Haven’t read the article (wouldn’t load for me) but what type of content you watch makes a difference too. I watch funny cats and dogs videos with my daughter all the time and they 100% make us feel better. But finding those said videos on social media is a “process” - it’s like going through a pile of rotting fruits to find something to feed your kid.
I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).
I’ve been using AquaVoice for real-time transcription for a while now, and it has become a core part of my workflow. It gets everything, jargon, capitalization, everything. Now I’m looking forward to doing that with 100% local inference!
The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.
They forgot.
They dont care.
They missed the registration deadline.
They're homeless, and no address.
They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.
They're in prison/jail.
The candidates suck, so you dont vote.
Can't afford to take time off work.
They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.
To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.
It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.
Forcing people to the polling place doesn't sound like a free society. Nor does it auger for any positive votes - people forced into something don't behave well. You'll get perverse voting.
Yes, and most of this measures result in decisions being made by the most irresponsible people.
Prisoners voting is madness. They are in too dependent a position to believe that their vote will reflect their votes.
On the contrary, voting should be banned not only for prisoners but also for people working for the government in any capacity. People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes.
Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful? If someone believes they have more important things to do than vote, why force them to vote?
> Registration procedures should be more complex and strict, not simpler. If someone is irresponsible, disorganized, or illiterate enough to fail to fill the form on time, then why should we consider their vote meaningful?
The US tried to do this kind of "literacy test" before, remember? It's where the expression "grandfathered in" comes from: you had to do an impossible-to-pass test to gain the right to vote - except if your grandfather had the right to vote.
This was of course used to ban black people from voting without explicitly banning them for being black.
> Prisoners voting is madness
If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?
> People who live off taxpayers should not be able to decide how to spend their taxes
This should obviously includes everyone working for government contractors. Which is obviously going to include everyone working for any kind of tech company with any government contract. Which, considering HN demographics, means you likely shouldn't e allowed to vote.
Heck, why not extend this even further? Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting. Everyone driving their car on government-maintained roads should be banned from voting!
Where did I mention a "literacy test"? I'm against such tests for exactly the same reasons I'm against prisoner voting.
> If prisoners can't vote, what's stopping the party in power from preventing them from ever losing an election by just jailing everyone expected to vote against them?
Prisons, by definition, are built on the principle that prisoners are under the full control of prison administrations. If everyone who will vote against could be imprisoned, there would be no problem allowing prisoners to vote: prisoners would still vote in the manner desired by the prison administration. That's how prisons work. And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.
> any kind of tech company with any government contract.
Obviously, this shouldn't apply to "any" government contracts. But if the majority of a contractor's income comes from government contracts, then yes, employees shouldn't vote.
> Anyone living in a state which receives more money than it contributes in taxes should be banned from voting. Anyone using government resources should be banned from voting.
I don't understand why you're trying to reduce this argument to absurdity. The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship through its ability to control taxes. And yet you're proposing measures that would proclaim such a dictatorship.
> And I don't think there's a need to increase incentives for authorities to imprison more people to achieve the desired election results through prisoners' voting.
Because what happens in the ballot box is private, it should be possible to let prisoners vote without interference as long as poll workers are allowed inside to do their job, but it's not just people currently in prison you have to worry about. There are places where convicted felons can lose their right to vote even after they've served their time and laws like that have already been used to suppress votes.
> The goal is to preserve democracy by reducing the government's ability to build a totalitarian dictatorship
Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with. By strictly limiting who is allowed to vote and taking that right away from millions of Americans you'd be destroying the country, not saving it.
Personally I don't find "tick atleast this one box and sign your name, otherwise you get a $20 fine" is too much to ask. If it wasn't the US I would assume most fines would still be ignored by the law anyways, but giving the US legal system another way to fuck with people is also kind of worrying when it is so bad already.
> A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Many people already do get the option to ditch out of work to go vote. And it's not logistically possible for _everyone_ to have the day off. So really this is just a matter of sliding the scale a bit so _more_ people can vote; at the cost of more inconvenience.
