Washington DC should either be made a state or given to Maryland except for a small federal district. What a load of crap.
We don't want it.
Readit NewsMy Operating Systems class as an undergrad used a book written by the Multics guys.
I hated it. It would present a bunch of apparently incompatible techniques for e.g. job scheduling, and then say that Multics implemented all of them. I immediately understood why UNIX came about: the Multics designers appeared incapable of having opinions, which led to an OS that was bloated and hard to understand.
That class was a long time ago, and I was a young, arrogant, and uninformed programmer, and maybe that take was wrong. But it left a strong impression at the time, and it was one of the few books from my undergrad days that I sold back instead of keeping.
Space roboticist here.
As with a lot of things, it isn't the initial outlay, it's the maintenance costs. Terrestrial datacenters have parts fail and get replaced all the time. The mass analysis given here -- which appears quite good, at first glance -- doesn't including any mass, energy, or thermal system numbers for the infrastructure you would need to have to replace failed components.
As a first cut, this would require:
- an autonomous rendezvous and docking system
- a fully railed robotic system, e.g. some sort of robotic manipulator that can move along rails and reach every card in every server in the system, which usually means a system of relatively stiff rails running throughout the interior of the plant
- CPU, power, comms, and cooling to support the above
- importantly, the ability of the robotic servicing system toto replace itself. In other words, it would need to be at least two fault tolerant -- which usually means dual wound motors, redundant gears, redundant harness, redundant power, comms, and compute. Alternately, two or more independent robotic systems that are capable of not only replacing cards but also of replacing each other.
- regular launches containing replacement hardware
- ongoing ground support staff to deal with failures
The mass analysis also doesn't appear to include the massive number of heat pipes you would need to transfer the heat from the chips to the radiators. For an orbiting datacenter, that would probably be the single biggest mass allocation.
My main lack of trust for this is the over leaning on "incompetence" as the explanation. I'm fully ok with the idea that they made mistakes and were not ready for the vastly different climate. I'm even comfortable with the idea that they may have thought to get more in trade than they were able to get.
That said, I think this vastly overstates how much people got their food from trade. Spices and some goods were, of course, big in trade. Mainline food? Not so much. Most people were not able to stockpile large quantities of food. Some cities maybe could. But it would have been grains/seeds or actual live stock. Not meats or anything that needed refrigeration. For... well, obvious reasons. Even cured meats typically have a very short timeline. So, fishing and hunting and basic gardening would have remained something that people had to do. Pretty much everywhere.
And indeed, this is inline with your edited in article. What were they trying to trade for? Corn. Why did they need to get it by trade, because their crop was bad. Why was the trade not working well? Because nobody had excess corn to trade. Long term stockpiles just couldn't exist to the scale that we think of today. And a lack of rain meant everyone was having a bad crop.
Finally, I want to be clear that I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that I'm just flat out wrong here. I've just grown super doubtful of a lot of the "these morons were able to sail across the atlantic, but were too stupid to do anything that would have resembled living off the land." Despite most living at the time looking like what we would call that.
Two things… one, they didn’t sail across the Atlantic. They hired ships and professional sailors to sail them across. They were passengers. That crossing wasn’t necessarily an easy one, but it was much more like what happens today with wealthy people who pay sherpas to help them climb Everest. The climbers have to have some knowledge and experience, but they aren’t the experts, and without the sherpas they'd be pretty lost.
Second, the point of this whole thread is that even at home, these were not people who were living off the land. They were wealthy Londoners. They lived in the city. They weren’t even raising their own kitchen gardens, they had people for that.
Wealthy Londoners bought their food just like you and I do. They had food markets. They used currency to buy grain, vegetables, and meat.
FYI, salted meat and fish will last for years and, if stored in a reasonably cool place like a root cellar, for decades. I personally have had Virginia hams that were over ten years old. Dried corn will last for centuries if stored properly.
The reason the settlers made so many diplomatic mistakes with the natives was because their leadership was primarily former military, and they saw the natives as a military problem. This made some sense because when they set out, they thought their primary challenge was going to be fending off military attacks from the Spanish. But that assumption turned out to be tragically wrong.
I'm not saying these people were all incompetent buffoons. Some of them were trained military officers. Some were craftsmen — there’s ample evidence of metal work and glassmaking at Jamestown. They were all experienced horsemen, and they were comfortable with firearms and bladed weapons. But what they weren’t was outdoorsmen, or even farmers, and in hindsight that’s what they needed to be. Once they got actual farmers on site, their immediate problems started to clear up.
You are still strengthening the claim beyond the paper, is my point. The paper, specifically, has several other explanations beyond "they didn't know how to care for nets."
