The way eink display prices scale is insane. You can get a 13 inch one for like 200, but any bigger than that it skyrockets. Must be that they still struggle to get good display yields across that large of an area, defect rates or something.

If your argument was one of cost, you should have said so from the start! Economically, it might or might not make sense. I can’t pretend to know the economics of running a space based datacenter, I’ve never run a ground based datacenter.

But you have been arguing about power and electricity and heat and how proud you are to have 200a service at your house (congrats on owning it, btw, tough nowadays) but those aren’t the dealbreakers. If the AI bros want to lose billions putting the datacenters in space, I don’t have a huge problem with that. Better that than diddling kids and destroying society, which is what they seem to be spending their money on now.

You don’t use 48 kW you have 48kW capacity, that’d be 33 (1500W) electric space heaters running nonstop 24/7. I have electric heat, electric oven/range, and an electric car and I averaged 3 kW across the last week. (406 kWh between the 26th and 1st)

A comparison that is reasonable is an h100 rack cluster like this which uses about 60 kW per rack. For input power, the newer iROSA solar panels generate about 20 kW at a size of 20ft x 60ft each. Throw in 4 of those radiators, and you have something that is feasible to throw into space. Again, I can’t judge the economics of launching and running a space based datacenter business, but you could absolutely launch and operate a space rack with current tech.

I could have seen the opposite, too, where xAI pays spaceX gobs of money for tons of datacenter launches in advance, bubble pops, xAI goes under and spaceX still has the money. But ya I think this is “the govt won’t let spaceX fail, pile all the riskiest shit into that”

That was my stumbling block, too. Don’t think of it as taking a datacenter and putting it into space whole, think of it as taking 5 or 10 racks and putting that into space, and repeating till you have as much compute as a datacenter. So it’s basically the size of a schoolbus (same size as hubble telescope) and it has solar panels+ heat rejection like those of the ISS, and then bolt a starlink on the end, and you can put as many of those in orbit as you need.

Each part of the hardware is doable(ish), and if the nerds who actually run datacenters say the terrestrial energy/cooling cost numbers vs launch cost numbers make sense, I’m inclined to believe them even if I don’t get to see that math specifically. But right now it’s just AI bros saying the costs make sense, and I don’t as much believe them.

I used to think space data centers was a scam, but I learned how much power existing satellites already use (and thus must be able to radiate into space to keep cold), and just looking at the ISS, each radiator (and it has several) can reject 14 kW into space, so if the ISS has can safely generate 14 kW of electricity and reject all the waste heat, then the major concern for me is addressed. Space datacenters are the first step to industry, in space, which is an necessary step for a lot of future stuff.

All the above is beyond the point though, he’s playing shell games to tie his most valuable and critical company, SpaceX, to the trashheap of AI bullshit so that the government will bail him out when it crashes.

Ya it’s wild what a boon having an extra block of time to oneself is. Some friends are looking for new jobs and we were chatting, but i couldn’t figure out how much better the pay would have to be to get me back to 5 days a week if I tried to get a new job.

Yep, i earn PTO hours as well, and i use less of it for random doctors appts and other “stuff that’s only open during work hours” so I have more for like, around Christmas/newyears or trips

I work in a billable hours type job, and thus took a pay cut when dropping to 90% but it gives me one full day off every two weeks, and it has been great. I have a day that is mine. I resolved not to do any recurring tasks on that day (no mowing the lawn or doing the groceries or stuff like that) so that it stays a day for me to do something interesting and new, or just hang around and decompress in a coffee shop somewhere. Very much reccomend.

It’ll be more like ordering a Chinese “first person RC car” then grabbing a conversion kit. this company newbeedrone currently sells a drone, and a kit to convert it to a car

But instead they will reverse it. You get a cart, and they sell you a $20 drone conversion kit personal fan add on