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.

You don't even know what an ad hominem attack is, since I didn't make one.

Learn what words mean before you use them, kid.

I guarantee it was an off the shelf device running their app. It's the elon phone!

If you don't hate Elon after what he did to USAID, which has killed thousands abroad elsewhere and also resulted in the screwworm showing up here, you're stupid.

Fine words from someone who has done neither.

What you're doing is called simping.

Not just history but the present is replete with counterexamples. Cartels abound.

wank wank, flonk flonk.

I remember a time when Slashdot was peopled mostly by humans who looked down on copyright law in general as a farce. Those were better times in a lot of ways, and this is only one of them.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Everything is coercive.

Who came to defend the honor of the fire stick?

The fix is to come up with a news reader with cryptographically managed identities (not verified, just consistent) and go back to USENET with it. This does everything valuable that social networking does, but without the malevolent overlord.

The copyright statute of Slashdot's home country defines a "copy" as a physical object in which a work is embodied, such as a book, ROM cartridge, or optical disc. The statutory license associated with ownership of a copy of a computer program includes making intermediate copies "as an essential step" in the use of the program. Title 17, United States Code, section 117. Historically, console makers and game publishers have lacked power to revoke this license with respect to a particular copy of a game that isn't online-only. With the end of video game distribution on optical disc, this license becomes revocable, and that's the problem.

This is what I came to say. Starting with elements is as close to scratch as we get, and they didn't go there