Oh man, I completely didn’t think about maintenance. Yeah, a data center will typically have several hard drives swapped per day. You’d have to have life support and a staff up there, as well as frequent resupply trips.

I am a bit late to this party, but I thought I’d piggy back on your comment to halfway address it using math.

We want to run data centers cool. This means keeping the center itself as close to 20°C as possible.

If we lose our convection and conduction then our satellite can only radiate away heat. The formula governing a black body radiator is P = σAT^4. We will neglect radiation received, though this is not actually a negligible amount.

If we set T = 20°C = 294K. Then we have the relationship of P/A = 423.6 W/m^2

According to an article I found on the Register from this April:

According to Google, the larger of the two offered pods will consume roughly 10 megawatts under full load.

This would imply a surface area of at minimum 23600 m^2 or 5.8 acres of radiator.

I don’t know how large, physically, such a pod would be. But looking at the satellite view of a google data center in Ohio that I could find, the total footprint area of one of the large building of their data centers is ballpark in that range. I don’t know how many “pods” that building contains.

So it’s not completely outside of the realm of possibility. It’s probably something that can be engineered with some care, despite my earlier misgivings. But putting things in orbit is very expensive, and latency is also a big factor. I can’t think of any particular practical advantages to putting this stuff into orbit other than getting them out of the jurisdiction of governments. (Not counting the hype and stock song and dance from simply announcing you’re going to set a few billion dollars on fire to put AI into space.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BKJ90uXkGdE

Is… that a reference to Frankie and Johnny’s???

Um… Hello, fellow person who grew up in or around New Orleans in the 1990s. How are things? Where did you wind up after Katrina? I have no idea how to handle someone just randomly referencing commercials I had completely forgotten about.

Am I going crazy? One toothbrush for every person. I’m a monogamuggle, and I don’t even share a toothbrush regularly with my wife. If you insist on the counter being tidy, put them in a drawer. Also prevents aerosolized fecal matter from getting on the toothbrush head.

The way that arsonist was able to melt the weird pointy top into something more appealing was really a thing of beauty.

Bouba > Kiki

Anakin brought balance to the force by slaughtering all of the Jedi.

Before, thousands of Jedi, like 4(?) sith.

After, 2 Jedi, 2 sith. Perfectly balanced.

Damn dude. Is your life really so pathetic that you are honestly deriving please from bad news being delivered to people who are on the opposite side of a fucking web browser debate? That’s sad. I hope things start looking up for you in the future.

“You mean I hitched my wagon to Grabthor The Wagon Destroyer, and he destroyed my wagon? This is an outrage!”

Or instead of targeting tiktok specifically, they could have chosen to pass a data privacy law and actually did something worthwhile instead of pointless, unpopular grandstanding. Haha just kidding, they would never do anything to reduce even slightly shareholder value.

I think you’re reading more intent in my post than was actually present. I’m not denying we did genocide to 100 million natives. All I’m denying is that Jackson specifically is significantly worse than the historically reasonable alternatives to the position. Had (for instance) John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe doctrine and a big proponent of western expansion, won the presidency, I do not doubt that a similar overall trajectory would have taken place. Maybe we wouldn’t have specifically had a trail of tears moment, but there’s more to the genocide of native americans than just the trail of tears.

And this is absolving responsibility of all the people who maintained slavery, which one could argue is even worse than jim crow.

How so? I believe you’re arguing in good faith, but I honestly don’t see how you come to this conclusion from what I wrote?

I’m not really trying to weigh and decide if 6000+ deaths and forcible removal of 100k+ people from their homes is better or worse than 100 or so years of systemic oppression followed by more, quieter oppression. Instead, I’m looking at this from the perspective of alternatives.

After the Civil War we very nearly had a moment when we could have maybe did something real for racial equality beyond anything we’ve seen even up to the present day. The Freeman’s Bureau was fighting for wages for former slaves, and was generally a force for working class empowerment. Black congressmen were already being voted into office rapidly. If it were left to do its work, it might even have helped to innoculate the Irish- and Italian-Americans against future union busting on Black/White racial lines a few decades down the line.

Instead, after only about a year, Andrew Johnson started fighting and dismantling the Bureau, placing the former slaveowners back into a de facto master/slave relationship with their former slaves, giving the old Southern Democrats back their political power, and generally restoring the status quo as much as possible. The Bureau itself lasted only 5 or 6 years, don’t remember. The KKK rose up because reconstruction wasn’t there anymore to prevent it, because the Democrats wanted so bad to just put all of the states back in the union and go back to bad old days, and so on.

