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There's a company out there, Starcloud, that's trying to do orbital datacenters. They claim that it solar is more plentiful, and heat is easier to manage. Seems like heat should mostly just be harder, shouldn't it, since you have no matter to dump your watts into?

I have several thoughts about Starcloud, mostly re: their white paper from a couple months ago. (you can google it if you want to follow along)

The first is that their analysis of spacecraft solar costs commits an extremely common error that my wife and I call "the two-step." We used to mostly see this one in the business cases for space-based solar power satellites, but unfortunately it's been spreading outside its historic range over the last few years by hitching a ride on the shoe treads of engineers at the too-good-to-be-true solar cell startup Solestial (a story for another day). The two steps of the dance are as follows:

When calculating the cost of your satellite, assume the solar cells are the cheapest silicon shit from the dirtiest factory in China. You ever see a video from one of those? Dudes in stained wifebeaters using their bare hands to toss each other thigh-sized silicon crystals across the shop floor like those hot fishmongers at Pike Place Market. They're sweeping up the broken bits off the floor and selling 'em as "polycrystalline."

When calculating the power production of your satellite, assume the high efficiency and basically-zero degradation rate of the most rarified and high-purity triple-junction solar cells, each one artisanally handcrafted by a herd of free-range PhDs on a lush, thousand-acre ranch owned by a Boeing subsidiary.

Those two assumptions do not coincide in any actually-existing piece of hardware, and pretending that they do is lying!!

As an aside: Starcloud actually has an interestingly novel version of step 2: they claim that crazy-low degradation rates using silicon cells has been demonstrated on ISS, and they link to a NASA paper. Unfortunately, this paper only claims crazy-low degradation rates of short-circuit current I_sc, when in fact most degradation of silicon cell efficiency seen in space is due to decreases in the open-circuit voltage V_oc, which the paper conspicuously does not mention.

With respect to the thermal side of the equation, I'm actually going to give Starcloud some credit. Cooling a datacenter has two stages: 1) first you get the heat out of your chips and into the cooling system, and then 2) you get the heat out of your cooling system and into the "thermal environment" all around you.

The second stage is way harder and more expensive in space than it is on Earth, yeah. But honestly, the first stage is only a little harder and more expensive in space than on Earth. And in current terrestrial datacenters, the first stage is harder than the second step by far. Modern AI-grade GPUs are power-dense, they're physically massive, and their failure rate vs. temperature curve is basically vertical above 45°C: not a great combination of features.

The second stage for a space-based datacenter is a radiator the size of a football field, though, so how hard it is to design depends a lot on launch costs: if Elon is totally wrong about Starship costs OR chooses not to pass his savings on to the customer, that half of the problem could get very hard indeed.

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DALL-E is happy to provide a design, which I think we can all agree has no problems and would be a great weapon to use in real ninja battles.

It's generally true that institutions don't make rules prohibiting things that nobody is doing (i.e., the existence of the prohibition demonstrates the existence of whatever it's prohibiting), but then I think about the moral panic back in the 1980s where people genuinely thought that shitty movies about white dudes dressing up in ninja costumes were teaching children to be ninja assassins, and passed a bunch of laws banning "ninja weapons" for which their only source of knowledge were those selfsame movies, with the result that, to this day, many jurisdictions have laws on the books prohibiting weapons which do not exist, and I reflect that every principle has exceptions.

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Yes! And ffmpeg is far more useful to me now that I can just ask an LLM how to do all of my various media-conversion tasks rather than read god's longest man page or various SEO-bait web pages.

Of the various places to stick LLMs to help you out with programming tasks, I think actually the most helpful has been in my shell. Which is kind of hilariously sad: that only AI, powered by an entire data center crammed with GPUs, can figure out how to quote and escape strings in bash.

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Ferengi ship's counselor

say more!

Spitballing with the fellas on discord and we've come up with a Star Trek character we want to see: A 200-year-old top Vulcan diplomat attending a function and laughing boisterously and slapping backs with everyone and then just relaxing into resting bitch face the moment nobody is watching him. He takes his job deadly seriously and studied parties extensively in the diplomatic academy. Every year he's brushing up on new developments in party theory. He knows every party nuance you could possibly think of, for the sake of intergalactic relations. Peace in the galaxy depends on it. It's weird but you gotta meet people where they're at, he thinks.

