That’s a calculated risk I take with deadpan humor. This time I cut it close.

I was just riffing on the AI “moderate” talking points. Building a data center in space is prima facie ludicrously stupid and you would need an extremely unusual justification to even consider it. I was pretending to act like a moron who blindly accepts there’s probably a serious reason why they make sense just because some dumbass hype man said so.

The follow-up is also funny:

How many aliens can damce on the head of a pin?

Oh yea absolutely. Underwater datacenters have one upside (cooling) and massive downsides (everything else, more or less). Space datacenters trade that upside into yet another downside, make the downsides even bigger and add a few extra downsides for good measure.

Underwater datacenters make cooling very effective and maintenance nearly impossible, so you have to treat the container data centers essentially disposable. That’s only viable with economy of scale big enough to be an xkcd comic punchline. I guess Microsoft found that even they are not quite there yet. Also most computers don’t tolerate seawater quite as well as they tolerate air.

Data centers in space are a tool. You have to know when and how to use them. I’m not saying they’re completely useless, but most people do not understand how to avoid the difficult and expensive orbital logistics, power and cooling issues, radiation problems or the slow and complicated networking (unlike me, of course people like me know how to avoid them). Obviously it’s ludicrous to suggest space station server farms don’t have their uses and I’m not the kind of luddite saying nobody should ever be putting data centers in space, but right now they should really only be used together with terrestrial data centers and not relied on exclusively. That said, it’s still early days and we will inevitably be seeing a lot more compute in the orbit.

I love the phrase ego death because everyone I’ve heard describe the experience sounds like the most egotistical mf in the universe with how impressed they are by their own self-enlightenment.

It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?

Tołalbottl

She wants to be a martyr so bad, doesn’t she? She desperately needs to be punished for the sake of her beliefs (and the things she did made others do). All for the great cause of… uh… y’know, the important thing she’s being silenced for. Things like that.

People who dislike C’thlaglthorp tend to come in two camps: the ones that prefer significant whitespace and the ones that don’t.

Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of potion that makes you talk like a conservative bullshit artist and said “Have you ever heard of Chesterton’s fence, Potter?” Harry, hearing a genetive case proper noun spoken as a part of two word noun phrase suddenly realized he was no longer talking to a strawman of a simpleton. “The burden of proof is in fact on you, the reformer, to first make a strong case for status quo to prove you understand why things are the way they are before you can even begin to challenge the state of things.” Harry was immediately convinced quidditch is good as is and voted Tory twice.

Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of instant death potion (known to muggles as cyanide) and force fed it to Harry Potter. He was rewarded with accolades, wealth and fame and lived happily ever after.

Does that represent the 🤏 (pinching fingers or “tiny”) hand gesture that makes some Korean men really mad?

Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.

Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.

How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?

It’s a logarithmic plot to begin with and they still feel the need to make the curve exponential lol.

I’m sure they have a rigorous and objective metric for what coding tasks take how long at what success rate for humans.

Yea good luck, I am a mediocre white man and the providence didn’t even grant me the confidence.

Actually the emperor’s clothes look amazing if you’re smart enough to see them.