That was never a realistic moment that I know of in American history where people against war with the native tribes of this land had outsized power and influence. Jackson completely ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling was awful, but while the ruling was grounded in good moral and legal principles, it was, like it or not, extremely unpopular. There wasn’t an entire party with a supermajority in Congress that could have kept up the pressure on this issue.

Andrew Jackson was Trail of Tears, but I actually think Andrew Johnson was arguably worse. He was Lincoln’s Democrat vice president (he was brought on to help “balance the ticket” instead of sticking with his strongly abolitionist first term VP Hannibal Hamlin), who started dismantling reconstruction and giving the power back to the former slaveowners.

You can pretty much lay Jim Crow at his feet.

deleted by creator

LLMs are bad for the uses they’ve been recently pushed for, yes. But this is legitimately a very good use of them. This is natural language processing, within a narrow scope with a specific intention. This is exactly what it can be good at. Even if does have a high false negative rate, that’s still thousands and thousands of true positive cases that were addressed quickly and cheaply, and that a human auditor no longer needs to touch.

An environmental posadist. Not a stance I’ve normally seen. Imo, if nothing came out of deep water horizon, there’s no oil accident big enough to matter.

Transocean received an early partial insurance settlement for total loss of the Deepwater Horizon of US$401 million about 5 May 2010.[60] Financial analysts noted that the insurance recovery was likely to be more than the value of the rig (although not necessarily its replacement value) and any liabilities – the latter estimated at as much as US$200 million.

If only there were other things that a person could do outside of voting once every four years to participate in the political process.

Hey, look at that. It’s the inevitable consequence of the game theory of first past the post voting. Voting system reform is my #1 issue, and if you actually care about the fact that “99% of voters” are locked into voting for someone they dislike to avert disaster every 4 years, it should be yours as well.

There is no meaningful future for third parties until and unless this occurs. IRV is a good first step, but Score voting is better. Multimember districts are also important. Getting rid of the electoral college is a no-brainer.

Oh, I’ll try to describe Euler’s formula in a way that is intuitive, and maybe you could have come up with it too.

So one way to think about complex numbers, and perhaps an intuitive one, is as a generalization of “positiveness” and “negativeness” from a binary to a continuous thing. Notice that if we multiply -1 with -1 we get 1, so we might think that maybe we don’t have a straight line of positiveness and negativeness, but perhaps it is periodic in some manner.

We can envision that perhaps the imaginary unit, i, is “halfway between” positive and negative, because if we think about what √(-1) could possibly be, the only thing that makes sense is it’s some form of 1 where you have to use it twice to make something negative instead of just once. Then it stands to reason that √i is “halfway between” i and 1 in this scale of positive and negative.

If we figure out what number √i we get √2/2 + √2/2 i

(We can find this by saying (a + bi)^(2) = i, which gives us (a^(2) - b^(2) = 0 and 2ab = 1) we get a = b from the first, and a^(2) = 1/2)

The keen eyed observer might notice that this value is also equal to sin(45°) and we start to get some ideas about how all of the complex numbers with radius 1 might be somewhat special and carry their own amount of “positiveness” or “negativeness” that is somehow unique to it.

So let’s represent these values with R ∠ θ where the θ represents the amount of positiveness or negativeness in some way.

Since we’ve observed that √i is located at the point 45° from the positive real axis, and i is on the imaginary axis, 90° from the positive real axis, and -1 is 180° from the positive real axis, and if we examine each of these we find that if we use cos to represent the real axis and sin to represent the imaginary axis. That’s really neat. It means we can represent any complex number as R ∠ θ = cos θ + i sin θ.

What happens if we multiply two complex numbers in this form? Well, it turns out if you remember your trigonometry, you exactly get the angle addition formulas for sin and cos. So R ∠ θ * S ∠ φ = RS ∠ θ + φ. But wait a second. That’s turning multiplication into an addition? Where have we seen something like this before? Exponent rules.

We have a^(n) * a^(m) = a^(n+m) what if, somehow, this angle formula is also an exponent in disguise?

Then you’re learning calculus and you come across Taylor Series and you learn a funny thing, the Taylor series of e^x looks a lot like the Taylor series of sine and cosine.

And actually, if we look at the Taylor series for e^(ix) is exactly matches the Taylor series for cos x + i sin x. So our supposition was correct, it was an exponent in disguise. How wild. Finally we get:

R ∠ θ = Re^(iθ) = cos θ + i sin θ