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[–] 9 points 11 months ago (16 children)

All the venture capitalists who got scammed into funding this:

space is cold

"Data centers on hard mode" is such a good way to put it.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Space is cold; but if something is hot in space, doesn't it also need to, like... Push the heat away somehow? No air, no wind, heat just stays there. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Yup, they can only dump heat through infrared radiation. The giant white fins on the ISS are radiators for waste heat.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    I think there is another way to dump wase heat. Use it to warm up something that has a lot of heat capacity, and then eject that. Not practical and a huge waste (I also got this from science fiction), so you know they are going to try it. Gonna suck for us groundies.

    "Run, the Muxk servers are overhead, it is raining molten tin!"

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    @burble @techtakes Why not submerge them in a river for far less money.Microsoft had an underwater datacenter-in-a-container test a while back.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Underwater datacenters make cooling very effective and maintenance nearly impossible, so you have to treat the container data centers essentially disposable. That's only viable with economy of scale big enough to be an xkcd comic punchline. I guess Microsoft found that even they are not quite there yet. Also most computers don't tolerate seawater quite as well as they tolerate air.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    @bitofhope Pretty sure space datacenters are also going to be even more disposable.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    Oh yea absolutely. Underwater datacenters have one upside (cooling) and massive downsides (everything else, more or less). Space datacenters trade that upside into yet another downside, make the downsides even bigger and add a few extra downsides for good measure.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Didn't Meta, then Facebook, open a datacenter somewhere in the Arctic circle and leave it exposed to the environmental cold? Until the planet runs out of cold, an eventuality whose impending rapidity I'd rather not ponder, that seems a viable approach.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    Data centers in space are a tool. You have to know when and how to use them. I'm not saying they're completely useless, but most people do not understand how to avoid the difficult and expensive orbital logistics, power and cooling issues, radiation problems or the slow and complicated networking (unlike me, of course people like me know how to avoid them). Obviously it's ludicrous to suggest space station server farms don't have their uses and I'm not the kind of luddite saying nobody should ever be putting data centers in space, but right now they should really only be used together with terrestrial data centers and not relied on exclusively. That said, it's still early days and we will inevitably be seeing a lot more compute in the orbit.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

    I get what you're saying.

    I hate when they make us untangle these linguistic knots. I think this is a motte-and-bailey^1^ situation, like how the oppo respond to AI (LLM) criticism by implying we don't like AI (ML i.e. the old thing that works).

    They likewise want datacenters (Big Hot Steaming Shitbox of GPUs...IN SPACE) not datacenters (radiation hardened, multiply-redundant, low-power industrial CPU clusters...IN SPACE)

    ^1^ ugh sorry having a brain fart and cant think of a better term

    Edit: I am reliably informed that I let one go over my head. Apologies!

    In my defense, I would be entirely unsurprised if you turned out to be an expert in this stuff lol

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I was just riffing on the AI "moderate" talking points. Building a data center in space is prima facie ludicrously stupid and you would need an extremely unusual justification to even consider it. I was pretending to act like a moron who blindly accepts there's probably a serious reason why they make sense just because some dumbass hype man said so.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    +1, also it's just unrealistic when people say we should stop using orbital data centres. They’re here and we should get used to them, because nothing we do can influence their development. Also, we need to be involved in the space data center industry or we won’t be able to influence their development later.*

    *yes, I have heard this in the wild. I have literally heard someone say that there’s nothing we can do about AI and then immediately suggest that we can and should do something about AI.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    the chair of my cs department at a public university expressed this sentiment

    "the cat's out of the bag, now we must teach students to use it responsibly"

    BECAUSE THAT HAS WORKED SO WELL BEFORE

    (sorry for shouting)

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