If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
This: "I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice."
They know the game very well. They know that if they manage to pump up the valuation high enough - they will be automatic money flowing in - regardless of actual valuations.
The unit economics of orbital DC just doesn't work with today's technology. Assuming 0 ongoing OpEx(free energy), the launch cost of the satellite itself, along with solar panels, radiators as well as the chip themselves just doesn't make sense given the ~5 year operational lifespan of both the chips and the satellites.
LEO satellite orbits decay. e.g. starlink sats are ~5 year lifespan. But assuming a higher, more stable orbit, how do you replace them? There will be tens of thousands of these orbital DCs, so not really feasible to go to each one to replace some chips.
Or alternatively I guess a few massive ones, but those would need to be truly massive to accommodate the solar panels and radiator fins required.
Space data centers are a bad idea. Every DC has a non zero number of employees that do maintenance. Going from 99% to 99.9repeating% reliability is extremely expensive. That's why satellites cost billions and take 10 years to build.
How do you price regulatory restrictions? The laws governing space are more lax than those governing how much chromium Tesla can dump into their waste water. By building in space, they get to completely sidestep any regulatory issues on Earth, like not being allowed to build what they want, wherever they want, how they want. It's annoying getting permits to do whatever on my house, but for businesses, it's a real problem.
The biggest regulation of building in space is... where do the debris go. You are tightly monitored for how much trash reenters into the atmosphere, so there is still SOME level of regulation.
There are safety regulations that require things roughly like, "to prevent harm to planes in the air and people on the ground, either control where your satellite re-enters so or make your satellite entirely out of components that are almost certain to burn up on re-entry".
As far as I can tell, there is no environmental regulation of how many kilograms of aluminum, silicon, etc. being added to the Earth's atmosphere when a Starlink burns up during re-entry.
elon has a great wall of china's worth of plaques with comments exactly like this, and his companies are still worth more than their combined weight in gold
I wish I could, it was one of those youtube podcast type interviews with one of the engineers, there was a lot more shared, but that line stuck with me the most.
Also, the stacked graph only allows you to quickly see total mentions, really hard to compare negative or positive sentiment across models at a glance.
Came here to offer this feedback. If I can't see the name of the model, nothing else in the chart really matters to me. I even tried going to the Google Sheet.
It's way too important a piece of information not to have it visible.
Fluent means different things to different people (and in different languages!).
As I understand it, B2 means one has a solid, functional proficiency in the language. They conversate/listen/read/write in diverse situations, without needing to switch to a different language or to prepare in advance.
They're very likely, however, to make mistakes, say things in non-idiomatic ways etc. although this is expected to be minor enough to not affect the ability to understand them.
In order to get to C1 and above, one needs a deeper understanding of the language - phrases, idioms, connotations, registers, etc. and a broader set of situations they can handle, e.g., a philosophical discussion. An of course, errors are expected to be rarer.
So, literally speaking, B2 is rather fluent, since the language is "flowing" out of them and they're not stopping to think every other word (which is, as far as I understand, a common interpretation of flüssig in German).
But as "fluent" speakers should know, words come with expectations beyond the literal meaning :P
But I as far as I recall B2 is when you start seeing native people failing the exam without preparation with C2 becoming a legitimate challenge for native speakers.
I believe the same threshold exists in N2 but because it's so Kanji focused without much assessment of fluency.
Talking in terms of "carbon" is misleading. Methane is much more potent than CO2. I don't know why you think methane is broken down at the same rate as it is added.
- Cattle release methane
- Forests are burnt to make room for crops/grazing
- Fertilizer for crops for cattle produces nitrous oxide
I do not claim this adds up to 60%, but to suggest it is zero is incorrect.
Methane is broken down with a few years delay, but still the same amount is breaking down as is produced. Think of a long pipe which takes a few years to travel through and it's fed at a constant rate. Total methane in the atmosphere stays constant.
