THAT Rene Ritchie? Cool, I wondered what happened to him. I listened to his podcast all the time in the 2000s, when podcasts were synced to an iPod over USB before your commute.

The performance bottleneck for space based computers is heat dissipation.

Earth based computers benefit from the existence of an atmosphere to pull cold air in from and send hot air out to.

A space data center would need to entirely rely on city sized heat sink fins.

For radiative cooling using aluminum, per 1000 watts at 300 kelvin: ~2.4m^2 area, ~4.8 liters volume, ~13kg weight. So a Starship (150k kg, re-usable) could carry about a megawatt of radiators per launch to LEO.

And aluminum is abundant in the lunar crust.

We are jumping pretty far ahead for a planet that can barely put two humans up there, but it is a great deal of my scifi dreams in one technology tree so I'll happily watch them try.

The grandfather comment is perhaps mixing up two things:

If launch costs are cheap enough, you can bring aluminum up from earth.

But once your in-space economy is developed enough, you might want to tap the moon or asteroids for resources.

And the presence of humans. Like with a lot of robotics, the devil is probably in the details. Very difficult to debug your robot factory while it's in orbit.

That was fun to write but also I am generally on board with humanity pushing robotics further into space.

I don't think an orbital AI datacentre makes much sense as your chips will be obsolete so quickly that the capex getting it all up there will be better spent on buying the next chips to deploy on earth.

Well, _if_ they can get launch costs down to 100 dollar / kg or so, the economics might make sense.

Radiative cooling is really annoying, but it's also an engineering problem with a straightforward solution, if mass-in-orbit becomes cheap enough.

The main reason I see for having datacentres in orbit would be if power in orbit becomes a lot cheaper than power on earth. Cheap enough to make up for the more expensive cooling and cheap enough to make up for the launch costs.

Otherwise, manufacturing in orbit might make sense for certain products. I heard there's some optical fibres with superior properties that you can only make in near zero g.

I don't see a sane way to beam power from space to earth directly.

Hey, I made that!

It's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.

Super useful feature; thanks. I used it to help me remember the names of people I saw often at places I ate at or worked out of.

Hey, my 10 HomePods are able to turn off 80% of my lights at night, 80% of the time!

I've switched to Home Assistant, and it's sooo much better.

Home Assistant can even share devices with Home app, so you can still use "Siri, turn off the lamp" to have it answer "you don't have any alarms set".

Is that the airport?

No, there is an airport 10 minutes from the museum but the museum itself is closer to downtown.

I joined Apple at the start of my career when iOS 6 and Snow Leopard were the active projects. I had to learn all of this. I’ve since forgot but this post was a wonderful bit of proprietary OS jargon and trivia nostalgia for me.

In my experience it’s that set lighting has changed enormously.

Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible. Now, we even have AI Denoising that can make ISO 12500 look like 800.

Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.

This also shows up in porn. A playboy photo was expertly lit and beautifully so, with angles and bounces and shade filters and gobos.

Since the 2000s the market has expected the “DV Cam” which became “Smartphone” recorded look. Which means natural lighting all the time. It’s lost the “glam”.

> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change.

Let me introduce you to some film history:

https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...

Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"

-1. One of the most famous biggest budget dudes, Stanley Kubrick, using an ultra rare incredibly special f/0.7 he bargained with NASA to get is, to me, an argument not that the past was great with natural lighting & could use it. It's an argument that that was the hardest most difficult costly & inaccessible upper-est echelon of what was possible, that only a couple rare gods of cinema had any access to dark natural lighting.

A focal plane mere inches thick!

Incredibly wild constraints here. It's incredibly fun to read about & folks should!

But everything about the Barry Lyndon story & the extreme effort to make it validates the top post to me. Our modern sensors are just stratospherically better & wildly unconstraining vs the past.

WHO WINS?

YOU DECIDE!

Wow, that guy in the thread attacking them is an asshole.

Or simply.. drumroll.. THE STATE

It's an AI bot, not a human

Or maybe a pervert.

He made a stronger claim later on by dropping the “maybe”

Does it read like AI slop to anybody else?

Mostly just reads like a mentally ill person to me TBH. Don't see why you'd think it was AI.

I thought that the question was actually really good, the existence of news articles doesn't really demonstrate state action...

Edit: the news article don't mention legal action being started or being prepared...

It is a management failure 100%. It doesn’t matter how good you engineers are when they are punished for doing good work and rewarded for shipping garbage.

Part of being good means pushing back too and managing upwards. Seems like they hire only those that won’t. Thus the management failure causes culture causing mediocrity.