For example:
The colonists’ performance in fishing in
the first years, in common with all other activities,
must also have been severely hampered by their
generally poor health, malnutrition and subse-
quent lack of energy. For a period of five months
there are said to have been only five men healthy
enough to man the bulwarks of the fort against
hostile Virginia Indians. During such difficult
times it is likely that fishing would have been
restricted and perhaps would have been halted
altogether.
The low stock of salt and not having the same dry season that they were used to from the other side of the Atlantic almost certainly played much more heavily, as well. (And to be clear, that paper covers these as heavy influences.)
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be. Our food supply is supernaturally clean, nowadays.
At any rate, my main gripe here is the mental image of "second sons that didn't know how to do anything" that you conjured. Certainly possible, but feels far overstated, to me. They had managed to survive a ship across the ocean. Something that was not a passive cruise journey.
Like most disasters, there were many causes for this one. The general unpreparedness of the Jamestown settlers is, however, an important one, and probably the primary causative one (although see edit #2 for a strong contrary argument).
We know for a fact that the proportion of wealthy nobles to manual laborers was really, really high compared to the population of England at the time, and there werent' enough of the latter to keep the colony afloat (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-... and https://www.jyfmuseums.org/visit/jamestown-settlement/histor...). These were largely second sons of wealthy families (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Families_of_Virginia). Most of the rest were the gentlemen's manservants, e.g. they were also urbanites (source: https://bandbwilliamsburg.com/jamestown-settlement/#:~:text=...
Regarding the quote from the paper:
The colonists’ performance in fishing in the first years, in common with all other activities, must also have been severely hampered by their generally poor health, malnutrition and subsequent lack of energy.
Note that a primary reason for the poor relationship with the native Americans was that the settlers didn't have their own food sources, and resorted to theft and assault to get native's food supplies -- which, as a result of the drought, weren't all that great (source: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...)
They also didn't have the skills necessary to (for instance) prepare acorns or harvest pine bark cambium. Survival foods would have been foods that noble Englishmen hadn't ever even eaten, much less prepared themselves.
From the Wikipedia article on "The Starving Time":
Although they did some farming, few of the original settlers were accustomed to manual labor or were familiar with farming. Hunting on the island was poor, and they quickly exhausted the supply of small game. The colonists were largely dependent upon trade with the Native Americans and periodic supply ships from England for their food.
As a consequence of the deteriorating relationship with the natives, the Jamestown colonists' ability to do any land-based (as opposed to water-based) subsistence activities was severely curtailed, and, one assumes, their ability to hire natives to fish for them also eroded. But they did have one major advantage, an actual oceangoing ship that they could have sailed into the Bay and used to fish. The natives had only canoes and could not possibly have constituted a major threat on the waters of the Bay. But that only works if you know how to fish, which they didn't. Once the nets rotted due to the colonists not understanding the importance of drying them, that advantage was also neutralized, and starving was inevitable in the absence of relief supplies from England or the Caribbean.
Probably also worth remembering how parasite ridden all of the food supplies you are mentioning would be.
The colonists were ill primarily because they didn't practice good hygiene wrt situating their toilet facilities away from their drinking water and ended up with dysentery, a problem that the native Americans managed to avoid (source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/the-myth-of-living-off-the-...).
Summary: the original contingent of Jamestown settlers had bad luck (drought, several supply ships being wrecked or otherwise not showing up on time) but their primary problem was that they didn't intend to live off the land at all, either by fishing and farming or by foraging. They didn't have the right supplies to do so, and mostly didn't have the knowledge needed to do it as a backup plan when the original plan of trading with the native Americans failed (due to poor diplomatic skills and poor diplomatic decision making.)
EDIT: to head off argument on this score, the poor relationship with the native Americans wasn't inevitable. The Roanoke Colony settlers, when their food ran low, joined the local tribe and the evidence indicates that they were adopted as members, intermarried, and survived there. (source: https://www.whro.org/arts-culture/2025-01-20/new-artifacts-o... and https://nypost.com/2025/06/07/us-news/researchers-discover-e...)
EDIT: Here's the best contrary argument, that it was primarily the drought that was to blame and not the incompetence of the English settlers: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rethinking-jamestown-...
This mostly fails a sniff test to me? And indeed, reading the linked article doesn't support your editorializing. To quote: "There is some evidence that they had poor fishing skills, but other factors may have contributed more to their failures"
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
From the article:
‘They suffered fourteen nets (which was all they had) to rot and spoil, which by orderly drying and mending might have been preserved. But being lost, all help of fishing perished.’ (25)
(25) Strachey, W. 1998b [1610], ‘A True Reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony then, and after under the government of the Lord La Warre’, in Haile 1998, p. 441
I originally learned this by talking with a Jamestown National Historical Park docent. I said that, having grown up in Virginia in the 20th century and knowing what tidewater Virginia was like in the 17th century, it would have been very hard to starve to death. American chestnut was still the dominant forest tree, and provided literally tons of nuts per tree. Black walnut and acorn were also plentiful and make good survival foods if you know how to prepare them. The Chesapeake Bay had enormous oyster beds, with oysters being described as "the size of dinner plates", and John Smith said that he thought he could have walked across it on the backs of fish, and if you know how to dry or salt fish it doesn't matter that the sturgeon and rockfish are seasonal. Mussels and crab, likewise, would have been plentiful, and unlike fish, accessible year round. Deer, turkey, rabbit, groundhog, squirrel, opossum and raccoon were plentiful, and passenger pigeon were also around, not having suffered the overhunting they did in the early 20th century.
