What’s software that would benefit from running in space? The only thing I can imagine is processing of data generated in space so you need less downlink or can reduce latency, everything else can be calculated wherever you want, no?
I think the point the original guy is hand wavingly getting at is the point of something like this is to avoid the possibility of say a FBI raid or Nuremburgish trials for a vast AI surveillance processing facility hub for other down looking satellites if they were to lose their newly acquired power, or similar technocratic ramblings / ideas like it would survive the end of society.
Its like that scene at the end of Real Genius, "Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's perfectly designed." Lets look at the facts: Impossible to raid, not under any direct legal jurisdiction, high bandwidth line of sight communications options to satellite feed points that would be difficult to tap outside of other orbital actors, Power feed that is untethered to any planetary grid or at risk of terrestrial actors, etc.
That’s not how it works. Your state is responsible for your activities in space, so if you annoy other countries enough, your own country will regulate you. If they don’t, you could have just built the same thing on the ground in this country.
It's definitely much easier and much much cheaper to send a single rocket there blowing the assembled rather large target into still sizeable chucks of orbital debris than it is to deploy and assemble the thing there in the first place. And there are a few terrestrial actors rather capable of this. More than there are who could make it happen under whatever optimistic assumptions anyway.
In itself, a structure of this size in orbit is an efficient catcher of micrometeorites and orbital debris. Over "non-eternal" timeframes you don't even need a bad actor with good rockets.
Nevermind that in such a case, the eventual fate of these sizeable chunks of orbital debris is to become rods of god ... just without particular steerability.
That’s just not what user experience means, two products having the same start and end state doesn’t mean the user experience is the same. Imagine two tools, one a CLI and one a GUI, which both let you do the same thing. Would you say that they by definition have the same user experience?
If you drew both brushing processes as a UML diagram the variance would be trivial
Now compare that variance to the variance options given with machine and computing UX options
you’ll see clearly that one (toothbrushing) is less than one stdev different in steps and components for the median use case and one (computing) is nearly infinite variance (no stable stdev) between median use case steps and components.
The fact that the latter state space manifold is available but the action space is constrained inside a local minima is an indictment on the capacity for action space traversal by humans.
This is reflected again with what is a point action space (physically ablate plaque with abrasive) in the possible state space of teeth cleaning for example: chemical only/non ablative, replace teeth entirely every month, remove teeth and eat paste, etc…
So yes I collapsed that complexity into calling it “UX” which classically can be described via UML
I would almost define "experience" as that which can't be described by UML.
Ask any person to go and find a stick and use it to brush their teeth, and then ask if that "experience" was the same as using their toothbrush. Invoking UML is absurd.
You know some of us old timers still remember a time before people just totally abandoned the concept of having functional definitions and iso standards and things like that.
Funny how we haven’t done anything on the scale of Hoover Dam, Three Gorges, ISS etc…since those got thrown away
User Experience also means something specific in information theory and UX and UML is designed to model that explicitly:
Notably, the terms "UX" and "experience" are not present in that document. UI and UX are different things. UX is a newer concept that is more based on observing users and their emotional reactions to using the product.
UML and functional definitions and iso standards are still important, it's just not UX.
Good luck never observing users using your product. Not everything is a space shuttle, recall that we are talking about toothbrushes here.
Doesn't the UEFI firmware map a GPU framebuffer into the main address space "for free" so you can easily poke raw pixels over the bus? Then again the UEFI FB is only single-buffered, so if you rely on that in lieu of full-fat GPU drivers then you'd probably want to layer some CPU framebuffers on top anyway.
Someone last winter was asking for help with large docker images and it came about that it was for AI pipelines. The vast majority of the image was Nvidia binaries. That was wild. Horrifying, really. WTF is going on over there?
You’re assuming a discrete GPU with separate VRAM, and only supporting hardware accelerated rendering. If you have that you almost certainly have more than 2MB of ram
The IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM.
The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K.
The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable to 3MB.
Neither EGA or VGA were "GPUs", they were dumb framebuffers. Later VGA chipsets had rudimentary acceleration, basically just blitters - but that was a help.
The PGC was kind of a GPU if you squint a bit. It didn't work the way a modern GPU does where you've got masses of individual compute cores working on the same problem, but it did have a processor roughly as fast as the host processor that you could offload simple drawing tasks to. It couldn't do 3D stuff like what we'd call a GPU today does, but it could do things like solid fills and lines.
In today's money the PGC cost about the same as an RTX PRO 6000, so no-one really had them.
What the will arrest you for vs can arrest you for are very different things. Really. This isn’t cynicism, is empirical knowledge. If they want to arrest you, you’re getting arrested. They can arrest you because they can arrest you. This is the strict literal sense of can.
Couldn’t you just make the voting anonymous to make sure that buying votes isn’t possible? Why wouldn’t I just take your money and still vote however I like?
Do you have a source that you can measurably affect drag on satellites using a ground based Ionospheric heater? How much is the atmosphere actually going to heat up from a few megawatts?
I also prefer adsb exchange. But one thing other flight tracking apps are better at is displaying departure and destination airports of commercial flights.
