Unless the Internet is lying to me, Leo orbits around 600km and Starlink around 350-600km. So it doesn't appear that will make a lot of difference.

Most of the latency in my Starlink connection is because the signal comes down in the US and has to route back from there to Canada if I ping my office from home instead of going direct through a cable. So I wouldn't expect to see much difference if I was using Leo instead.

Yes. One thing to remember is that Boomers are retiring en masse and older Gen-X are saying 'screw this' and retiring early because it's not worth the hassle of working any more. So it's not just people being laid off but also people deciding they don't want anything more to do with the awful work culture of the modern world.

SpaceX made $75 billion actual real dollars. It's in the bank.

Sure, the individual VCs aren't allowed to take their actual cash out of the company until August 6. Want to bet the datacenter hype keeps going until at least then?

Elon Musk, or whoever manages him, already learned not to post speculative tweets about his companies followed up shortly later by "just jokes lol".

They could charge a subscription so other "Smart Glasses" users will see you wearing pants. If you don't pay then the other users' glasses will automatically AI-remove your pants whenever the glasses see you.

Although I guess some people might consider that a feature rather than a bug.

Yeah, I have bigger batteries in the basement connected to the solar panels in the yard but they're not powerful enough to run AC. Can run a few fans though.

And our wifi is the only one on the street that's up when the power is out so curious neighbours could figure out something's going on at our house.

In the last few weeks republican politicians and their supporters have publicly said Nixon shouldn't have resigned and was treated unfairly. Apparently what he did was totally fine by them. Vance in particular expressed sympathy for Nixon. Who's woke now? Surreal.

Looks like it's currently $849 in Bluetti's summer sale. That's for about 2kWh of battery, 2kW-ish inverter and solar charger in one box, which is a lot less than it would have been five years ago.

Designed to fit on top of a fridge but it can be used for powering other things too.

It's not great, but I don't think that's the least practical part of it. Reasonable people have done the math and you can almost make it work just by making the radiators the same size as, and putting them on the back of, the solar panels. Starlink satellites already generate and dissipate a kilowatt plus.

The impractical part is that the whole thing is going to deorbit and burn up after five years. Sure, maybe you don't want the five year old GPUs, but replacing the panels and radiators every five years is going to be more expensive than building twice as much on the ground.

Conspiracy theories are silly, and unnecessary.

Remember when Elon ruminated about hyperloop and everyone went nuts? Well, this time he ruminated about space datacentres. Oh, and SpaceX investors cashed out for ~$85 billion.

It is LEO.

Size is not free. Besides having to get the thing up there, which might come down to merely very expensive, there's drag in low Earth orbit, and the bigger the surface area of your satellite the more propulsion you need to keep it up there. The life of Starlink satellites is primarily limited by their propellant.

Even if you ignore launch costs entirely, is it cheaper to put your datacentre in space and replace it and your power plant every few years, or put it in a nice desert or on a floating island somewhere instead? Oh, and you have to engineer it to be completely maintenance free for the first option too.

What's the downside? SpaceX stock got pumped for their IPO. The money is made. As long as the hype keeps going they can raise more any time they want, or Elon could sell some of his shares. If it turns out to be unworkable, SpaceX (and subsidiaries) are back where they started.

There aren't really any unsolved engineering problems. SpaceX can absolutely put a rack of nvidia GPUs into low orbit. We could have done that in the 70s. The argument is whether it's economical or not.

Which is cheaper, putting a thousand square metres of solar panels, a rack of GPUs, a vacuum cooling system and propulsion in low orbit and incinerating and replacing it all every few years, or the panels, GPUs and a convective radiator that is ~50x more efficient on the ground and runs for twenty plus?

If I put some bricks or concrete blocks in a vacant lot and they assembled themselves into a house you'd think that was pretty cool.

Oddly enough the UK was the only place where we had a generator hooked in to automatically take over power for the house when the grid went out. That was partly because we lived in a wood where falling branches would take our power lines, but it was also because the power company couldn't be bothered to clean up the lines so falling branches wouldn't take them out.

It works as a UPS but you can also attach solar panels to it for off-grid use. I didn't because I don't want to have to run cables through the walls into the house.