Well, now you've done it -- we have to estimate how water Dennis Ritchie used in the process of writing his C compiler.

- According the Wikipedia, Dennis Ritchie developed the first C compiler in 1972 and 1973, so I'm going to call it two years.

- The average American uses 80-100 gallons of water per day (including drinking water, toilet flushing, showers, cooking, laundry, etc).

So that puts the water usage for Ritchie's C compiler in the ballpark of 65,700 gallons total. Dunno how that compares to the AIs' usage, but there's no inherent reason why an AI needs to use water at all; closed-loop cooling systems are quite doable.

So, Musk could just add some nVidia GPUs into future Starlink modules and call it done?

https://darknetdiaries.com/epi...

I wonder if it would help at all to build one modest server into the back of each solar panel, rather than trying to concentrate all of the servers together?

One option would be to just not use orbital servers for jobs where low latency is important. E.g. if you want your server to spend the next four hours optimizing an elaborate programming solution, you can have that done in space, but if you want it to remote-control your Tesla's driving, you'd better use a ground-based server instead.

Realistically, though, latency is the least of the problems with Musk's idea. Other factors will keep this project on the ground.

Well, it's a thing, in that Teslas are driving with it now, but more specifically will it ever be safe enough to be fit for purpose (i.e. to drive actually unsupervised)? To get there, Tesla would need to come up with a way for the cameras to handle bad visibility (such as driving directly into the sun), and it's not clear to me that there is any good solution to that except adding other kinds of sensor for redundancy.

Applying a condition affecting a minority of a population to the entire population is certainly more in the realm of "insult" rather than "fact."

.... amortized over a 30-year operational lifespan, with near-zero risk of catastrophic loss during that period.

That's the cost of doing business in space, sure. But Musk would be competing against companies providing the same service using data centers based on Earth, that don't have to pay that cost because they can just walk over to the malfunctioning server and fix or replace it. Given the rate at which the GPU-farm industry is commoditizing, it's hard to see how Musk wouldn't get underpriced and driven out of the market.

I understand that, but those are going to end up being some really large radiators depending on how much compute you're packing into each individual satellite, and how do you position them when you want the maximum amount of sun for power? It's also only one of the (many) challenges you need to deal with.

Ads make sense for $20/mo services that might be able to make $10 in ad revenue and can sell the service for $12/mo if you choose ad supported.

But AI companies are currently burning $10 for every $1 in revenue. At some point those $60 services need to become $600/mo and the $200 services need to convince you to pay $2,000/mo. Something thatâ(TM)s likely doable when they actually can replace half a $15,000/mo developer.

But when youâ(TM)re paying $2,000/mo for the service, whoâ(TM)s going to tolerate a $1,992/mo service that spams you with ads?

Itâ(TM)s the same reason Jeep may desperately sell in dash ads but Rolls Royce and Bentley know it would tank their sales far more than any revenue theyâ(TM)d gain.

You don't think Russia's nuclear arsenal would still serve as a deterrent against that sort of thing? (Not that I have a whole lot of confidence in Russia's ICBMs actually working, but China would probably have to assume at least some of them would, and that losing some cities would be a bad thing for them)

The first gen Starlink satellites were ~60 per launch on Falcon, IIRC, so it's not unreasonable to imagine "hundreds per launch" on Starship.

With that said, the whole "AI in spaaaaaaaace" bit seems even more insane than terrestrial AI. Where is all the heat supposed to go?

Come on, Elon has been grafting through the Obama, Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 administrations without being called on his shit, and your comment about "the Rs stock portfolio" utterly ignores that it's congress as a whole (with a few exceptions) seems to come out with massively increased net worth when all is said and done.

Fun fact about the Starship: its fuel is liquid methane and liquid oxygen, which when combusted results in exhaust consisting of water vapor and carbon dioxide. So, not great from a global-warming perspective, but not really polluting in the classic sense.

Falcon 9, OTOH, burns kerosene and oxygen, and emits water vapor, carbon dioxide, and soot. Presumably they will start phasing that out in favor of Starship though, when they can.