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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Well using water for cooling is a way to save money in some regions, but it doesn’t even work everywhere, most data centers don’t use a lot of water.

    When it comes down to it, you can have a datacenter anywhere, including in space, but you do need to keep it cool. Cooling can be harder or easier in different environments, space is probably one of the hardest environments to keep electronics cool in.

    I but I guess the most direct answer to your question:

    How are they going to cool these in space

    They’ll do it with radiators, lots of radiators. And they’ll do it at 50x the price it would cost on earth. With that in mind, I welcome the space datacenters, build as many as you want. I can’t think of any better way for an AI company to drive itself to bankruptcy.


  • If you’re afraid of this kind of thing, then don’t use escalators when they aren’t moving, that’s fine.

    According to a quick Google search, there are 2-3 escalator related deaths per year in the US. That’s not just counting malfunctioning escalators, it also counts morons doing dumb things on escalators (and “within the US” includes every Florida Man out there).

    You can worry about this if you like worrying, but it’s probably not worth it.



  • They’re also more expensive than regular copper or aluminum wiring, and in this case I suspect that their required proximity would be a downside.

    I think I’m going to have to say “citation needed” here.

    There are different grades of fiber optic cable, but for short distances you can generally use the lowest grade, so that’s probably what would be used if they were just components in a device, and that stuff is dirt cheap.

    On the other hand, currently audio equipment tends to need higher end copper wiring, shielded cables, gold plated connectors, etc. digital interfaces are much less demanding of course, s/pdif or HDMI for example.

    As for your comment about being vulnerable to drops and bumps, yeah I think you’re certainly right about that. And honestly, there are some other potential issues with the idea too. Foremost, a microphone like this would probably require a whole lot more analysis and signal processing than you really want for a simple audio input.



  • Oh no… You absolutely can’t be doing maintenance on an escalator while people are walking on it. Not only unsafe, that’s just not going to work at all most of the time. The maintenance crew and the public would be in each other’s way.

    On the other hand, when it breaks on a Monday, and the crew says they can be there to do the repair on Thursday, that means that it’s safe to use the escalator as stairs for a couple of days while you wait.







  • I mean, airplane brakes probably have about a 3% duty cycle (the percentage of time they’re in use), so they’re generally idle. For city driving, car brakes probably have about a 25% duty cycle.

    If those numbers are close to accurate, that means planes are using their brakes about 10x less than cars.

    BTW, I didn’t pull those plane numbers directly out of my ass, but they’re definitely a rough estimate. I’m figuring about 5 minutes of breaking time per flight, counting landing and during the taxi to and from the runway. And I’m assuming a 2.5 hour flight, figuring that could be close to an average flight time.







  • Our moon is definitely the most important body in the solar system after the sun and earth. There’s a good chance life is only possible on earth because of the moon.

    The thing is, here on earth, we have this wealth of life and diversity, but we only have this diversity because we have a diversity of elements to work with. On most planets, we don’t see this diversity of elements, the same proportion of heavy elements have to be there somewhere, but we don’t see them on the surface. We’re pretty sure that this is because on other planets we don’t see plate tectonics. The process of plate tectonics churns and mixes the earth, it brings heavier elements that would normally be trapped underground back up to the surface.

    The crazy part, is that we’re not 100% sure why we have plate tectonics, and why all the other planets in our solar system don’t. But a leading theory is that plate tectonics are sustained by the tidal forces of a very large moon.

    If this interpretation is accurate, we really owe so much to the moon. Its continued gravitational force on the earth is what has made everything (life, intelligence, society, technology) possible.

    Also, in a Drake equation/Fermi Paradox context, the perfect moon may very well be the extremely rare event that makes the earth truly special.