She indicated that the majority of the English settlers weren't farmers or fishermen and didn't have the hands-on experience to make use of the resources at their disposal. I went home and did a bit of internet research on that statement, and it seemed fairly accurate.
I do not claim to be a trained historian of colonial Virginia; I just grew up there.
The experience of early colonists is so fascinating. Some of these colonies were very tenuous and seemed very unprepared.
The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth. They didn’t know how to care for the fishing nets, so they rotted, and then didn’t know how to fix them.
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
GlenTheMachine commented on Launch HN: Vassar Robotics (YC X25) – $219 robot arm that learns new skills · Posted by u/charleszyong
• Adding one DOF to match ARX kinematics is doable, with a price increase of $30–40.
• A tool changer is a great suggestion. A few of my friends are working on kinematic couplings, which would be ideal for this. I’ll need to give some thought to how to pass electrical signals and power to the tool, while also keeping it lightweight.
• Could you share what functionality you want in terms of encoders? The ST3215 uses 12-bit magnetic encoders, which can retain position after power loss. Are you looking for higher resolution? For torque sensing, if the order volume is large, I can add this for just a $20-30 price increase.
You'd also ideally add torque sensing at the joints because it opens up a whole world of control techniques that you can't get with just joint position sensing. You can do compliance or force control, which lets the arm act as if it had a spring at the joints, so when it hits something the impact is nice and gentle, and importantly, so you can do things like e.g. a bolt insertion task where you have to control the position of the arm in x and y but you want to exert a small positive insertion force in z.
• Finger tip force sensing: Is this for applications like picking up an egg?
Or if you're folding clothes or handling cables or wires or anything else flexible, you really need to have a sense of touch. You can't really do these tasks very well with position sensing and vision alone.
Another idea: Maybe add a passive mounting adapter and power leads at the end effector so people can add their own vision or lidar sensors, and just let them connect via bluetooth, so you don't have to route signal cables?
FYI, I am a space roboticist by trade and I teach a graduate level class in robotics at the University of Maryland.
Also, for the type of work I'd do with an arm like this, I'd be more than happy to just have the follower arm. You need a leader arm to do some types of teleoperation or imitation learning, but not really to do reinforcement learning or learn about control theory.
What you do need is an articulated rigid body model that you can import into e.g. NVIDIA Isaac Lab or Gazebo. The availability of a good digital model is a HUGE selling point.
GlenTheMachine commented on Launch HN: Vassar Robotics (YC X25) – $219 robot arm that learns new skills · Posted by u/charleszyong
Just to clarify, these improvements is for future models.
• Adding one DOF to match ARX kinematics is doable, with a price increase of $30–40.
• A tool changer is a great suggestion. A few of my friends are working on kinematic couplings, which would be ideal for this. I’ll need to give some thought to how to pass electrical signals and power to the tool, while also keeping it lightweight.
• Could you share what functionality you want in terms of encoders? The ST3215 uses 12-bit magnetic encoders, which can retain position after power loss. Are you looking for higher resolution? For torque sensing, if the order volume is large, I can add this for just a $20-30 price increase.
You'd also ideally add torque sensing at the joints because it opens up a whole world of control techniques that you can't get with just joint position sensing. You can do compliance or force control, which lets the arm act as if it had a spring at the joints, so when it hits something the impact is nice and gentle, and importantly, so you can do things like e.g. a bolt insertion task where you have to control the position of the arm in x and y but you want to exert a small positive insertion force in z.
• Finger tip force sensing: Is this for applications like picking up an egg?
Or if you're folding clothes or handling cables or wires or anything else flexible, you really need to have a sense of touch. You can't really do these tasks very well with position sensing and vision alone.
Another idea: Maybe add a passive mounting adapter and power leads at the end effector so people can add their own vision or lidar sensors, and just let them connect via bluetooth, so you don't have to route signal cables?
FYI, I am a space roboticist by trade and I teach a graduate level class in robotics at the University of Maryland.
The MS support guy literally tried to get me to password crack the random dude's account. Like, he wanted me to help him guess the guy's password so we could log in as him and change his family settings.
That was the only "help" he could provide.