Spending all the money you have and all the money you can get and all the money you can promise has a number of side effects, such as gigantic data centres full of high-power chips just to run lyin…
  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    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.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      7 hours ago

      My poe detection wasn’t sure until the last sentence used the “still early” and “inevitably” lines. Nice.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I get what you’re saying.

      I hate when they make us untangle these linguistic knots. I think this is a motte-and-bailey1 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

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        8 hours ago

        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.