Personally, I'd rather just make mail-in voting more common.
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.
An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.
The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).
Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.
The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.
If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
In recent years, people can vote early, vote by mail, or vote on election day. Hard to see how a "holiday" for voting makes anything easier for anyone, though I could maybe support it if you eliminated all the other options.
Also on the list: Tackling the electoral college thing such that every voter contributed equally, regardless of their home state.
I don’t live in the US, but US elections have quite an influence and it’s frustrating to see a system I perceive as very flawed having such an effect here, at the other end of the world in New Zealand.
The President is the representative of the constituent State governments of America, not the people. That is why it is the States that vote. The only part of the Federal government that is intended to proportionally represent the people, and is in practice, is the House of Representatives in Congress.
This is a good and appropriate thing. States are approximately countries. Most laws only exist at the State level e.g. most common crimes don't exist in Federal law. The overreach of the Federal government claiming broad authority over people is an unfortunate but relatively recent (20th century) phenomenon. The US does seem to be returning to States having more autonomy, which I'd say is a good thing.
Another foundational element of our constitution was denying women the right to contribute to society, and not establishing any form of succession and other blatant and stupid failures.
Maybe the framers can go fuck themselves.
Yet the framers quite literally told you to change what they made, so they agree.
> There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
> We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal. If people are neither informed nor interested, why do you want them to have a say at all? At best they’ll be picking a last name that sounds pronounceable. Or going with whichever first name sounds more (or less!) male.
> Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
> Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
I’m generally for this though there are a bit of logistics when you’re dealing with preprinted paper ballots and some expectations of processing quantity. Prior registration also addresses people showing up at the wrong polls in advance.
> But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
Not always a bad thing either. If all it took was the stroke of an executive’s pen, you’d see a lot of things I bet you would not be fond of rather soon.
> But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
I wouldn’t call the US system ‘effective’.
The US system is spiralling and it’s getting dystopian.
The hunger games analogy is fitting, with The Patriot Games coming right up.
> Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting?
About half of all folks in US prisons are there for non-violent crimes, and we're talking about a relatively small percentage of voters anyway. Maybe ~3 million added to the ~244 million eligible voters
For a consequence to be effective, you have to lose something. If you go to prison, the big thing you lose is freedom of movement. But other things, such as who you live with, what you eat, and the ability to vote are other things.
>Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
There's no reason that a holiday to give people time to do it requires or logically leads to either of those, no.
>I never quite understand why mandatory participation is a meaningful goal.
Mandatory participation generally includes write-in and abstain options, but requires people to participate in the process. Making it mandatory defeats the measures taken to stop groups of people from voting (insufficient polling places for long lines, intimidation keeping people away, purging voter rolls, etc.)
>We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because it's easy to file bullshit charges against anyone you don't want voting, and because something being illegal doesn't make it morally wrong, so people should be able to vote to change things even when being persecuted for them.
> > There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
> Sure. But let’s get rid of all early voting and mail in balloting. No excuses right? Throw in voter id too.
Why does having a day with "more people off work to go vote" mean we make voting harder in other ways? I don't understand what you're trying to say/imply here.
> > Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
> We already strip them of their freedom of movement. Why do you want everyone up to and including rapists, pedophiles, and murders voting? Is there a particular voting bloc that you think would add value with their point of view?
Because, like it or not, they are citizens, and citizens get to vote. Do I think most pedophiles have much to contribute to the process? No, probably not. But there's a LOT of prisoners that are guilty of much lesser crimes; ones that don't imply their vote shouldn't matter.
> The electoral college is a feature. It forces you to win across large and small States.
Challenge. But this is very much an opinion thing.
>"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
This is true, but it's also very useful in assigning blame (or avoiding assigning it improperly).
So for all the people who complain about all the people who didn't vote, and try to blame them for Trump's election, we can just point to the historical record for voting in US presidential elections. The truth is: the turnout was not unusually low. In fact, it was somewhat high, historically speaking (though not as high as in 2020, which was a record; you'd have to back to the 50s or early 60s to see a higher turnout, and that was in a time when Black people weren't allowed to vote in many places).
