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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024

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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  • 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 in graceful degradation of performance. 5. Incremental scalability: Able to scale the number of containers from one to N, maintaining profitability 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 to shorten the lifespan of certain electronic devices. However, cooler operating temperatures, mechanical and thermal stability, and the absence of a corrosive atmosphere (except for atomic oxygen, which can be readily mitigated with shielding and coatings) may prolong the lifespan of other devices. These positive effects were observed during Microsoft’s Project Natick, which operated sealed data center containers under the sea for years.25 Before scaling up, the balance between these opposing effects must be thoroughly evaluated through multiple 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 data center hardware current and fresh. The old containers may be re-entered in the payload bay of the launcher or are 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 gracefully as components fail. This ensures the data center will continue to operate even while waiting for some containers to be replaced. The true end-of-life of the data center is likely to be driven by the underlying cooling infrastructure and the power delivery subsystems. These systems on the International Space Station have a design lifetime of 15 years26, and we expect a similar lifetime for orbital data centers. At end of life, the orbital data center may be salvaged27 to recover significant value of the hardware and raw materials, or all of the modules undocked and demised in the upper atmosphere by design.

    • 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.

      • everyone who's ever done physical cabling knows aaallll about dropping cables upward

      • 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

        ez

      • 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.

        • while radiating out waste heat at higher temp would be easier it'll also take up valuable power, and either i don't get something or you're trying to break laws of thermodynamics

          • I'm saying that we shouldn't radiate if it would be expensive. It's not easy to force the heat out to the radiators; normally radiation only works because the radiator is more conductive than the rest of the system, and so it tends to pull heat from other components.

            We can set up massive convection currents in datacenters on Earth, using air as a fluid. I live in Oregon, where we have a high desert region which enables the following pattern: pull in cold dry air, add water to cool it further and make it more conductive, let it fall into cold rows and rise out of hot rows, condition again to recover water and energy, and exhaust back out to the desert. Apple and Meta have these in Prineville and Google has a campus in The Dalles. If you do the same thing in space, then you end up with a section of looped pipe that has fairly hot convective fluid inside. What to do with it?

            I'm merely suggesting that we can reuse that concentrated heat, at reduced efficiency (not breaking thermodynamics), rather than spending extra effort pumping it outside. NASA mentions fluid loops in this catalogue of cooling options for cubesats and I can explain exactly what I mean with Figure 7.13. Note the blue-green transition from "heat" to "heat exchanger"; that's a differential, and at the sorts of power requirements that a datacenter has, it may well be a significant amount of usable entropy.

            • okay so you want to put bottoming cycle thermal powerplant on waste heat? am i getting that right?

              so now some of that heat is downgraded to lower temperature waste heat, which means you need bigger radiator. you get some extra power, but it'd be a miracle if it's anything over 20%. also you need to carry big heat engine up there, and all the time you still have to disperse the same power because it gets put back into the same server racks. this is all conditional on how cold can you keep condenser, but it's pointless for a different reason

              you're not limited by input power (that much), you're more limited by launch mass and for kilogram more solar panels will get you more power than heat engine + extra radiators. also this introduces lots of moving parts because it'd be stirling engine or something like that. also all that expensive silicon runs hot because otherwise you get dogshit efficiency, and that's probably not extra optimal for reliability. also you can probably get away with moving heat around with heat pipes, no moving parts involved

              also you lost me there:

              pull in cold dry air, add water to cool it further

              okay this works because water evaporates, cooling down air. this is what every cooling tower does

              make it more conductive

              no it doesn't (but it doesn't actually matter)

              condition again to recover water and energy

              and here you lost me. i don't think you can recover water from there at all, and i don't understand where temperature difference comes from. even if there's any, it'd be tiny and amount of energy recoverable would be purely ornamental. if i get it right, it's just hot wet air being dumped outside, unless somehow server room runs at temperatures below ambient

              normally radiation only works because the radiator is more conductive than the rest of the system, and so it tends to pull heat from other components.

              also i'm pretty sure that's not how it works at all, where did you get it from

              • and I’m over here like “what if we just included a peltier element… but bigger” and then the satellite comes out covered in noctua fans and RGB light strips

        • I was also momentarily nerdsniped earlier by looking up the capacity of space power tech[0] (panel yields, battery technology, power density references), but bailed early because it'll actually need some proper spelunking. doubly so because I'm not even nearly an expert on space shit

          in case anyone else wants to go dig through that, the idea: for compute you need power (duh). to have power you need to have a source of energy (duh). and for orbitals, you're either going to be doing loops around the planetoid of your choice, or geostationery. given that you're playing balancing jenga between at minimum weight, compute capacity, and solar yield, you're probably going to end up with a design that preferences high-velocity orbitals that have a minimal amount of time in planetoid shadow, which to me implies high chargerate, extremely high cycle count ceiling (supercaps over batteries?), and whatever compute you can make fit and fly on that. combined with whatever the hell you need to do to fit your supposed computational models/delivery in that

          this is probably worth a really long essay, because which type of computing your supposed flying spacerack handles is going to be extremely selected by the above constraints. if you could even make your magical spacechip fucking exist in the first place, which is a whole other goddamn problem

          [0] - https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/power-subsystems/ (warning: this can make hours of your day disappear)

    • BasicSteps™ for making cake:

      1. Shape: You should chose one of the shapes that a cake can be, it may not always be the same shape, depending on future taste and ease of eating.
      2. Freshness: You should use fresh ingredients, bar that you should choose ingredients that can keep a long time. You should aim for a cake you can eat in 24h, or a cake that you can keep at least 10 years.
      3. Busyness: Don't add 100 ingredients to your cake that's too complicated, ideally you should have only 1 ingredient providing sweetness/saltyness/moisture.
      4. Mistakes: Don't make mistakes that results in you cake tasting bad, that's a bad idea, if you MUST make mistakes make sure it's the kind where you cake still tastes good.
      5. Scales: Make sure to measure how much ingredients your add to your cake, too much is a waste!

      Any further details are self-evident really.

      • if you MUST make mistakes make sure it’s the kind where you cake still tastes good

        every flat, sad looking chocolate cake I've made

    • Design principles for a time machine

      Yes, a real, proper time machine like in sci-fi movies. Yea I know how to build it, as this design principles document will demonstrate. Remember to credit me for my pioneering ideas when you build it, ok?

      1. Feasibility: if you want to build a time machine, you will have to build a time machine. Ideally, the design should break as few laws of physics as possible.
      2. Goodness: the machine should be functional, robust, and work correctly as much as necessary. Care should be taken to avoid defects in design and manufacturing. A good time machine is better than a bad time machine in some key aspects.
      3. Minimize downsides: the machine should not cause exessive harm to an unacceptable degree. Mainly, the costs should be kept low.
      4. Cool factor: is the RGB lighting craze still going? I dunno, flame decals or woodgrain finish would be pretty fun in a funny retro way.
      5. Incremental improvement: we might wanna start with a smaller and more limited time machine and then make them gradually bigger and better. I may or may not have gotten a college degree allowing me to make this mindblowing observation, but if I didn't, I'll make sure to spin it as me being just too damn smart and innovative for Harvard Business School.

    • Fuck it, throw some more junk into orbit, why not

    • Who knew that the VC industry and AI would produce the most boring science fiction worldbuilding we will ever see

    • Who is even asking for this?

243 comments