Could you build a data center in space? Yes, absolutely I am sure there are no physical barriers. We have computers in space now, and those computers have telecom links to Earth.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.
I think you're understating the permitting problem - it's a major reason for the very large/rapid price hikes on power in the PJM region, and the populist backlash against data center construction, including moratoriums on DC construction. The difficulty in getting new electrical generation interconnected in many parts of the US is one of the major marks in favor of the plan.
I'm not understating it. But I'm not buying the line that suddenly it's impossible to build industrial buildings in the US. I am realizing that there are thousands of jurisdictions in the US with wildly different permitting regimes, and then hundreds of other countries in the world that might be more welcoming.
But let's say they need to stay in the US. Are DC operators offering to buy down utility capex costs so that existing residents don't see a spike in rates? If not, obviously that is going to create opposition as nobody wants their utility bills to rise rapidly. It would probably be cheaper & easier to e.g. write a check to Southern Company to prevent rate hikes directly tied to their DC than to put a DC in space.
The math also barely pencils? IF Starship hits its $100/kg, getting a single rack of servers to orbit will cost ~$100k. A 500MW data center might have ~5k racks, so ~$500m to orbit. SpaceX estimates $100/kg - $300/kg so it could be $1.5B - $2B just to put the racks in orbit, plus the cost of the servers, plus the cost of the actual orbital data center itself, plus the cost of getting the orbital data center to orbit. That's getting into the "hand every resident a check for $100k in exchange for their county approving the permit" territory.
One Vera Rubin rack costs $3-7M and eats something like 600 kw, so you’re probably looking at more like 800 racks for that 500 MW DC. $100k launch costs per rack doesn’t seem too terrible if that’s what it works out to. I’m sure there’s a mountain of solar panels that aren’t included, though?
And it’s not that simple, building out power generation is very constrained, the interconnection queue is years long in many places, and the current backlog for new natural gas turbines is multiple years right now. Fixing the permitting isn’t impossible with some political will, but energy permitting reform is something that’s been bandied around for years in Congress and hasn’t made it across the finish line. EPRA almost made it at the end of last Congress but that session ended before it did. Hopefully it makes it this time, everyone should contact their congresspeople and ask them to support energy permitting reform.
You will have a setup working based on solar energy and battery storage before you get spaceship to not explode anymore and to deliver low price for payload.
And we are talking about AI Datacenters, they are a lot less latency dependend than websites.
Alone the idea that Musk would be able to break through any burocrazy for space stuff and sets up a supply chain for everything space is easier than just setting up some energy and fiber, feels ridicoulys
I don't understand how years spent building an orbital DC is better than years spent permitting. I guess maybe they expect to somehow be able to build these faster? (How?)
Anyway, is it technically possible? Yes. My suspicion is it's at best a wash vs building on the ground. Applying a similar price premium & similar engineering resources to a ground-based system is likely to deliver much more predictable results.
Tech obviously can have success at lobbying. The TikTok ban IIRC got 90 votes in the Senate. I'm sure the total cost of the required astroturf campaign was much less than launching a single orbital DC.
As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.
Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.
Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.
And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.
A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.
> Even if not quite true, it doesn't change my argument
This is one of the main points of bigotry. The facts don't matter. So when a person says something obviously ridiculous like
> among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites
the proper way to interpret is "I feel like there are too many unworthy people working there," where "too many" is entirely subjective and could be as few as one.
Honestly didn't mean to say you were being a bigot there. But I would strongly suggest you spend some time in Google/census data/etc. to recalibrate your feelings. The TL;DR; is most high-paid corporate jobs in the US are held by a single demographic. Said demographic is a distinct minority of college graduates in the US.
One's information environment can mislead, but perhaps the process of finding information sources you consider objective, then studying them, will lead you to reevaluate the information diet that is creating a false picture of reality.
Walmart does not, over 10 years after they were released, even accept the contactless payment systems in common use. Instead, they push their in-house version in part so they can capture the relevant customer data.
And we're meant to believe that Walmart planned to outsource the entire series of touchpoints represented by the discovery & checkout process? Yeah, okay.
This was never going to be more than an experiment for Walmart.
I left after seeing Contact Picker API listed. Contact Picker API is, per the MDN link in the OP, marked as "This is an experimental technology." It is "not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers."
I remember back in the early 2000s when people thought we were running out of steam on the advancements front. This was roughly around the time when CPU clocks stopped getting faster. Pentium hit 3GHz in 2005, Intel Core Ultra 5 performance cores are generally around this exact speed 20 years later.
Since at least the 640kb quip, betting against progress or the appetite for progress has been a losing bet.
Honestly post 2005 things did slow down dramatically for typical single core workloads.
In the late 90s and early 2000s the mantra was "why waste time optimizing your software? By the time you're done the next gen of CPUs will have made up the difference."
Now the increase is more about moving to GPUs and power efficiency etc. We still have increases, but the rate of speedup has slowed down a lot.
IIRC it was called Clawdbot when Anthropic complained. IANAL but I believe the holder of a trademark is obligated to defend it against infringement. Hard to say that Clawdbot was not potentially infringing, given its purpose. It's not clear how much leeway Anthropic had given his initial choice of name.
I still think Anthropic should've bought Clawdbot/OpenClaw. Feels like a missed business opportunity to expand your market share by capitalizing on the hype.
"now at OpenAI" were my original words - they did the equivalent of an acqui-hire and "protected" OpenClaw in a foundation.
In the context of the seemingly aggressive machinations of Anthropic your hair-splitting without clarifying beyond "OpenAI didn't buy OpenClaw" seems itself misleading and rather counter to helping conversations progress.
It could reasonably cause confusion in the marketplace. Again, IANAL.
If you wanted to find out the actual legal arguments, you could release and promote software for white-collar workers called Mycrosoft Offyce and I am sure you will get official legal answers from Microsoft's counsel.
The example in question is a Trademark for "T. Markey" and the conflicting mark is listed as "Tee Marqee".
Reasonableness is a thing here. Every person in this thread knows why it was called Clawdbot and not (say) Peterbot or cronbot. That we all know that reason is the problem.
Edit, the USPTO does in fact make this blindingly easy to find:
"How do I know whether I'm infringing?" --> "The key factors considered in most cases are the degree of similarity between the marks at issue and whether the parties' goods and/or services are sufficiently related that consumers are likely to assume (mistakenly) that they come from a common source."
There are two kinds of countries: countries that use metric, and countries who have put a person on the moon.
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