So instead of blaming non-voters, blame can be assigned properly to those who DID vote. Because the factors that have prevented many people from voting in past elections were still a factor in the most recent election.
>We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Right, and how do you enforce this when people aren't allowed to take time off from work to vote? Also, looking at the state of Australian politics, I don't see mandatory voting as a worthwhile fix.
>A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
Lots of people have to work on national holidays. How do they vote? Society doesn't stop needing police, firefighters, or hospital workers on national holidays. And most stores (like grocery stores) are still open, so their workers are required to go to work too.
More importantly, why do you think the GOP would ever agree to any measures to increase voter participation?
I didn't see anyone blaming non-voters. The argument is that a majority of Americans didn't vote for this, because most Americans didn't vote at all. (Also, of those that did vote, less than 50% voted for Trump).
A big problem of the American two-party system is that you can't distinguish a vote against one party from a vote for the other party: Did all of that 49.8% vote for Trump, or was he the "lesser of two evil" for a lot of people who genuinely hated Harris?
Voting is always a compromise. No candidate ever perfectly represents one's own views on every issue. So IMO reasons for voting "for" a candidate or "against" another don't really matter.
Which is why it isn't really fair to say "this is what people voted for." Just because people voted for a candidate doesn't mean they agree with everything that candidate does.
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people
Define "property owning", presumably you mean land or a home (would an apartment be enough without any real rights to the land it sits on?). This definition would end up disenfranchising most young adults and probably a majority of the members of the military (the military is relatively young, and young enlisted folks are housed in dorms, and if they move frequently often don't bother buying homes because it just doesn't make financial sense).
>Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote
I don't follow. Please explain.
>Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Yeah, just like the good old days when we had literacy tests in this country to vote down south.
You're literally calling for a return of Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was bad because it targeted people in the basis of a characteristic that didn’t matter: skin color. That doesn’t mean that all restrictions on voting are bad. If the restriction is based on a characteristic that does matter, like intelligence, that’s completely different.
I am certain, because you use IQ as a metric for who you think should vote, that you are smart enough to puzzle out a steelman argument for my position.
Use that big brain of yours and try it, you might learn something about humanity (and humility)!
> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.
Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?
It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.
As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.
> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.
So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.
It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Holy crap, the dog whistles.
Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"
Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.
And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?
You don't believe in social science. Sorry, I mean social "science". It feels like it'd be rude to quote you on that point, but it's one of your most consistent arguments and it's not reasonable to expect people not to notice the special pleading you're doing around it. It'd be like me suddenly talking about the virtues of DNSSEC.
That doesn't change the fact that the majority of Americans didn't vote for Trump. In fact, the majority of people who did vote didn't vote for Trump. Yes, he won the "popular vote", but that just means he got more votes than anyone else, not more than half of the votes.
Don't all the candidates base their strategies on the existing electoral structure? Why would he have wasted resources optimizing for a metric that isn't relevant? You don't know what the outcome would have been if he did that.
Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.
The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.
If you want people to vote at over 90% you need to make it compulsory as Australia does. IMO the problem with doing this is that the people who don't care or don't believe it matters are now going to be annoyed that they have to do it. They will vote randomly, or just pick the first candidate listed, etc. just to be done with it. I saw the same behavior in school by kids who didn't care about the standardized tests they had to take. They just filled in bubbles on the answer sheet at random.
If you don't care enough to inform yourself about the candidates or at least have a party affiliation, it's probably best that you don't vote.
The point of letting people vote is to make people feel as though they're involved in the process so they're less likely to cause social unrest. If somebody is too apathetic to vote, they're also too apathetic to cause trouble and therefore it's not a real problem that they didn't vote.
The average person who doesn’t vote is a low-trust individual who is skeptical about government and institutions. Those people are Trumpier than average.
