StableOutshoot

StableOutshoot 25d ago

I think I get it now

You think a "space datacenter" is a monolithic piece of hardware, a single satellite bus that's carrying 100% of the compute that's intended to be operated in orbit

You do understand that they're going to launch more than one of these, right?

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StableOutshoot 25d ago

What do you mean by "serious engineering organizations"?

I mean organizations with a track record of delivering on ambitious projects.

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StableOutshoot 25d ago

solar roadways

Zero serious engineering organizations were involved in any of the various "solar freakin roadways" proposals. I give a lot more credence to SpaceX, who have a decades-long history of actually delivering on serious technical challenges previously considered outlandish under conventional wisdom.

building them out on the ocean or in Antarctica

In both of these places you are adding bandwidth/latency challenges, and Antarctica is forbidden from commercial exploitation.

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StableOutshoot 25d ago

SpaceX gives values of 150kW of compute power and 110 m^2 of radiator panels (220 m^2 of total radiating surface area since they are double sided).

A typical radiator has an emissivity of about 0.95.

So, per Stefan-boltzmann:

150000 = 220 * 0.95 * 5.67e-8 * T^4
T^4 = 12.6579e9
T = 335K or 61.85 C

If you run your chips at 80C (not unreasonable!), that's a 20 K delta from the chip to the radiator, which seems very reasonable to me? My gaming PC does about 40C from my chips to ambient and I'd expect SpaceX to be able to engineer a better thermal solution than me.

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StableOutshoot 25d ago

Note that your value for Emissivity is very low. Radiators with emissivity around 0.95 are common, which cuts your radiator area nearly 4 times, and the total compute power per satellite given by SpaceX is about 150 kW, which further reduces radiator area by about 6.6 times.

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StableOutshoot 25d ago

I also feel like SpaceX is a bubble, but I also thought that Bitcoin was a bubble.

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StableOutshoot 26d ago

Serious question, do you think that all of these engineering organizations who are going all in on this concept haven't done the math themselves?

I was skeptical about the cooling issue myself but I did the math myself and it turns out that if you're willing to run your chips a little hot you can get away with less radiator surface area than solar panel surface area. It's simply not the issue that people seem to think it is.

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StableOutshoot 26d ago

In just a few short years, SpaceX went from "it's impossible to land an orbital rocket booster, and SpaceX's attempts keep exploding" to "here's a hilarious video making fun of all the hardware we blew up developing our incredibly successful rocket booster recovery system."

In just a few short years, SpaceX went from "an LEO constellation with thousands of satellites is insane" to being the most lucrative internet service provider in the world.

I have very little doubt that SpaceX is capable of turning "Starship is impossible and keeps exploding" into "here's a hilarious video making fun of all the hardware we blew up developing the most capable orbital launch system ever flown."

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

Post offices are operated by the federal government. The federal government would be investigating it because a federal election is a federal issue.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

They're vagrants. How would you find them in order to question them? You show up to the address on their ballot to ask about them and the person there will just shrug and tell you they have no idea.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

How politically active do you really think the modal homeless person is? The point is to get your hands on a bunch of ballots for a bunch of people who were never actually planning on voting, and likely aren't even aware of what you are doing when you shove a voter registration in their face and tell them to draw an X on it.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on

Homeless people. You register them to vote at the homeless shelter, getting them to sign the registration form with an X, then the party loyalists staffing the homeless shelter just fill out the ballots when they arrive at the shelter. The homeless shelter is rewarded with government funding when their party has power. There is essentially zero possibility that there is anybody working at any homeless shelter who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat party loyalist, there's essentially zero chance of this operation getting ratted out. It actually feels extremely reasonable to me that this would be the explicit mechanism by which the Democrats keep their electoral majority secure in California. This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

So basically, I can carry one of these things into a polling place filled to the top with ballots any time within 7 days after the election and they'll be eligible to be counted.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

