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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • I don’t think it makes any sense either:

    • Cooling will be large and expensive as hell
    • Getting computers there will be expensive
    • Getting solar cells there will be expensive
    • The radiolink to earthbound networks will be expensive and slow

    The only positive is that the energy will be cheap, and that the computers are safe except from nation state actors and untracked space debris.

    I lean towards this being a narrative for the markets. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. claimed a 370 billion USD total addressable market (TAM) in space enabled solutions, and a 26.5 trillion USD TAM for AI in their S-1 filing before going public. They state within that their goal over time is to launch 100 gigawatts of compute to space each year.

    By making the claim that this would be worthwhile they present themselves as uniquely positioned to profit from this situation. Moreso than other AI compute companies or other rocket launch companies.






  • Well we learn to code in the programming language that the teacher choses, not in any natural language at all, so neither English nor our native languages.

    But all significant programming languages that I know do have reserved control words that are taken from English. Maybe that is the direction of your question?

    Then no, mostly we don’t use specifically crafted or preprocessed programming languages just to have control words recognizable as words in our native languages. We just learn the English-based control words as features of the programming language, if we don’t already recognize them.

    As for the variable names and natural language comments embedded in the code, that we create, that varies. I’d say as soon as interlingual collaboration or code sharing is a possibility, people will go for English in my experience. And I suspect that people who have gone for English before tend to stick to English even in their private use.

    This is also related to learning materials, documentation of language features and libraries being available to the largest degree in English.

    I perceive it as easier to stick to English, rather than to code switch between natural language while I program.


  • Yes they are very related.

    Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese loaned the symbols from China when they began writing their languages. However Japanese uses two moraic writing systems in addition (Hiragana and Katakana), Korean has later switched to a syllabic one (Hangul), and Vietnamese switched to a latin derived alphabet. Those are probably what you recognize as distinct.

    Where and when they use or used Chinese symbols the meanings per symbol are or were not consistent in the languages, as separate drifting of meaning and reforms of the writing system occured over a long period.

    The symbols are called 漢字 in traditional Chinese and 汉字 in simplified Chinese, the are called 漢字 in Japanese, it used to also be 漢字 in Korean, now in Hangul it is 한자, in Vietnamese it was 漢字 and is now Chữ Hán or Hán tự.

    As you can see they used the Chinese name for the Chinese ideograms. But they all say it a little differently. Hànzì in Mandarin, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Chữ Hán or Hán tự in Vietnamese. But it all means “Han” “characters”, with “Han” referring to the Han dynasty of Chinese rulers here.

    I think Japanese is the only language who loaned them and is still significantly using them. Only texts for children or learners would typically be written fully in Hiragana and Katakana, normal daily written language will have most concepts represented by Kanji, modern loanwords and foreign names in Katakana, and Hiragana for particles and some verbal endings etc for inflection.





  • The A record is the record in a DNS entry that contains the IPv4 address to which you wish to map the name in general.

    There are various others, for example the AAAA record is the one that contains the IPv6 address, the MX record is the one that contains the name of your mail server, the NS record contains the name of your nameserver, the SOA record has refresh timers and contact information for the zone admin, RRSIG records have cryptographic signatures proving authenticity of various other bits.

    Another interesting one in this context would be CNAME, there you can put the canonical name you’d like the user to look up instead of the one they were asking for. So you can leave out the A and AAAA, and put in a CNAME instead if you want to tell the user to look somewhere else.

    For example you can put in the DNS entry for www.example.com a CNAME record containing “example.com”. Now if a user comes asking for the A record of www.example.com, they will find the CNAME instead and know that they are supposed to look at the A record of example.com instead, because there isn’t a separate IPv4 address specifically for www.example.com.


  • Back when people still hosted their own email and web pages and domain controllers etc, it was more common to break it out into subdomains. The www subdomain was for the web stuff that the webmaster would administer. Nowadays everything is outsourced, and you just point your main domain ar whatever webhosting company you’re using.

    But it was always possible to have a normal A record on your main domain and have a webserver listen to its port 80.

    I guess at some point everybody got so used to the world wide web just being there and every business being on it, that using the cool alliteration didn’t feel necessary anymore.


  • Non-voting common stock is a scam pulled by these fucking billionaire founders to reduce public participation, and concentrate their power, even as they use other’s money for their pet projects.

    If a company just needs to take up money for an investment, it can issue bonds. Then it gives up no control, but enters into a fair agreement with someone loaning them capital at fixed rates, with no pretense of ownership.

    If they sell shares, that is supposed to represent partial ownership and allow all the owners to collectively decide on strategy. It also brings with it the right to recall board members who go insane, like Musk or Zuckerberg. To prevent that these scumbags issue non-voting stock, or stock that has such reduced voting rights as to be essentially useless. Like SpaceX recently, all the IPO shares (class A) carry a tenth of the voting rights compared to the ones they kept (class B).