I thought I had a decent understanding of the 2024 election; people were unhappy with the status quo, therefore mistrusting the people and institutions they believed responsible for it. Then I saw this and its supporting data in your first link:
> Voters saw Harris as more ideologically extreme than Trump
According to Gallup, the record high support for increasing immigration was about 36%. Harris presided over an administration that saw a large increase in immigration. So believe didn’t find it credible when she said she wanted to control the border. And the position of wanting to increase immigration is more ideologically extreme than Trump’s position of wanting to shut down the border to illegal immigration just as a factual matter.
The latest Harvard-Harris poll, which isn’t good for Trump, still shows people want to deport all immigrants here illegally by a 52-48 margin: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/HHP... (page 24). I don’t think even Trump intends to actually do that. He would have to dramatically escalate what he’s doing now in order to achieve that outcome.
"you" lost? Did this guy you're replying to run for office? This whole my team vs your team bullshit is really one of the big problems in our country. No independent thought. Just stick with what news says. Always vote my team. Dumb. Here's a news bulletin for you, everybody lost.
I think people not being able to vote because their right to vote has been taken from them, or their vote was made pointless through gerrymandering, or because of other acts of voter suppression does change elections. The ability for it to change the outcome of a race is why voter suppression happens.
People who don't bother to vote for any reason changes elections. It also makes it very hard to make claims about what the majority of Americans want, since so many didn't make their opinions known
In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.
I do not think the current government in the US is fascist, but electing fascists would indeed be an exercise in democracy. The entire point of democracy is that it's the will of the people, whether right or wrong.
This is precisely why democracy was never seen as a tenable system for millennia. Thinkers of the past always assumed that the people would be incapable of picking the most skilled leaders, and would instead end up picking the most charismatic leaders. This is precisely what Plato's endlessly cited allegory of the Ship of State [1] is about.
Democracy is not "Whoever gets half + 1 vote is king"
Winning representatives are still supposed to represent the people who didn't vote for them in fact.
Democracy isn't about picking the "best" leader because that's not necessary. "The best" is almost never necessary, and you are much better off building a system that handles regularly not getting the best, because no system reliably picks the best, especially since "The best" is a criteria that cannot be rigorously defined.
You're imposing your own ideological conditions that literally do not exist. It's like a supporter of e.g. imperial systems saying that the emperor is supposed to represent all of society. In society's opinion? Sure, but there is no such condition in reality. Some did, some didn't.
The problem with democracy is that we don't get anywhere even remotely near the best. It tends to promote people that are highly charismatic and highly corrupt. The latter trait is not a coincidence, but a part of getting ahead in democracy. Give corporations what they want and your election coffers will be full, refuse and they'll instead fund your opponent and their media will frame you as unelectable, a threat to democracy, or whatever new FUD phrase focus tests best at the time. And that corruption tends to correlate strongly with a complete vacancy of morals or ethics - see: how our entire political class, globally, flocked to pedo island like flies to shit.
What’s there not to like? Superconductors. Free electricity. No cooling necessary.
Put those three together and maybe it’s possible to push physics to its limits. Faster networking, maybe 4x-5x capacity per unit compared to earth. Servicing is a pain, might be cheaper to just replace the hardware when a node goes bad.
But it mainly makes sense to those who have the capability and can do it cheaply (compared to the rest). There’s only one company that I can think of and that is SpaceX. They are closing in on (or passed) 8,000 satellites. Vertical integration means their cost-base will always be less than any competitor.
it's worse, incoming radiation also works to heat up objects that are in sunlight and in space. And you want to be in sunlight for the solar panels.
This is why surface of the moon is at temperatures of -120C when it's night and +120C when it's day there.
And the sun's radiation also flips bits.
Yes, it's technically possible to work around all of these. There are existing designs for radiators in the shade of the solar panels. Radiation shielding and/or resistant hardware. It's just not even close to economic at datacentre scale.
No, just you. Superconductors don’t get hot. There is 0 resistance in superconducting mediums. Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor. Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Radiation may be sufficient for the little heat that does get produced.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Space is not cold or hot - it isn't. It's a vacuum. Vacuum has no temperature, but objects in space reach temperatures set by radiative balance with their environment. This makes it difficult to get rid of heat. On earth heat can be dumped through phase change and discharged (evaporation), or convection or any number of other ways. In space the only way to get rid of heat is to radiate it away.
