Because a LOT of people are missing the point:
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I loathe Felon Muscovite but one thing that he does not need to talk up is his space orbital capabilities.
He does about 150 orbital launches a year, which is more than all the global total launches combined.
Boeing lifters are fully single shot and cost anywhere from 2 to 3 billion dollars of taxpayers money.
Musk is a fraction of that.
If he gets his Starship operational, he will be able to put 1kg of mass up there for about $20 and for that price you can totally put a data centre in orbit and kill dead the "using water/power/CO2" arguments from the #Antiai mob
Having said all that, everytime his Nazi Starship explodes I rejoice.
@n_dimension @cstross
Yeah?I'll play along and ignore the cooling and connection restraints.
How much CO2 is burned getting that kilo up there? Compared to driving it to a datacenter?
What happens with the hardware after it's expected normal lifetime? Do we care about the rare metals in there, that will burn up on reentry? What that introduces into our atmosphere?
Orbital datacenters are a joke, unless you urgently want to drive up your spaceship and AI company shares.
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@0xtero @n_dimension Obviously people will need somewhere to stash the bored ape NFTs and generate their fresh child abuse photos with too many fingers, penises, and ovipositors. It's a huge growth market! Hey, why are you looking at me like that?
@cstross @n_dimension Oh. I’d already forgotten bored ape NFTs. This timeline is so tightly packed with rubbish even recent past have overflown from my cognitive context window. Sort of like the low earth orbit after Elon gets his way.
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@cstross @n_dimension Except even your basic Falcon 9 burns like 125 tons of methane to put something in orbit and refining metal to make giant rockets isn't exactly a carbon free activity.
@Infoseepage @n_dimension Falcon 9 does not use methane as fuel, it runs on RP-1, refined jet fuel (kerosene). Falcon 9 first stages are reusable, the disposable upper stage has to be as light as they can make it in order not to waste payload—I'm guessing there's less than a cybertruck's worth of metal in there.
Maybe go after the shipbuilding industry first? (A quarter of a million tons of steel per ULCC!)
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@n_dimension @cstross
Yeah?I'll play along and ignore the cooling and connection restraints.
How much CO2 is burned getting that kilo up there? Compared to driving it to a datacenter?
What happens with the hardware after it's expected normal lifetime? Do we care about the rare metals in there, that will burn up on reentry? What that introduces into our atmosphere?
Orbital datacenters are a joke, unless you urgently want to drive up your spaceship and AI company shares.
CO2 does not "burn" (unless you're using fluorine as an oxidizer :) — get your elementary-school level science right first?
Orbital DCs are still bullshit but you won't discredit them by bloviating wildly and sounding like a hick who can't be bothered with research.
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@NewtonMark @n_dimension Radiative cooling works in space. But it's worth looking into how large the radiators on the ISS have to be, or what it takes to keep the JWST from overheating.
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I loathe Felon Muscovite but one thing that he does not need to talk up is his space orbital capabilities.
He does about 150 orbital launches a year, which is more than all the global total launches combined.
Boeing lifters are fully single shot and cost anywhere from 2 to 3 billion dollars of taxpayers money.
Musk is a fraction of that.
If he gets his Starship operational, he will be able to put 1kg of mass up there for about $20 and for that price you can totally put a data centre in orbit and kill dead the "using water/power/CO2" arguments from the #Antiai mob
Having said all that, everytime his Nazi Starship explodes I rejoice.
@n_dimension @cstross "antiai mob" lmao okay slopper, when the world has burned to ash I hope you know that we will remember the ghouls who laundered the reputation of the fire.
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@cstross @n_dimension Oh. I’d already forgotten bored ape NFTs. This timeline is so tightly packed with rubbish even recent past have overflown from my cognitive context window. Sort of like the low earth orbit after Elon gets his way.
@0xtero @cstross @n_dimension Whenever I'm feeling blue I remember "all my apes gone" and I chuckle, and I remember that at least I'm not that much of a gullible rube.
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@n_dimension @cstross
Yeah?I'll play along and ignore the cooling and connection restraints.
How much CO2 is burned getting that kilo up there? Compared to driving it to a datacenter?
What happens with the hardware after it's expected normal lifetime? Do we care about the rare metals in there, that will burn up on reentry? What that introduces into our atmosphere?
Orbital datacenters are a joke, unless you urgently want to drive up your spaceship and AI company shares.
@jesse @n_dimension @cstross I've said it before, even if "AI" were A) Not a scam propped up by cognitive bias and billions in marketing budgets, and B) Provably benign, it would still kill us all by boiling the seas and choking the air just by doing nothing.
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@jesse @n_dimension @cstross I've said it before, even if "AI" were A) Not a scam propped up by cognitive bias and billions in marketing budgets, and B) Provably benign, it would still kill us all by boiling the seas and choking the air just by doing nothing.
@seachaint @jesse @n_dimension Nope. If AI wasn't a scam propped up by a hype bubble it wouldn't have the money to boil any oceans so we'd be seeing economical and efficient LLMs, mostly academic research tools, trained on legally acquired corpuses using existing university-owned servers (no giant DCs in sight) and the image generating garbage wouldn't exist.
The environmental damage is a side-effect of capitalism getting hold of it.
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@Infoseepage @n_dimension Falcon 9 does not use methane as fuel, it runs on RP-1, refined jet fuel (kerosene). Falcon 9 first stages are reusable, the disposable upper stage has to be as light as they can make it in order not to waste payload—I'm guessing there's less than a cybertruck's worth of metal in there.
Maybe go after the shipbuilding industry first? (A quarter of a million tons of steel per ULCC!)