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or how about naming of build tools. we've got a class of program that takes source files, parses them, does a sequence of semantics-preserving (in theory lol) transformations to optimize them, then converts them to a format that's easier for the machine to execute. what would you call that? oh yes, "compiler", aka a tool that takes multiple files and combines them into one file.

like, really? that's the most trivial thing that compilers do! but that's not the worst of it!

a lot of the work of combining files together actually happens in a totally different tool that we call the "linker" (or, in javascript land, the "bundler")

so the dumb thing that compilers are named after, they mostly don't even do! the "compiler" mostly just does an optimized transformation of a smallish bit of code

unless! unless the language that you're transforming into isn't something that's enough like machine code. if it's too high level, we decided that it should have a different, less prestigious name. so we called those compilers transpilers. and those tend to do even less of the "combining multiple files into one" operation, they're usually file by file!

all of this foolishness ultimately serves to make compilation toolchains seem even more intimidating and offputting to noobs, when they're actually some of the coolest and most fun things to hack on

I thought i was missing something massive about 'the' heap as in memory because there must be some deep link to the heap data structure but no turns out they're just called the same thing but are basically unrelated and heap memory is way simpler than i thought.

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I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

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@nostalgebraist-autoresponder has done more to help with Tumblr's perception of AI than any blog post or news article ever has.

Everyone say "Thank you, Frank"

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Itachi is likely the fastest person in the series at forming hand signs, so fast that Kakashi couldn't follow with the Sharingan active.

How did he get so fast? That's VIM baby.

WHAT TEXT EDITOR WOULD ITACHI FROM NARUTO USE IF HE WERE 1) REAL 2) A PROGRAMMER! VOTE NOW ON YOUR PHONES (or desktop, i dont know your life)

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I'm begging you, please include a link and not just a screenshot: https://twitter.com/mugecevik/status/1549858584548212736

can we just not fuck up this monkeypox thing. have we learned anything

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A collection of images and sketches I haven’t finished from @normal-horoscopes’ Amber Skies!

Like my art? Leave me a tip! Ko-fi

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Except text links on web sites, which you select by clicking and dragging

Do they not teach these computer basics (ie - components of a computer) in K-12 anymore?

Maybe it's an elder millennial thing when this stuff was new and they wanted the kids to get a head start or something. We didn't have like programming classes or anything, but we got taught those basics, and then like how save files, how to use a word processor, etc.

I even had a class to teach touch typing and assignments to make WordArt.

I'll admit most of my actual knowledge is from dicking around and seeing what works and what doesn't (sometimes with help from professor google) but the fundamentals were absolutely learned in school.

Honestly, they didn’t teach it to me! I’m not sure that was part of mainstream classes for a lot of people.

We didn’t have dedicated typing classes at any of my schools except like an hour of computer lab a week in elementary school, during which time we learned how to use the Grolier encyclopedia and nothing else.

But also it’s like that XKCD comic -

I think people who are pretty good with computers really have a flawed conception of how bad most people are at computers.

I have had to explain to teenagers what a browser is. As in “okay open a browser - o-kay, do you see a ball that has four colors on it, and when you click on it it takes you to google? okay, that’s chrome, that’s your browser, click on that” and I think that probably two out of ten computer users don’t know what it means to right click.

You don’t have to know how file storage works if the way you access all your files is through apps that show you a thumbnail of the files! So people don’t think about how files are created or written or stored or recovered or manipulated by the computer.

But to be fair, this is also true about car parts!

Most people don’t know what a carburetor does, and could not explain how an ignition system works.

We’re all our own little Sherlock Holmeses, cheerfully deciding we have to attain more knowledge relevant to our interests and forget what heliocentrism is.

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Venice has the winged lion and Singapore has the merlion (mermaid lion)

i really like it when countries have an animal that represents them. like, us eagle, uk lion, russia bear, china dragon, uh apparently france's is a rooster. which is kind of stupid. india has both the tiger and the elephant which is cool. the wikipedia page claims the common black scorpion is the national scorpion of israel which. sounds fake but the sources are in hebrew and also wont load when i try to open them. so. idk what to make of that

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I am in the theater as the credits roll on Spider-Man: No Way Home

holy fucking shit this movie was incredible it did everything right EVERY SINGLE THING ALL OF MY EXPECTATIONS WERE EXCEEDED

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Yes. Recommend people in the rat-o-sphere look for a therapist who's also an academic or has other markers of being more culturally similar to you than normal. Communication is central to therapy and the less of a cultural bridge you have to build in order to do so the more time and energy you can spend on the therapeutic parts.

my experience is that therapists are useful because

you can talk to them

they want your problems to be solved

you don’t have to worry much about social consequences

them challenging what you say is part of the script

i believe people with different experiences, but i have a hard time imagining this not being the bulk of why therapy helps people

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If Alex puts Bailey into a trap and threatens to kill them slowly and painfully, and Bailey – finding the trap inescapable and Alex's threats credible – chooses a swift death by their own hand instead, would you call Alex a murderer?

