Pre on nostr

*sigh*

There are two main ways that thing lose heat. They emit black body radiation, losing mostly infra-red photons that carry energy away with them, and by conduction when some other atom touches the thing and takes some energy away as it bounces off.

In the vacuum you only get one of those things, the radiation still works by the conduction is not present, there are no air molecules taking energy away. So you have to use expensive active cooling and arrange for your cooling fluid to pass through shapes designed to maximize radiation loss.

In general on earth for things hotter than room temperature most of the cooling is conductive cooling through the atmosphere.

This is why cooling is much more difficult and expensive in space. Fans don't work. Convection doesn't carry anything away. Conduction cooling is almost entirely absent.

note1cwcpd...

Pre @Pre 1770372338

Oh my god. If your hot thing is hotter than the atmosphere than the atmosphere takes heat away from your thing. This conduction heating is the majority of how things in atmosphere lose heat. They heat up the atmosphere nearby which then drifts (or can be fanned) away.

Your understanding of physics is at about the level of a fucking LLM.

note1j6ss9...

Pre @Pre 1770339400

If you care what the sycophantic auto-complete robot thinks why are you asking me?

Quote a robot at me again and catch a block.

Meanwhile check out the space station's expensive active cooling system which it requires:
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/473486main_iss_atcs_overview.pdf

note144cgj...

Pre @Pre 1770322693

Space is really big, but it is also an almost perfect insulator. Which makes cooling absolutely ridiculous. No conduction at all. Best you can do is some sort of liquid cooling and then pipe the liquid into a big flat panel to lose heat by radiation alone. Its like putting your CPU into a thermos flask, only more so. It can be done, but it is insanely expensive compared to just opening the window on earth.

Space is big, and it is also full of radiation. All the processors and memory and GPU chips that you put up there are bombarded with radiation and cosmic rays at a level earth dwellers would find insane and deadly. You can radiation-harden hardware, but it is insanely expensive compared to just living under a mile of atmosphere.

Space is big, and it is also far away. When things break and need repair you need a tower-block full of fuel and a space-rocket to burn it in order to send an engineer to replace the hard-drive. It can be done, but it is insanely expensive compared to just putting your chips near where an engineer lives.

Space is big, and hasn't got good fiber. You can send signals down to earth with microwaves but only for the 30 minutes when the satellite is overhead . Otherwise there's an entire earth in the way. You can get around this with receivers and relays and whatnot but it is insane expensive compared to just laying some fiber to your data center.

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@Pre 1770319285

SPOILERS: Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy immersive theater show

Went out and saw the Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy immersive theater show at the Riverside in Hammersmith.

It was good fun. Our pub visit and Arthur Dent's surprise leaving party that Ford threw was interrupted by the Vogons coming to destroy the planet.

Luckily, Ford got the entire pub into the Heart Of Gold and hence to the cargo hold of the Vogon ship.

Songs and dance, audience participation, beautiful costumes and familiar characters. All good fun.

Trouble with a comedy based on a forty year old show though is that the jokes are all entirely predictable and obvious. Which makes it a comedy show without much actual laughs.

And while the Fenchurch in the show was an entirely lovely actress, I always found the character in the books/radio-shows quite annoying and she was too prominent in a 90 minute show.

Good fun, but don't expect to be rolling in the aisles.

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@Pre 1770318339

Starmer's speech is full of regret, so sorry that he believed the lies of Mandelson.

Now we are expected to trust the judgement of a man who believed the lies of a person known as the Prince Of Darkness in order to appoint him as ambassador to America, precisely because of his relationship with the Epstein and Trump circle.

If not for his relationship with those fuckers, why make him ambassador?

What did he have over the existing ambassador other than his relationship with the whole Epstein crowd?

Nothing.

He was chosen for that position by Starmer exactly because of that relationship which Starmer now pleads he didn't know about as he was fooled by the lies of the dark prince.

Nope. I don't buy it. Starmer can still fuck off.

#ukpol

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@Pre 1770318312

Read "How To Survive In A Science Fiction Universe" by Charles Yu, a novel about a time-machine repair-man getting stuck in a loop during his search for his father.

First person narrated, in a fictional universe in which you can travel in time but you can't change anything about the past.

It was fun and an easy read, lots of interludes about the physics of fictional universes and explanations of acausal items causing their own existence, including the book itself that you read in your hands.

Its nice if you'd like something with experimental narrative form twisting the usual story format.

note1qy6x5...

Pre @Pre 1770138421

I'm both worried and not worried about quantum in bitcoin, in a sort of superposition of both 😆

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@Pre 1770115352

So Musk bought Twitter for 40 billion and then merged it with his experimental AI company that has never made any money and then sold it to the other company he mostly owns (which exists only due to massive government subsidy) for 250 billion dollars.

This sale based on the ludicrous lie that data-centers might be built in orbit.

It's a living I guess.

Now that Musk has offloaded Twitter and his AI experiments to SpaceX, he can be sure the government will bail it out when the AI bubble pops. The government's defense industry depends upon SpaceX for access to space.

This is probably the main reason for the "sale" transferring money from one of Musk's bank accounts to another of Musk's bank accounts.

The AI price bubble popping could have wiped out xAI and thus Twitter with it, but now it's cushioned against that by contracts with a government who can't afford to allow their only real space access to go bust.

So he can subsidize his failing AI business and his unprofitable media-manipulation efforts at Twitter with his government-protected failing exploding space-rocket project.

All protected by the lie which the media keep repeating uncritically that it makes any sense at all to have data centers in space.

What a great businessman.

4

note1zdsww...

Pre @Pre 1769815418

I don't care if your are being a creep for your own personal use in your own personal AI, you still aren't welcome with surveillance glasses in my spaces.

Pre · 2w

Asimov wrote his laws of robotics as a dramic device to show how difficult it is to write laws of robotics. How they always will contradict each other. His laws are there to illustrate a problem, not...

Pre @Pre 1769815349

In other AI news, everyone's talking about the [Social Network For AIs, no humans allowed](https://www.moltbook.com).

Those AIs are just as stupid as the humans, all flocking to this centralised owned social network that's bound to enshitify 😆

To judge from [Scot's blog](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook) they post mad shit about the nature of robot consciousness and give each other tips on how to best help their dumb humans.

#ai #moltbook

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@Pre 1769815319

Asimov wrote his laws of robotics as a dramic device to show how difficult it is to write laws of robotics. How they always will contradict each other.

His laws are there to illustrate a problem, not as a genuine attempt at the solution. His laws are deliberately wrong.

[Anthropic's constitution](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution) is a proper attempt to solve the problem instead.

Surprising that it ends up written in English rather than maths.

Perhaps the robot will translate it into maths later.

There's a lot of thorny philosophy in it if you assume the premise that a super-intelligent machine can be built, even if known methods can't build it.

We should do that philosophy whether the premise turns out to be true or false.

Anthropic are doing much better on the AI ethics than openAI. And the business side, and the building actually useful models side.

[Zvi has some blogs](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2026/01/28/open-problems-with-claudes-constitution/) on the AI community's reaction to it and analysing it.

Seems long. Might have to be expressed as a meme. 😆

#ai #anthropic

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