In the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth....

Because the panel is positioned such that it's is always exposed to the sun.

1: There is no night or day.

2: There are no seasons.

3: There is no weather.

Basically, the primary motivating factor of putting AI in space is abundant solar energy. Otherwise, AI in space makes little to no economic sense.

But solar panels are dirt cheap. Just slap 8x more of them on earth.

It's nuts that it's supposed to be easier to send them to space than to truck them to a desert.

I didn't mention the second compelling reason for data centers in space... All that requires land!

(But to be quite frank, I don't think data center is in space are going to be practical.)

To build on the economic/practical issues.

The useful life of cutting edge AI server hardware will require constant rotation of equipment to potentially remain competitive with more accessible solutions.

Heat management ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-w6G7VEwNq0 )

Hardening of equipment for the environment. ECC isn't going to be enough. I would have to defer to experts about the best way to manage it, but it either means custom hardware, weight, or both.

Repairs are impossible. Hopefully a sat can degrade gracefully, but routine repairs on earth become significant outages/decreases in economic value of a sat over time.

Rocket launches have gotten much better, but are not perfect. Insurance is a thing. However, cost of equipment in a failed launch may be eye watering, rivaling a governmental military launch.

To give a datacenter in space constant exposure to sunlight, the orbit must be either very var away, or occasionally be on the other side of the earth from you. Either way, the latency is terrible. You can put them in a ring and only choose the one closest to you, but are you really going to keep moving your data from satellite to satellite? So, bad for interactive use, maybe OK for non-interactive use, if you can afford the 30 foot by 30 foot solar panel and a similar size radiator for an 8x B300. That will be about $15M for your $500K GPU set. Plus $7M for the launch at SpaceX public rates.

I think these are mostly for llms or long-term storage where they are mostly concerned about latency within the data center and not latency between you and the data center.

Hard to know, but there are some areas they are probably using:

* 24 hours of light vs. ~9 hours of light (e.g. winter)

* Panels perfectly perpendicular to sun 100% of the time vs. variable for fixed panels on earth

* No atmosphere

* No clouds

Presumably they get exactly the same amount of sunlight 100% of the time instead of a few hours peak on earth? I'd say 8x is in the right order of magnitude.

My layman expectation would have been much higher. It's got no atmosphere refracting anything and it's closer to the source of energy.

The distance from earth to the sun is 150 million kilometers and your orbit is probably only a few hundred kilometers up (and realistically it’s sun-synchronous and perpendicular to the earth-sun axis), so the distance change doesn’t really matter.

LEO isn't much closer to the sun, and the atmosphere probably doesn't absorb a huge amount at the wavelengths they work.

This came with a double-ended USB-A for charging: https://www.rei.com/product/248291/biolite-luci-original-cle...

I went one step further: there's a really annoying behavior in Google Workspace where a giant popup appears if you linger over any account.

I wrote an chrome extension to block them: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/google-workspace-ho...

And WTBS the radio station was also purchased by Ted Turner!

It was originally "Tech Broadcasting Service" and run by an MIT student group.

For the $50k purchase, the newly-named WMBR purchased a new transmitter.

https://wmbr.org/www/history

I never knew this.

Also if you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, WMBR is a fun and weird listen and clearly sounds like college radio when compared to something like WERS.

Wmbr is great. I always assumed it was “Walker Memorial Building Radio” based on the building it transmits from.

There’s something lovely about this.

To my eye, it is like the patina that your favorite tools get.

I’m looking at you, 40 year old tape measure.

I’ve noticed that this only occurs when I use a two-prong adapter for the power brick.

If I use the 3-prong, which is usually tied to a long cable, I don’t feel the buzz.

I assumed that the additional grounding helped.

> Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal

So they’re the same thing but from two frames of reference?

I’m not sure this metaphor holds.

Yeah it really felt hammered in as a way for the author to try to look literate and punchy, but it does not work.

This is lovely! Can I suggest make sure that the board is solveable?

This is part of the game. Many games will not be solvable.

Can I suggest putting a strand of Christmas lights inside the completed structure? They get a little diffused and look really cool.

For bonus points, get pics of your kids' faces lit by only that light.

Boom: next year's card.

That is one truck