Literally none. Space is the worst possible place to put something that overheats already on earth. There's probably some synergy in the other direction (AI piloting of satellites or whatever) but that's marginal at best.
I've sure they've considered that in the engineering. For example, the solar panels would shade it. The space station has a cooling system in it. Musk's Starlink satellites don't seem to be overheating.
that's an amazing read, lots of concrete and convincing challenges; but otoh, technology is evolving at such a fast pace, maybe it is possible for breakthroughs that we couldn't imagine now to become reality sooner than we would have anticipated?
There's another way to look at it, though. If the data center satellites can be built and launched cheap enough, you can still come out ahead on performance/cost. I.e. if the space data center has 1/10 the performance of a ground one, and they can be built and launched for less than 10% of the cost, then you've got a business. And there are costs that won't be incurred - no electric bill, no cost for land, no charge for maintenance.
* no electric bill: if you use solar panels to provide your own power, you also have no electric bill on Earth.
* no cost for land: land in sunny places where crops don't grow (for instance) is good for solar power and very cheap compared to building out a datacenter
* no charge for maintenance: sorry, I really don't get this one. Why don't the computers in space need any maintenance?
Ah! That makes sense. But surely there is a point at which this economics becomes true for terrestrial datacenters too (in fact I saw some glimpses of that 10+ years ago, demonstrations of shipping-container-sized self-contained units that you just plug in power, and replace the whole container when it gets degraded). If they're not doing that today for terrestrial datacenters, then it probably doesn't make economic sense yet to do it in space either.
> maybe I am a fool, does space-based AI make no sense at all?
I think it does, for what it’s worth if we are to extend intelligence (as we know it) and potentially consciousness out there into the galaxy.
Because of distances and time, it is unlikely that humans will populate the galaxy with biological offspring (barring some technical breakthroughs that we have no line of sight on).
AI, on the other hand, could theoretically populate the galaxy and beyond, carrying the human intelligence and consciousness story into the future.
No. Imagine if your computer was in space instead of being under your desk. Would that solve anything?
Orbit is a very inconvenient environment. It's difficult to reach so maintenance is a nightmare, it's moving all the time, there's nowhere to sink waste heat into, you have a constrained power budget, you have a constrained weight budget. The only things you want to put in orbit are things that absolutely can't go anywhere else.
A lot of people who are a little bit ignorant think it's really easy to cool things in space because space is notoriously very cold.
Physics, it turns out, is slightly more complicated than this and it turns out vacuum is an incredibly good insulator and more (much more) than offsets the temperature differential in terms of how easy it is to cool something.
Thinking a bit, ORBITAL ai makes little to no sense, nowhere to dump your heat, your gpus are going to be slag or only operate part of the time. But what if he put them on the moon? the lag time is what ~1.2s? That seems like an amount of time that a current AI query can take and still seem reasonable.
Not that I think it's anything but him allowing some investors to cash out when spacex goes public. Hell didn't he just shift 2billion from tesla to xai?
At the end of the day he will never see whatever bullshit he's peddling in the media about this sale his drug habit is going to kill him before then.
> then have rest of the day off to enjoy things I like
But that's not what companies expect from you, even if you owns AI. They expect you to output more, and when you do, someone else is probably out of work.
They just sent out email about the scam. I was so annoyed that even after opening the app, the notification icon still persists, wondering if the hack on the notifications exploits some loophole in the Betterment app
I am at the stage of life where I appreciate this wisdom and desire the practice of it, but lack the will power to not get caught up “trying to win the game”. Once a while I get anxious about leveling and compensation, overwhelmed by comparison with peers. For people who had the similar struggles but managed to overcome, what worked for you?
- Surround yourself with friends who also aren’t playing the game.
- Get really clear about what your actual financial goals are, not what they’d need to be in order to maintain status among game-players.
- Get compensated in ways other than money. For me, working four days a week instead of five, and working remote from anywhere, is worth a whole lot of money. And working at a smaller company is a hell of a lot more fun if you like being part of product decisions.
- If you can, find ways to do things that your ladder-climbing friends can’t do. Spend a month in Europe without taking any holiday. Spend the whole winter in Thailand. Use that extra mental energy from that day off to do something amazing.
I left FAANG about 10 years ago and took a massive pay cut. I’d do it again.
By telling yourself it is ok to feel this way and going back to things you are good at, things that you love and people you care about and enjoy being with. Also exercise - that works.
There is nothing to overcome. These feelings rise up sporadically. Acknowledge and move on.
> At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful.
FWIW you can argue the same for woodworking, a chair is typically not made to be looked at but for people to sit on. I tired to think what inherently makes writing software treated less than a craft than woodworking, but couldn’t think of any.
depends on the kind of software, the visuals are part of the ux and ergonomics. ratio, spacing, how to convey state with just the right amount of visual cues. a chair is not a tool your interact with to create. now there are some software that is like this, you want to start it and forget about it as long as it does its thing while you think about your goal.
Surely there is a lot of workload is delay-able, but there is equal, if not more, amount of workload that do not have the luxury of waiting. Is it fair to say the serverless platform has no advantage for the latter workload?
Yeah, you can't do synchronous stuff on it, like you would say lambda, or what ever google calls theirs. I think calling it serverless is probably confusing to a lot of the outside world, as to them serverless is cgi-bin for the docker generation.
this form of serverless is very much batch jobs with some modern bits sprinkled in.
perhaps they should have called it serverless batch, or Batch-as-a-service, async-serverless or serverless-futures.
