Comment by jmyeet
7 hours ago
There are a class of people who may seem smart until they start talking about a subject you know about. Hank Green is a great example of this.
For many on HN, Elon buying Twitter was a wake up call because he suddenly started talking about software and servers and data centers and reliability and a ton of people with experience with those things were like "oh... this guy's an idiot".
Data centers in space are exactly like this. Your comment (correctly) alludes to this.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all have so many servers that parts are failing constantly. They fail so often on large scales that it's expected things like a hard drive will fail while a single job might be running.
So all of these companies build systems to detect failures, disable running on that node until it's fixed, alerting someone to what the problem is and then bringing the node back online once the problem it's addressed. Everything will fail. Hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, power supplies, fans, NICs, cables, etc.
So all data centers will have a number of technicians who are constantly fixing problems. IIRC Google's ratio tended to be about 10,000 servers per technician. Good technicians could handle higher ratios. When a node goes offline it's not clear why. Techs would take known good parts and basically replacce all of them and then figure out what the problem is later, dispose of any bad parts and put tested good parts into the pool of known good parts for a later incident.
Data centers in space lose all of this ability. So if you have a large number of orbital servers, they're going to be failing constantly with no ability to fix them. You can really only deorbit them and replace them and that gets real expensive.
Electronics and chips on satellites also aren't consumer grade. They're not even enterprise grade. They're orders of magnitude more reliable than that because they have to deal with error correction terrestial components don't due to cosmic rays and the solar wind. That's why they're a fraction of the power of something you can buy from Amazon but they cost 1000x as much. Because they need to last years and not fail, something no home computer or data center server has to deal with.
Put it this way, a hardened satellite or probe CPU is like paying $1 million for a Raspberry Pi.
And anybody who has dealt with data centers knows this.
Great comment on hardware and maintenance costs, and in comparison Elon wrote "My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space." It's a pity this reads like the entire acquisition of xAi is based on "Elon's napkin math" (maybe he checked it with Grok)
The deal they made values xAI at $230 Billion. It’s a made up number, with no trustworthy financial justification to back it up. It is set to provide a certain return to xAI’s investors (the valuation decides the amount you get per share), who in turn are bailing out the earlier acquisition of X (Twitter). All of this is basically a shell game where Elon is using one company to bail out another. It’s a way of reducing the risk of new ventures by spreading them out between his companies. It’s also really bad for SpaceX employees and investors, who are basically subsidizing other companies.
The thing is, everyone knows Elon is not a real CEO of any of these companies. There isn’t enough time to even be the CEO of one company and a parent. This guy has 10 companies and 10 children. He’s just holding the position and preventing others from being in that position, so he can enact changes like this. And his boards are all stacked with family members, close friends, and sycophants who won’t oppose his agenda.
As both are private companies none of this matters if the investors of both companies are happy.
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Ah yes, my favourite kind of engineering: financial engineering
He's bailing out one of his failing ventures with one of his so far successful ones. The BS napkin math isn't the reason he's doing it. It's the excuse for doing it.
Or he's having another mental break because he knocked up yet another woman and is going to have yet another kid he can't remember the name of.
Can you provide a link for that quote, because that quote is absolute stupidity.
It's in the article that you're commenting on, https://www.spacex.com/updates#xai-joins-spacex.
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Thanks for putting words to that; the paragraph which most stuck out to me as outlandish is (emphasis mine):
I'm deeply disillusioned to arrive at this conclusion but the Occam's Razor in me feels this whole acquisition is more likely a play to increase the perceptual value of SpaceX before a planned IPO.
"what if we move all our data center needs into my imagination, things are running so much smoother there"
> but they cost 1000x as much
Compute power has increased more than 1000x while the cost came down.
I recall paying $3000 for my first IBM PC.
> they need to last years and not fail
Not if they are cheap enough to build and launch. Quantity has a quality all its own.
Have you heard of cosmic radiation?
Cosmic rays take time to destroy them.
Might be why he's also investing in building their own fabs - if he can keep the silicon costs low then that flips a lot of the math here.
First of all Twitter had basically no downtime since he bought it, so all the 'internet experts' posting their thoughts were completely dead wrong. If anything Twitter was far more reliable than Microsoft has been these past few years.
You are assuming things need to run the same way in space, for instance you mentioned fans, you won't have any in space. You also won't have any air, dust, static, or any moving parts.
You are assuming the costs to launch to orbit are high, when the entire point of Spacex's latest ship is to bring the cost to launch so low that it is cheaper per ton than an airplane flight.
Maintenance would be nice but you are saying this like Elon Musk's company doesn't already manage the most powerful datacenters on the planet.
You have no clue what you are talking about regarding cosmic rays and solar wind, these will literally be solar powered and behind panels and shielding 100% of the time.
I went looking through your comments. 75% of them (and probably 90% in the lasst 2 years) were Elon related. Tesla, SpaceX, Grok, Twitter, DOGE, etc. Quite a lot of comments for 101 karma if I'm being real.
Why do you feel this kneejerk reaction to defend Elon and his companies? You'll never be him. He doesn't care about you. He'd use you for reactor shielding for an uptick in Tesla share price without a second's hesitation. This is cultish behavior.
Do you have any idea who you're defending? I'll give you just one example. A right-wing influencer named Dom Lucre uploaded CSAM to Twitter, a video. But he didn't just upload it. He watermarked it first so had it on his computer and then postporcessed it. It was I believe up for days. This was apparently a video so bad that mere possession should land you in prison. And the fact that the FBI didn't arrest him basically tells you he'd an FBI asset. After taking days to ban him, Elon personally intervened to unban him. Why? Because reasons.
And this is the same man who it's becoming clear was deeply linked with Jeffrey Epstein, as was his brother [1].
Bringing this back to the original point: this is why Twitter lost 80% of its value after Elon acquired it. Advertisers fled because it became a shithole for CSAM and Nazis.
As for "basically no downtime" that's hilarious. I even found you commenting the classic anecdote "it was fine for me" (paraphrased) on one such incident when Twitter DDOSed itself [2].
Your cultish devotion here is pretty obvious eg [3]. I'm genuinely asking: what do you get out of all this?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836560