Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    19 hours ago

    Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      19 hours ago

      The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers

      edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        9·
        18 hours ago

        The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game’s Codex (“Starships: Heat Management” in the Secondary section, if you’re looking for it).

        That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven’t had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody’s bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.

        • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          18 hours ago

          Oh don’t worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.

          • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
            4·
            16 hours ago

            they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun

            I know you’re joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copper’s great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:

            1. The sun isn’t hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copper’s gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core

            2. Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copper’s a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to iron’s 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing

            3. The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)

            So, this idea’s fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but that’s a question for another day.

            • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
              4·
              7 hours ago

              don’t forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sun…

              • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                2·
                3 hours ago

                Indeed, people don’t seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            18 hours ago

            All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        18 hours ago

        The author’s previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.

        Proponents say this represents a natural step in the evolution of moving heavy industry off the planet’s surface and a solution for the ravenous energy needs of artificial intelligence. Critics say building data centers in space is technically very challenging and cite major hurdles, such as radiating away large amounts of heat and the cost of accessing space.

        It is unclear who is right, but one thing is certain: Such facilities would need to be massive to support artificial intelligence.

        Starcloud’s fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.