How do you do this with a single postal worker without them getting caught by their fellow employees or the security cameras in their post office? This is why I say you would need to enlist an entire post office in this scheme.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

I go into more detail in another comment but this falls apart if it turns out the post office that you are pretending to have mailed this from turns out not to have handled nearly enough mail that day to account for all the ballots that were supposedly mailed through it.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

Well the basic problem I see is illustrated by the Mitchell and Webb moon landing conspiracy sketch:

"So, first off, we're going to need to build a massive rocket."
"Why would we need to do that? We're not actually going to the moon."
"Yes, but when they ask how we got them there, we're going to need to be able to say, we sent them there on that massive rocket you saw."

I would be extremely surprised if the USPS doesn't track the amount of volume through each post office. It would be insane if they didn't. So when somebody asks "where did all of these ballots come from," your conspiracy is going to need to be able to say "they were mailed from this post office, look at the postmarks," and this would become a pretty embarrassing thing to say if you can go to that post office and it turns out they didn't process nearly enough volume to account for all the ballots that supposedly passed through that post office. So that post office needs to actually process approximately enough mail-in ballots to actually account for everything that showed up at the counting location.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Are you fucking kidding me

Everything I learn about the California elections process seems to be explicitly designed to allow as much fraudulent voting as possible

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

I don't feel like this is viable, you basically need to enlist an entire post office as your accomplice when you get them to put a false date in their post-marking machine and run a bunch of ballots through it for you, and post offices have security cameras.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

though US prison sentences continue being bafflingly draconian to my European eyes - an effective life sentence, and he didn't even actually kill anyone?

The fact that they were committing a terrorist act at the time, and the victim was a police officer, are both aggravating circumstances here.

what I gathered a lot of people do believe the others' claim that they did not know that Song planned to have a shootout at all (however plausible or not that claim is)

Extremely implausible that they did not intend, or at least reasonably foresee, some sort of shootout considering they brought loaded rifles and first aid kits, and wore body armor.

I mean, what's the guarantee that if a Mottizen goes postal under a future Blue administration, there won't be calls to put us all on the hook based on this precedent?

A conspiracy under the law in the United States requires an agreement to commit an illegal act, and in most jurisdictions an overt act furthering that agreement. The prairieland suspects had a history of close association in which they communicated their plans to commit a terrorist act, and then they all showed up at the same place at the same time wearing the same uniform carrying rifles and explosives and wearing body armor and committed a terrorist act with those rifles and explosives. No, some lone nut going postal is not grounds to put any of us away just because we happened to post in the same comment thread on some web site. To believe this to be even remotely possible is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the charges against the prairieland suspects, and the law itself.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

I had no idea there were two shooters. I knew that only one person ever got convicted for the actual shooting, I guess they were never able to identify the second shooter.

I know that "imagine if the roles were reversed" is very tired at this point but I can't imagine a group of right wing militants bringing body armor and rifles to a federal government facility and opening fire on federal agents and having a sitting member of congress make a statement about how awful it was that they got sent to prison over it. Truly incredible to me.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

The idea that rebellion is somehow a constitutional right is absurd. George Washington himself put down rebellions in the early days of the United States. The best way that I can understand this is that all rebellions are legal if they succeed, and the function of 2A is to make that possible, but in order for your rebellion to be legitimate it needs to actually have the manpower, organization, and support necessary to succeed against the manpower, organization, and support that the government is able to muster.

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StableOutshoot 1mo ago

I have no theory of mind for the people who are outraged by the verdict or believe that this is somehow creating a chilling effect on the right to protest. The idea that the first amendment is a license to shoot a cop is fundamentally absurd and I have no insight into the mind of the person who is shocked that doing so would result in a prison sentence. The most charitable way I can think about this is that they feel a social obligation to speak in solidarity with their fellow travelers, and the fact that doing so requires them to spout obviously absurd bullshit is not an obstacle to this.

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