Not just open-source compilers, but books on compiler design, which have proliferated because every CS professor wants to take a crack at the problem.

Is there a single case of the scammer getting a single dollar from one of these scams? My suspicion is that there isn't. (Everyone who doesn't know the answer and isn't curious should downvote me.)

> Compensations could be paid tax-exempt

I think this is the real killer feature here. Software companies could save money by simply open-sourcing parts of their software.

Interesting.

Similarly R&D tax incentives could be made to only apply if the R&D is publically available (for study, and any use)

I think you may be overestimating how quickly this happens and underestimating how much surface area that rock has. Given no atmosphere, the fact that the rock with 1/4 the radius of Earth has a temperature differential of only 300C between the hot side and the cold side, there's not a lot of radiation happening.

In deep space (no incident power) you need roughly 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C. That would mean your 100 MW deep space datacenter (a small datacenter by AI standards) needs 200000 sq meters of surface area to dissipate your heat. That is a flat panel that has a side length of 300 meters (you radiate on both sides).

Unfortunately, you also need to get that power from the sun, and that will take a square with a 500 meter side length. That solar panel is only about 30% efficient, so it needs a heatsink for the 70% of incident power that becomes heat. That heatsink is another radiator. It turns out, we need to radiate a total of ~350 MW of heat to compute with 100 MW, giving a total heatsink side length of a bit under 600 meters.

All in, separate from the computers and assuming no losses from there, you need a 500x500 meter solar panel and a 600x600 meter radiator just for power and heat management on a relatively small compute cluster.

This sounds small compared to things built on Earth, but it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before. The ISS is about 100 meters across and about 30 meters wide for comparison.

First, thanks for your knowledgeable input.

Second, are you saying that we basically need to have a radiator as big (approximately) as the solar panels?

That is a lot, but it does sound manageable, in the sense that it approximately doubles what we require anyway for power.

So, not saying that it’s easy or feasible, but saying that cooling then seems “just” as difficult as power, not insurmountably more difficult. (Note that the article lists cooling, radiation, latency, and launch costs as known hard problems, but not power.)

> So, not saying that it’s easy or feasible, but saying that cooling then seems “just” as difficult as power, not insurmountably more difficult

This is with an ideal radiator and perfect pointing so it receives no incident light, so in practice you need a bigger one than this.

However, if you think launching a solar panel that is the size of 10 NYC city blocks is "manageable," then why not throw in a radiator that is about 15 city blocks in size?

Maybe the more appropriate conclusion would be that both cooling and power supply would constitute very tough challenges.

I would say that the combined challenge is about 3x harder than just power alone.

What do you think about droplet radiators? E.g. using a ferrofluid with magnetic containment for capture and enough spare on board to last five years of loss due to occasional splashes?

> 2000 sq meters of surface area per megawatt if you want to keep it at 40C

What is this figure based on?

> it's huge compared to anything that has been sent to space before

That is the goal of Starship though. The ISS has a mass of 400 ton, the goal is to need only two cheap launches of Starship v4 for that.

But if you do nothing, it enables people in countries that DO extradite and cooperate to get in on the fun, too. I guess that's just being nice to our allies.

I think that X was the big web dev community, and as soon as it was taken over by rocket man, people scattered to the wind. I think most, however, didn't actually go anywhere and just decided to be less social.

I'm surprised more indie games don't use software rendering, just to get a more unique style. 640x400 aught to be enough for anybody!

If you're going to chart-gaze, you need to have a healthy skepticism about the chart itself - is what it's measuring still meaningful? Every chart is an isolation of variables in an ocean of variables. The shark attack / ice cream sales chart will mysteriously stop working when everyone is on Ozempic and stops craving icecream! Likewise, there's a very real possibility that "inverted yield curve means recession imminent" logic only works during a particular era of USA dominance in the world, which we have thoroughly left behind. Food for thought, I hope.

Way too niche, and hard to get right (if there's a gap and some radio waves escape, you just transferred megabytes!). Plus it requires a metal front flap to really work.