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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 13 points 2 months ago

I read the white paper for this data centers in orbit shit https://archive.ph/BS2Xy and the only mentions of maintenance seem to be "we're gonna make 'em more reliable" and "they should be easy to replace because we gonna make 'em modular"

This isn't a white paper, it's scribbles on a napkin

Design principles for orbital data centers. The basic design principles below were adhered to when creating the concept design for GW scale orbital data centers. These are all in service of creating a low-cost, high-value, future-proofed data center. 1. Modularity: Multiple modules should be able to be docked/undocked independently. The requirements for each design element may evolve independently as needed. Containers may have different compute abilities over time. 2. Maintainability: Old parts and containers should be easy to replace without impacting large parts of the data center. The data center should not need retiring for at least 10 years. 3. Minimize moving parts and critical failure points: Reducing as much as reasonably possible connectors, mechanical actuators, latches, and other moving parts. Ideally each container should have one single universal port combining power/network/cooling. 4. Design resiliency: Single points of failure should be minimized, and any failures should result ingraceful degradation of performance. 5. Incremental scalability: Able to scale the number of containers from one to N, maintainingprofitability from the very first container and not requiring large CapEx jumps at any one point. Maintenance Despite advanced shielding designs, ionizing radiation, thermal stress, and other aging factors are likely toshorten the lifespan of certain electronic devices. However, cooler operating temperatures, mechanical andthermal stability, and the absence of a corrosive atmosphere (except for atomic oxygen, which can be readilymitigated with shielding and coatings) may prolong the lifespan of other devices. These positive effects wereobserved during Microsoft’s Project Natick, which operated sealed data center containers under the sea foryears.25 Before scaling up, the balance between these opposing effects must be thoroughly evaluated throughmultiple in-orbit demonstrations. The data center architecture has been designed such that compute containers and other modules can be swapped out in a modular fashion. This allows for the replacement of old or faulty equipment, keeping the datacenter hardware current and fresh. The old containers may be re-entered in the payload bay of the launcher orare designed to be fully demisable (completely burn up) upon re-entry. As with modern hyperscale data centers,redundancy will be designed-in at a system level, such that the overall system performance degrades gracefullyas components fail. This ensures the data center will continue to operate even while waiting for some containersto be replaced. The true end-of-life of the data center is likely to be driven by the underlying cooling infrastructure and the powerdelivery subsystems. These systems on the International Space Station have a design lifetime of 15 years26, andwe expect a similar lifetime for orbital data centers. At end of life, the orbital data center may be salvaged27 torecover significant value of the hardware and raw materials, or all of the modules undocked and demised in theupper atmosphere by design.

[-] self@awful.systems 17 points 2 months ago

there’s so much wrong with this entire concept, but for some reason my brain keeps getting stuck on (and I might be showing my entire physics ass here so correct me if I’m wrong): isn’t it surprisingly hard to sink heat in space because convection doesn’t work like it does in an atmosphere and sometimes half of your orbital object will be exposed to incredibly intense sunlight? the whitepaper keeps acting like cooling all this computing shit will be easier in orbit and I feel like that’s very much not the case

also, returning to a topic I can speak more confidently on: the fuck are they gonna do for a network backbone for these orbital hyperscale data centers? mesh networking with the implicit Kessler syndrome constellation of 1000 starlink-like satellites that’ll come with every deployment? two way laser comms with a ground station? both those things seem way too unreliable, low-bandwidth, and latency-prone to make a network backbone worth a damn. maybe they’ll just run fiber up there? you know, just run some fiber between your satellites in orbit and then drop a run onto the earth.

[-] corbin@awful.systems 3 points 2 months ago

You're entirely right. Any sort of computation in space needs to be fluid-cooled or very sedate. Like, inside the ISS, think of the laptops as actively cooled by the central air system, with the local fan and heatsink merely connecting the laptop to air. Also, they're shielded by the "skin" of the station, which you'd think is a given, but many spacebros think about unshielded electronics hanging out in the aether like it's a nude beach or something.

I'd imagine that a serious datacenter in space would need to concentrate heat into some sort of battery rather than trying to radiate it off into space. Keep it in one spot, compress it with heat pumps, and extract another round of work from the heat differential. Maybe do it all again until the differential is small enough to safely radiate.

[-] hirvox@mastodon.online 4 points 2 months ago

@corbin Isn’t this also the idea behind the Mathroska Brain gigastructure?

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