Superconductors don't have any resistance - and so heating from resistance isn't present. However, no super conducting computers have been created.
And yes, it is really impressive - but we're also talking about one chip in liquid helium on earth. One can speculate about the "what if we had..." but we don't. If you want to make up technologies I would suggest becoming a speculative fiction author.
Heating of the spacecraft would get it on the warm side.
> The same variations in temperature are observed in closer orbit around the Earth, such as at the altitudes that the International Space Station (ISS) occupies. Temperatures at the ISS range between 250° F in direct sunlight and -250° F in opposition to the Sun.
> You might be surprised to learn that the average temperature outside the ISS is a mild 50° F or so. This average temperature is above the halfway point between the two temperature extremes because objects in orbit obviously spend more time in partial sunlight exposure than in complete opposition to the Sun.
> The wild fluctuations of 500° F around the ISS are due to the fact that there is no insulation in space to regulate temperature changes. By contrast, temperatures on Earth’s surface don’t fluctuate more than a few degrees between day and night. Fortunately, we have an atmosphere and an ozone layer to insulate the Earth, protect it from the Sun’s most powerful radiation and maintain relatively consistent temperatures.
If you want solar power, you've got to deal with the 250 °F (121 °C). This is far beyond the specification for super conducting materials. For that matter, even -250 °F (-156 °C = 116 K) is much warmer than the super conducting chip range of 10 K.
Furthermore, the cryogenic material boils off in space quite significantly (I would suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_propellant_depot#LEO_d... or https://spacexstock.com/orbital-refueling-bottlenecks-what-i... "Even minor heat exposure can cause fuel to boil off, increasing tank pressure and leading to fuel loss. Currently, the technology for keeping cryogenic fuels stable in space is limited to about 14 hours.") You are going to have significant problems trying to keep things at super conducting temperatures for a day, much less a month or a year.
Even assuming that you can make a computer capable of doing AI training using super computers this decade (or even the next) ... zero resistance in the wire is not zero power consumption. That power consumption is again heat.
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> Theoretically you could manufacture a lot of the electricity conducting medium out of a superconductor.
Theoretically you can do whatever you want and run it on nuclear fusion. Practically, the technologies that you are describing are not things that are viable on earth, much less to try to ship a ton of liquid helium into space (that's even harder than shipping a ton of liquid hydrogen - especially since harvesting it is non-trivial).
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Computing creates heat. Maxwell's demon taught us that doing 1 & 1 and getting one creates heat. Every bit of computation creates heat - superconductor or no. This is an inescapable fact of classical computation. "Ahh," you say " - but you can do quantum computation"... and yes, it may work... and if you can get a quantum computer with a kilobit of qbits into space, I will be very impressed.
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One of the things that damages superconductors is radiation. On earth we've got a nice atmosphere blocking the worst of it. Chips in space tend to be radiation hardened. The JWST is using a BAE RAD750. The 750 should be something that rings a bell in the mind of people... its a PPC 750 - the type in a Macintosh G3... running between 110 and 200 Mhz (that is not a typo, it is not Ghz but Mhz).
High temperature super conductors (we're not dealing with the 10 kelvin but rather about 80 kelvin (still colder than -250 °F) are very sensitive to damage to their lattice. As they accumulate damage they become less superconductive and that causes problems when you've got a resistor heating up in the cryogenic computer.
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Your descriptions of the technology for superconducting computers is in the lab, at best decades from being something resembling science fact (much less a fact that you can lift into space).
Right. You build your computers out of superconductors, and they don't get hot.
Sadly, they also don't compute.
> Even the cheapest kind will superconduct in space (because it’s so cold).
Is this a drinking game? Take a drink whenever someone claims that heat is not a problem because space is cold? Because I'm going to have alcohol poisoning soon.
Let's see how cold you feel when you leave the Earth's shadow and the sun hits you.
Do you mean to suggest that computer hardware does not need to be cooled when it is in space? Or that it is trivial and easier to do this in space compared to on Earth? I don’t understand either claim, if so.
