Totally agree with you on ‘putting stuff away’. Much of the mental effort is trying to organize stuff so it takes space efficiently, and be easy to find it when I need it. If a robot put it away, I don’t really care where. I can just ask it where it is.
Global cellular operator revenue is approx $1T. They have put their toe in the water with direct-to-cellular support for starlink, and have bought spectrum to improve this. I'm sure they basically want to offer cellular to everyone in the world and get a good chunk of that $1T. Maybe they want 20% of it? Sounds crazy, but China Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telecom each have 10%. Sounds it's not so wild that they can grab a big chunk, especially if they can find new customers that are not already connected.
And of course they can also continue to grow their broadband internet access business.
I suppose they will likely start putting cameras and other data sensors on the satellites so they can sell other data for mapping, positioning services, agriculture, weather, etc. The incremental cost to add this to the platform will be almost nothing compared to existing systems.
Right now we do not even have the antenna technology in current high end smartphones for 'easy to use, normal speed' mobile to satelite communication.
And funny enough, the more local mobile phones you would have, which want to send data to a satelite, the harder the problem gets due to interference.
With 5g we do already a lot of beam forming etc. Try beamforming into 500km space with uncoordinated random amount of mobile devices with very very little sending power and one satelite 'beamforming' its a few hundred square miles.
It will take years if not more to be technical capable to have modems so good that they can communicate with a starlink satelite in any reasonable 'day to day' way.
And Starlink already increased prices again.
And without Sparship and prooving that they actually can reuse it, they can't hold the price point.
Starlink satelites do not scale very well. They need v3 and even with v3 this doesn't scale efficently.
Once in a while I get inspired by a post on HN, but I know I don't have the energy to follow it through. Here's my idea for anyone who thinks they can do something with it:
Imagine you are holding in your hand a small glassy sphere. Initially it looks like random dots inside, but as you play with it in your hands, you get glimpses of images of loved ones.
To implement this, select a bunch of photos of people, generate pseudo-3d models of their faces with your AI of choice. Position them around a sphere in a 3D modelling software, and generate a whole bunch of renderings all around the scene. Now, feed those renderings into gaussian splat software.
The resulting 3D gaussian splat should include relatively high fidelity when the viewer is aligned with the supplied iamges, but more stochastic nonsense when misaligned. This should contribute to the feeling of being able to 'find' images while rotating the sphere around.
if you allowed for some slippage in precision, how many images could you fit in that are recognizable from various angles, with ~acceptable~ resolution? Sounds fun.
This seems like a good opportunity to share my recent photos from a bookstore in Tokyo… just a crazy number of computer books. Mostly in Japanese language.
Surely, the question is: how big do the radiators have to be?
gemini says that the NVIDIA DGX H100 is 130kg and takes 11kW.
It says space-based radiators in the 100kW range are approx 15kg per kW. And space-based solar panels are approx 1kg per kW.
So let's says we're talking about 1 system that bundles 9 DGX H100's. That's 1.2T for the computing system, 1.5T for the radiator, 100kg for the solar panels, and let's say 2T for the propulsion, propellant, guidance, and all the other spacecraft stuff. That's a total of about 5T, and the radiator is just about 20% of the mass budget.
The power radiated is proportional to the 4th power of the temperature, so they would be incentivized to develop a heat exchanger with a high temperature working fluid.
I would assume that the current GPU systems are not optimized for weight. I would also assume that they need to build special purpose GPU equipment for space, which could possibly be made much lighter than the current ones.
I wonder if we can mine patent databases for old ideas that never worked out in the past, but now are more useful. Perhaps due to modern machining or newer materials or just new applications of the idea.
Trex makes composite decking planks from recycled shopping bags. Seems like a perfect use for the material. Its durable. It doesn’t have to be sterile or pure. Apparently 100,000 bags will go into a typical deck.
Having said that I don’t see what’s wrong with incineration if it’s done correctly. It’s not open pit burning, with waste gases going into the environment. It’s high temperature, with additional gas and oxygen to promote more complete burning. And waste gases are filtered.
Provided they don’t get too much sun, because those dense plastic planks get much hotter than wood (I’ve measured 65C on mine). A deck is not much good if you can’t stand on it.
I think some of the Trex looks pretty good, they're definitely not all the same. If you do go this route then you will need an outdoor rug on the planks if it gets direct sun though. They're just way too hot otherwise, as you've stated. But throw a nice outdoor rug down and it's problems solved.
Which is also why it’s critical that they be installed with a gap between the boards (Kreg makes a useful set of spacers and drill jig to hide the screws). Otherwise expansion will destroy the deck.
Oh, mine have spaces and all (the very-expensive, not-optional mounting clips create the requisite spacing). They're just hot. Google "composite deck heat" etc will find lots of people complaining about it.
CO2 is a major waste gas which can't be filtered. That's one problem with incinerating plastic waste. Being buried in a landfill, that CO2 wouldn't be released. The other environmental problem is that it's not being reused so more virgin plastic has to be produced, and that production process releases CO2.
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