@n_dimension @cstross Sorry, actually knew that and mistyped due to morning brain. I swear to god I can't seem to sleep for more than three or four hours at a time these days. Any hydrocarbon fueled rocket is going to produce a ton of all those lovely molecules people are insistent shouldn't be going into the atmosphere if we don't want to bake the planet to a crisp. My understanding is a single Falcon launch is like 5-10 years of total emissions from a typical USian type person.
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Because a LOT of people are missing the point:
No, Elon Musk is NOT serious about putting a million data centres into orbit. It can't work: laws of physics say "nope".
But SpaceX is expected to go public this year.
Elon is talking up his company's future prospects in front of gullible investors because he needs a growth narrative beyond Starlink, which is already priced in. Something to justify the Starship proram beyond NASA's lunar ambitions.
So it's salesman's bullshit, lies for fools.
So the Anti-The Boring Company maneuver.
In steady of saying something that is possible(Calf HSR), isn't feasible, you say the impossible is feasible.
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@n_dimension @cstross Sorry, actually knew that and mistyped due to morning brain. I swear to god I can't seem to sleep for more than three or four hours at a time these days. Any hydrocarbon fueled rocket is going to produce a ton of all those lovely molecules people are insistent shouldn't be going into the atmosphere if we don't want to bake the planet to a crisp. My understanding is a single Falcon launch is like 5-10 years of total emissions from a typical USian type person.
@Infoseepage @n_dimension That's a terrible way of framing things. How much carbon does a typical bridge emit? What social good does it provide? Hint: lots more of both than you might expect at first sight (concrete emits about 3x to 4x the CO2 emitted by the aviation industry).
Meanwhile some of those rockets are carrying earth resources satellites that provide early warning of tsunamis, hurricanes, and other disasters that potentially cost millions of lives.
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@Infoseepage @n_dimension That's a terrible way of framing things. How much carbon does a typical bridge emit? What social good does it provide? Hint: lots more of both than you might expect at first sight (concrete emits about 3x to 4x the CO2 emitted by the aviation industry).
Meanwhile some of those rockets are carrying earth resources satellites that provide early warning of tsunamis, hurricanes, and other disasters that potentially cost millions of lives.
@n_dimension @cstross There are some good uses if satellites, obviously. Orbital data centers are not one of them.
I was just discussing concrete and steel production the other day in the context of Ireland replacing some early wind farms with much taller turbines and wondering if they had to redo the pads. The pads (which you mostly don't see because they're buried) use tons of concrete and rebar and are often cited as a reason why wind power is less green than people think.
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@n_dimension @cstross There are some good uses if satellites, obviously. Orbital data centers are not one of them.
I was just discussing concrete and steel production the other day in the context of Ireland replacing some early wind farms with much taller turbines and wondering if they had to redo the pads. The pads (which you mostly don't see because they're buried) use tons of concrete and rebar and are often cited as a reason why wind power is less green than people think.
@Infoseepage @n_dimension Yep. Also worth noting is that civil nuclear power plants use *enormous* amounts of concrete and high-grade steel: those containment vessels are metres thick, and most reactors themselves are multi-hundred-tonne forged steel pressure vessels (giant kettles, basically). Even nuclear power isn't carbon-emission-free.
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@Infoseepage @n_dimension Yep. Also worth noting is that civil nuclear power plants use *enormous* amounts of concrete and high-grade steel: those containment vessels are metres thick, and most reactors themselves are multi-hundred-tonne forged steel pressure vessels (giant kettles, basically). Even nuclear power isn't carbon-emission-free.
@n_dimension @cstross Steel production can at least in theory be moved over to ore reduction methods and power sources which are much greener than at present, but the shift isn't happening near fast enough. Don't know what to do about concrete. As a society, we're addicted to it as a construction material. Maybe move back to quarrying large blocks of stone and use concrete extremely sparingly?
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@seachaint @jesse @n_dimension Nope. If AI wasn't a scam propped up by a hype bubble it wouldn't have the money to boil any oceans so we'd be seeing economical and efficient LLMs, mostly academic research tools, trained on legally acquired corpuses using existing university-owned servers (no giant DCs in sight) and the image generating garbage wouldn't exist.
The environmental damage is a side-effect of capitalism getting hold of it.
@cstross@wandering.shop @seachaint@masto.hackers.town @jesse@chaos.social @n_dimension@infosec.exchange A lot more stuff that looks like Vosk, essentially.
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@n_dimension @cstross Steel production can at least in theory be moved over to ore reduction methods and power sources which are much greener than at present, but the shift isn't happening near fast enough. Don't know what to do about concrete. As a society, we're addicted to it as a construction material. Maybe move back to quarrying large blocks of stone and use concrete extremely sparingly?
@Infoseepage @n_dimension There are low-carbon concrete processes, but AIUI nothing has been scaled up to mass production. In the long term, cement absorbs CO2—but at ambient temperature and pressure it takes centuries.
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@NewtonMark @n_dimension I've been expecting the bubble to burst since last October, but as the man says, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid.
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@cstross@wandering.shop @seachaint@masto.hackers.town @jesse@chaos.social @n_dimension@infosec.exchange A lot more stuff that looks like Vosk, essentially.
@lispi314 @seachaint @jesse @n_dimension I was thinking more along the lines of history-llms, but yes.
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@news
https://www.eunews.it/2026/02/03/sono-gia-6-i-paesi-ue-volenterosi-digitali-contro-i-social-network-anche-la-spagna-proporra-il-divieto-ai-minori-di-16-anni/
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