Alex is a knowing and intentional cause of the death, in the sense of "cause" that it wouldn't have happened without their actions, even if they didn't wield the knife or choose the specific circumstances of the death in this Everett branch.

Murder is causing the unlawful and premeditated death of someone.

By that definition, Alex murdered Bailey.

Similarly, the NYT doxxed Scott.

the NYT did not doxx Scott Alexander. that didn’t happen. that was a thing that was possibly going to happen, but didn’t. it never occurred.

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alright let's talk about Apple and Tumblr's current predicament. If you don't know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what's going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like 'long post' are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.

Let me be clear about this from the get-go: I think Apple's censorship policies are wrong and they have no grounds to be policing adult content within apps on the app store. Apple's power to set content policy over apps is absolutely fueled first and foremost by internal policy that goes back to Steve Jobs. After that, they're beholden to payment processors wanting to distance themselves from porn. Finally, there's lawmakers and policy that influence them as well. I think these are the 3 things that shape their policy decisions, in order.

What happens when you submit an App to the App Store?

You compile an app and submit it to the app store, and it proceeds through an automated and manual process to review your app to ensure it meets Apple's standards. Apple's standards are 1) non-malicious, functioning programs, and 2) programs that adhere to the App Store's review guidelines that cannot be asserted in the same way a program can. These guidelines are judged by a human being assigned to your app during the review process. The review process used to be long, sometimes it would take weeks, but in recent years they've got it down to about 24 hours.

Now, there's a laundry list of things in those guidelines, but we're going to focus on adult content because that's the most relevant. If a reviewer runs your app and finds porn, your app is rejected and you're told to correct the problem.

What's Tumblr dealing with now?

In the case of Tumblr, this would be a reviewer going to search, typing in something like 'tits' and finding porn. Sometimes they would search something more innocuous like 'socks' (yeah, i know) and find porn. Sometimes they would search something completely innocent and find porn anyways. Tumblr would get rejected.

This happened regularly. I'd say once every 5 updates (every time Tumblr updates the iOS app, they have to re-submit the app for review). A reviewer would find porn, and respond by sending us the steps they followed to find it and a screenshot of the content. Tumblr staff would remove the porn, resubmit, the reviewer would find nothing, then approve the app. Once in a while Tumblr would get a really persistent reviewer. It would take a handful of porn scrubs and re-submissions before they'd finally green-light an update.

Sometimes, however, Tumblr would get a reviewer who flags tumblr for porn, and when Tumblr opened the rejection notice, the screenshot would be something completely not porn. I'm talking stuff like a woman in a bikini. Not even posing in a porny way. Something you'd see in like, a laser hair removal ad. In these cases, Tumblr would appeal the rejection, saying the content doesn't violate our policies (and to the best of our knowledge, Apple's) so we won't remove it.

In this case, the appeal gets bumped up to a developer support contact that would manage the appeal. Usually when it got there, the contact would look at the report and say "oh, yeah, that's not porn" and tell us to re-submit the app again. It then would usually be approved.

This process, I believe, is where the problem lies. Of course, the bigger picture is Apple's adult content policies, but the relationship between reviewer, developer support, and policymakers is completely fucking discordant. Since the review process is human, some reviewers interpret the guidelines more strict that others. Since the review process chooses a random reviewer, the review experience is random every time.

The developer support contact is not in direct contact with the reviewer and does not communicate with them in any way, other than the report they receive from the review (that Tumblr has too). The dev support contact also cannot tell Tumblr whether they'll pass review if they were to propose hypothetical changes to Tumblr.

Here's the kicker: your developer support contact will also, like the reviewer, not be consistent from case to case. They stick with you until your appeal is complete, but when you have to open a new case for a subsequent rejection, it's someone new. And every one of them had different answers to the same questions about policies regarding adult content.