But that still means you have a couple of years with a higher concentration of methane, and given the higher impact this is obviously very relevant, no?
re 2: special relativity is not general relativity - large elements will not provide testable predictions for a theory of everything that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.
re: "GR environments (such as geostationary satellites)" - a geostationary orbit (or any orbit) is not an environment to test the interaction of GR and QM - it is a place to test GR on its own, as geostationary satellites have done. In order to test a theory of everything, the gravity needs to be strong enough to not be negligible in comparison to quantum effects, i.e. black holes, neutron stars etc. your example (1) is therefore a much better answer than (2)
Re 2 I was wondering if there may be some GR effect as well, as the element's nucleus would have some effect on spacetime curvature and the electrons would be close to that mass and moving very fast.
For geostationary orbits I was thinking of things like how you need to use both special and general relativity for GPS when accounting for the time dilation between the satellite and the Earth (ground). I was wondering if similar things would apply at a quantum level for something QM related so that you would have both QM and GR at play.
So it may be better to have e.g. entangled particles with them placed/interacting in a way that GR effects come into play and measuring that effect.
But yes, devising tests for this would be hard. However, Einstein thought that we wouldn't be able to detect gravitational waves, so who knows what would be possible.
But: if you consider the amount of nuclear generating capacity has (4th in the world, more than Russia), and its advanced space program, “within one year” probably means closer to “weeks or months” than “three hundred and sixty four days”.
Dr. Hipp has said several times that nobody expected a weakly-typed database to achieve the pervasiveness that is observed with SQLite.
At the same time, strict tables address some of the concern of those coming from conventional databases.
Dates and times are a core problem to SQLite not seen elsewhere as far as I know, but this does evade UTC and constantly shifting regional time. My OS gets timezone updates every few months, and avoiding that had foresight.
Default conformance with Postel's Law is SQLite's stance, and it does seem to work with the ANSI standard.
> Dr. Hipp has said several times that nobody expected a weakly-typed database to achieve the pervasiveness that is observed with SQLite.
I don't remember ever saying that. Rather, see https://sqlite.org/flextypegood.html for detailed explanation of why I think flexible typing ("weak typing" is a purgative and inaccurate label) is a useful and innovative feature, not a limitation or a bug. I am surprised at how successful SQLite has become, but if anything, the flexible typing system is a partial explanation for that success, not a cause of puzzlement.
Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?
"I had this crazy idea that I’m going to build a database engine that does not have a server, that talks directly to disk, and ignores the data types, and if you asked any of the experts of the day, they would say, “That’s impossible. That will never work. That’s a stupid idea.” Fortunately, I didn’t know any experts and so I did it anyway, so this sort of thing happens. I think, maybe, just don’t listen to the experts too much and do what makes sense. Solve your problem."
> Did I misinterpret the experts' assertion of imposibility?
Misstated, I'd say. You said "nobody" but the actual quote is about the assumed conventional wisdom of the time, which is quite different. And while this was probably inadvertent, you phrased it in a way that almost made it sound like that was Dr. Hipp's original opinion, which, of course, is the opposite of true.
I often forget or mix up which "Law" refers to which observation, and I'm surely not the only one. So:
Postel's Law, also known as the Robustness Principle, is a guideline in software design that states: "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept."
SQLite probably doesn't do anything with times and dates except punting some functions to the limited libc facilities because including any proper date-time facilities would basically double the footprint of SQLite. Same for encodings and collations.
DuckDB is a columnar database, and columnar DBs are way better for analytics, statistics... That is its main reason for its popularity, the ability to run specific workloads that row based databases will struggle/be slower at.
Nothing to do with the posters badly formatted complained about Sqlite. By that metric DuckDB has a ton of issues that even out scale Sqlite.
Yeah, but most applications are small. So, at the scale of most applications you can drop in DuckDB with zero change in actual performance. It still has indexes to support highly selective queries because it needs to have functional primary keys.
I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.
I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...
[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...