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ericd commented on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory   cell.com/one-earth/fullte... · Posted by u/Archelaos
davidw · 17 hours ago
Work on local things to make your own city better. Plenty of stuff that's not too difficult, even if it won't fix everything:

* Multifamily housing is much more energy efficient. Is it legal to build throughout your city, or does zoning prevent it?

* Is there good bicycle infrastructure so people don't have to drive for everything?

* Does your city still have expensive parking mandates that lock in car dependency? Get rid of those. They also get in the way of places becoming more walkable.

* This one hurts, but: eat less beef.

* Advocate for good transit as another way for people to get around without driving a personal vehicle.

* What can be done in your city/region to electrify heating for homes and businesses?

* What can your region do to build more renewable energy capacity?

Those are all things where even a few voices can sometimes make a difference.

ericd · 17 hours ago
Great list!

For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.

ericd commented on MIT Living Wage Calculator   livingwage.mit.edu/... · Posted by u/bear_with_me
kibwen · 3 days ago
The average total cost of car ownership in the US in 2025 was about $12,000. $9,000 is already a huge underestimate of what the average person is paying.
ericd · 3 days ago
That US average includes a lot of new, loaded, financed, comprehensively insured F150’s, not some reasonable minimum.
ericd commented on France's homegrown open source online office suite   github.com/suitenumerique... · Posted by u/nar001
admissionsguy · 5 days ago
> solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow

True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.

You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.

ericd · 5 days ago
It’s building infrastructure, which should lower costs in the long term. Seems like a good use of money from where I’m sitting.
ericd commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
javascriptfan69 · 8 days ago
Current cost to LEO is $1500 per kg

That would make your solar panel (40kg) around $60K to put into space.

Even being generous and assuming you could get it to $100 per kg that's still $4000

There's a lot of land in the middle of nowhere that is going to be cheaper than sending shit to space.

ericd · 8 days ago
I think the disconnect is that with starship they’re targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one on the ground, doesn’t suffer seasonality/weather, and doesn’t require battery storage for smoothing/time shifting, so you’d need to deploy many times the number of panels on earth. Our home array in North America over the course of the year generates something like 1/7th of its theoretical capacity, overproduces in the summer, and underproduces in the winter.
ericd commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
pclmulqdq · 8 days ago
Solar panels in space are more efficient, but on the ground we have dead dinosaurs we can burn. The efficiency gain is also more than offset by the fact that you can't replace a worn out panel. A few years into the life of your satellite its power production drops.
ericd · 8 days ago
No idea how quickly they wear out in space with 24x7 irradiance and space temps, but on the earth, they’re at something like 80% capacity after 25 years. So seems like you could control how long they have via overpanelling?
ericd commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
ndsipa_pomu · 8 days ago
> You can't just shut off a data center at night.

Why not?

A capacity problem can be solved by having another data center the other side of the earth.

If it's that the power cycling causes equipment to fail earlier, then that can be addressed far more easily than radiation hardening all equipment so that it can function in space.

ericd · 8 days ago
Because GPUs are expensive, much more expensive than launch costs if they get starship to the low end of the range they’re aiming for, and you want your expensive equipment running as much as possible to amortize the cost down?
ericd commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
DonHopkins · 8 days ago
Libertarian Paradise!

Too bad the fire trucks can't get to you when you catch on fire from that hot GPU.

ericd · 8 days ago
Good thing the lack of oxygen does a pretty good job of taking care of that for you ;-)
ericd commented on Data centers in space makes no sense   civai.org/blog/space-data... · Posted by u/ajyoon
msie · 8 days ago
it should be easier to build a railway

No, because of the costs of acquiring land that the railway goes through.

ericd · 8 days ago
Now how about procuring half a gigawatt when nearby residents are annoyed about their heating bills doubling, and are highly motivated to block you? This is already happening in some areas.
ericd commented on xAI joins SpaceX   spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork
XorNot · 8 days ago
You cannot just block out the mass of stuff and declare it'll cost exactly the launch cost, nor can you take the cost of current datacenter servers and go "they'll definitely cost the same to put in space".

A regular set of servers will straight up be destroyed if put on a rocket and launched into space: the motherboards and PCBs aren't mounted or rated to survive the vibration. The connectors and wiring isn't rated for that vibration. Sure, some probably make it, but you will lose machines from just launching them alone. Any electrolytic capacitors in there? If your system exposes them to vacuum or even just low pressure, then those likely die too. Solar panels? We can launch them obviously, there's a reason people send up expensive solar panels: because you're doing a lot of work making sure they'll physically survive the launch.

So of course, now you have to build a space-rated server frame, PCBs and GPUs. You ain't going to buying bulk H100's from Nvidia. And you have to package and mount it to get it both survive the launch and physically fit into the payload bay. Then you have to add a deployment system for it, sensors etc. And then you have to add an assembly system, because if it doesn't fit in one launch (you're proposing 250+ launches for power alone) then all of these systems need to be assembled in orbit. How are they going to be assembled? How are they going to be maneuvered? Even if you could rendezvous accurately with the construction orbit, we're talking months of drift from every little thing knocking stuff around, putting it into a spin, etc.

So either each of these is now a fully contained satellite, complete with manoeuvering system and power, or you're also needing to develop a robotic assembly system - with power and manoeuevering in order to manage and assemble all this.

And let's not forget mission control: every single one of these steps is incurring a bunch of labor costs to have people manage it. And not cheap labor costs: you're going from "guys who roll racks in and plug stuff in and can be trained up easily" to "space mission control operators".

Is this doable? Probably. Is this going to be in anyway cheaper then Earth? Not in the slightest, and it's not going to be close.

ericd · 8 days ago
Heh relax, it’s back of the envelope to try and see if it’s anywhere in the ballpark, and if they get launch to be cheap enough, it seems like it might be. You don’t assemble one massive thing in space, it’s a bunch of disposable individual sats with laser interconnects, like Starlink.
ericd commented on xAI joins SpaceX   spacex.com/updates#xai-jo... · Posted by u/g-mork
hunta2097 · 9 days ago
The fuel costs alone would dwarf a data center build out.
ericd · 9 days ago
Just based on weight, looks like a Block 4 starship should be able to bring up ~150 30 panel pallets of 550W panels, about 2 MW. They're trying to get a starship launch down to $2M with full reuse. GPU DCs are frequently in the neighborhood of 500GW, so maybe 250 launches for just the power generation, or $500M? And then there's radiators, so let's say $1B for launch of power and heat dissipation. For comparison, 500MW of H100 machines retails for >$10B, and the launch cost for those shouldn't be too bad compared to the power, since they're more value dense. And then there's land and ongoing power and cooling spending for the terrestrial version, which you don't have for the space version. So actually, doesn't seem terrible economically? This is obviously very back-of-the-envelope, and predicated on the optimistic scenario for starship launch cost.

u/ericd

KarmaCake day12573November 8, 2009View Original