Even assuming that this la-la-land idea has merit, the equilibrium temperature at the Earth's orbit is 250 Kelvin (around -20C). The space around the Earth is _hot_.
There are people literally working on accomplishing this. I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Edit: Not trying to single out the above commenter, just the general “air” around this in all the comments.
I honestly believed folks on HN are generally more open minded. There’s a trillion dollar merger happening the sole basis of which is the topic of this article. One of those companies put 6-8,000 satellites to space on its own dime.
It’s not a stretch, had they put 5 GPUs in each of those satellites, they would have had a 40,000 GPU datacenter in space.
The problem you are encountering is how you are discussing superconductors. If you want to convince people that they are relevant you should explain how they would be used. You haven't done that at all, you just keep repeating "superconductors".
And it would be helpful if you showed some uses of superconductors in space similar to what you propose and not some vague proposal for research that would take decades to realize. I'm not familiar with any use of them relevant to this application and I take the other people responding to you are not either.
> There are people literally working on accomplishing this.
They're reinventing physics? Wow! I guess they'll just use Grok AI to fake the launch videos. Should be good enough for the MVP.
For the superconductivity idea to work, the entire datacenter needs to be shielded both from sunlight and earthlight. This means a GINORMOUS sun shield to provide the required shadow. But wait, the datacenter will orbit the Earth, so it also will need to rotate constantly to keep itself in the shadow! Good luck with station-keeping.
There's a reason the Webb Telescope (which is kept at a balmy 50K) had to be moved to a Sun-Earth Lagrange point. Or why previous infrared telescopes used slowly evaporating liquid helium for cooling.
> I don’t understand what’s with the arrogance and skepticism.
Because it's a fundamentally stupid idea. Stupid ideas should be laughed out.
I'm not talking about "stupid because it's hard to do" but "stupid because of fundamental physical limitations".
Space is not cold. Space is not hot either. Temperature is a property of matter. Empty space does not have a temperature. It is also a perfect insulator for conduction and convection, and as for radiation: it's a problem because of the sun heating up objects via its radiation.
This is the basics, I'm not an expert. But I don't think that you have anything useful at all to say here.
It’s less that and more - we’re still figuring out the best interface to use them.
For coding, interacting with the agent is best done via chat, especially if you’re trying to run teams of agents, then you’re not going to be looking at code all the time. The agent will summarize the changes, you will click on the diffs, approve them and move on. So it’s a very different experience from being the only one coding.
Edit:
Here’s a hot take -
A quick note on SwiftUI, it’s a piece of garbage that’s so hard to use that native devs despise it. So far no AI has been able to one shot it for me.
Blender most likely uses immediate mode - which is more resource intensive and less efficient than a stateful object oriented interface. But Zed uses a similar approach with (I think) success.
Then think about this, pre-AI, Google with all its billions, used web interfaces in all its desktop product GUIs :)
Apple, with all of its billions, created XCode which is inferior to every other IDE I have ever used. They still haven’t learned from Visual Studio. Microsoft is bad at a lot of things but developer tooling isn’t one of them.
All that to say, even if you knew what you wanted, taking that vision to reality is a difficult challenge. At least with AI, they could create a 100 different prototypes cheaply and pick the best direction based on that. That they should do, and they probably aren’t.
My Samsung Frame TV shows ads in the app bar and you cannot disable/remove them. They can’t even use the Google excuse because the TV runs Samsung’s OWN TizenOS.
> it didn't take long for me to realize the initial problem that caused my previous install to be unbootable was of course found between the chair and keyboard.
I think we’ve all been there! It still happens to me, exactly 5 seconds after calling Claude/Codex/Gemini names and dismissing their ability to follow instructions.
I can give an hour long monologue on YouTube’s continued exploitation of children. Their half assed attempts to fix this (by some well intentioned Googler’s, who I’m sure must have had a lot of pushback) aren’t enough. Just try unblocking a channel for your kid’s account (you can’t - the only option is to unblock EVERYTHING).
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