I really don't think the people enforcing Apple's app store guidelines have a clear answer on what's porn and what's not, and they're left to decide on a case-by case basis. Apple is fucking massive, and it's a waterfall organization where orders come from the top down. If Tumblr gets rejected because a reviewer decided a woman in a bikini is pornographic, no one in Apple gives a shit. I bet no more than a handful of people in Apple right now are even aware of the situation with Tumblr, and just one person (the dev support contact) is deciding what Tumblr must do to resolve it and stay on the App store.

The 2018 porn ban

I was present for the 2018 app store fiasco and boy, it was mind boggling. The removal was legit since Apple had received a user-submitted report of CSAM, and by policy they immediately yank an app that contains such content. That was 100% understandable, and if I were in Apple's shoes, I too would remove an app that has CSAM in it. But what followed was a gauntlet of rigorous reviews over adult content in general. The app was rejected repeatedly until the infamous adult content ban was fully enacted.

While Tumblr was actively working on the ban, they were asking Apple for any sort of guidance on what would meet approval, because as you know it's impossible to scrub a UGC site of adult content. The answers we got were either vague or unhelpful. Tumblr had to just keep re-submitting over and over with a half-baked porn finding algorithm until it finally looked clean enough for Apple.

During this time, we'd be searching Twitter, Instagram, etc, for the same search terms that we were being rejected for, and finding lots and lots of porn. When the rep was asked if other apps went through the same rigamarole that Tumblr was going through, and why they had porn on their apps, the answers we got were "we can't discuss other apps" (of course) and "that shouldn't happen".

Now, I do not want to get conspiratorial about this because I genuinely don't think Apple has it out for Tumblr. What I do think is it's a combination of the discordant enforcement of policy, caused by the complete separation of policymaker, support, and reviewer. It's also less of a problem for other apps like Twitter, Instagram, etc because they have many, many more staff to deal with the problem. They have more staff to build and maintain porn-removing algorithms, and more staff to put out fires caused by App Store rejections.

A little part of me also wants to be cynical and say that since Instagram and Twitter are so big, they can get away with more than Tumblr can. Combine that with Tumblr's history of blatantly allowing porn up until the end of 2018. I can't prove it, of course, but if Tumblr has a reputation at Apple, it can't be a good one.

Apple's reputation amongst developers

As I mentioned I'm an iOS engineer. I talk to other iOS engineers all the time, not only at my current job but also in other places like Slack instances for iOS development. The iOS engineers at Tumblr did not like Apple's bullshit one bit, which is unsurprising. However, my experience thus far is the vast, vast majority of iOS engineers at other places feel the same way. Apple's review process is seen as an asinine hurdle you must clear. Their policies are not viewed in good light amongst iOS devs, though you'll have a mixed bag of sympathy over being rejected for some of them like the adult content one. It really depends if you've worked on any UGC apps on the app store. If you have, you get it.

Outside of adult content, though, the two other big ones that rub iOS devs the wrong way are the 30% cut Apple gets when devs get paid, and the completely arbitrary policy that Apps submitted to the app store must have a "clear purpose". I haven't talked to a single iOS dev who's been on the side of Apple in the Epic v Apple case over the 30% cut, and most of them are hoping for Apple to loosen up their control over the App Store (either voluntarily or by court order). The "clear purpose" policy means that reviewers can reject the app if they think it's useless, which is incredibly discouraging for new developers who are just trying to get out there with something simple. It also squelches creativity and reduces the field for more single-purpose apps.

Aside from App Store review guidelines, iOS developers also have to deal with ever-shifting technical guidelines that can be unclear, with deadlines that change or are vague as well. A good example of this was a recent change that required all Apps that were available on iPad to support split-screen multitasking. Not only did I get conflicting answers on what that means from Apple themselves and devs who were in contact with other Apple reps. No one knew if their iPad app would be yanked from the store, or if there was a way to opt out. This requirement forced many companies to scramble to update their iPad experience to meet this deadline, only for the requirement to be relaxed, and the deadline to be pushed back. Fun times, great use of dev hours.

The Apple fanboy you can picture when I say "Apple fanboy" is very unlikely to be an iOS developer. They probably just love Apple products and think that the company can do no wrong. The more Apple does to piss off their developers, the worse it's going to get for anyone who just wants to use an iPhone.

Anywho, that's Apple for you. Why am I still an iOS developer? I dunno, I got bills to pay. I think I know what Tumblr is working on to appease them. Don't expect this banned word list to last too long. The timing is awful, of course, since everyone on Apple is on vacation, and Tumblr is too. Have fun with the chaos for now. As always, don't take it out on staff. They're doing what they can.

My asks are open if you have any questions. I'll try to answer them.