so a couple months ago it was noted that mattermost’s website had gone very problematic, extreme emphasis on pitching to mil/int with very little indicating its foss roots/nature
there are so many parts that people in the skeet[0] replies have already pointed at but the thing that someone just went "tune the smoother way up! just make sure it looks good!" and thought they were done with the assignment... amazing. really does a fantastic job of highlighting the same old problem of these things only managing short-duration outputs coherently!
10/10 would cringe again
0 - what's a blacksky skeet called? do they have their own term? I don't know how standalone blacksky operates and I refuse to learn any more about skeeterprotocol than I already know
certainly has more than a bit of that urbit coiner Sovereign Individual shit going on yeah
I tried looking around a bit to see if I could find any info about contributors there, and for the most part none of them really seem to have much internet fingerprint at all. did find one person with a moderately extensive set of personal repo/project commits spanning back a few years, spanning long enough so as to find that they were doing a BSc/Hons/something circa 2018. which isn't concrete but does strongly hint at a current age of mid 20s to mid 30s. "get 'em while they're young and you can poison their brains early!" - the bayfucker mantra
current issue is likely the most recent bout scraper waves (based on it matching data myself and others have seen elsewhere); suggestions have been made, so hopefully soon(tm) changes
(don’t mean to speak on @self’s behalf ito plans, mind. that’s for them to do :D)
off the top of my head: apple dropping rosetta2 (the x86/amd64 compat layer), extreme focus on apple intellidunce, a variety of desktop-related things constantly just getting a bit worse (music.app is currently completely broken for shortcut/automation control), and things like trying to push the macos desktop to be far more like the ios ui (see e.g. the shit they've done with settings dialog)
apple's focuses are all in places and things that no-one wants, but they're too stubborn to listen to any feedback
Yeah heat management in space turns out to be pretty fucking hard. You could ask “who knew?!” but there’s that whole space program thing…
I presume that they’re not in fact blind to this fact, mind you. You cannot be doing actual astro tech design without it (your object would never make it to launch - there’s too many blockers that’d stop it), but the properties of heat generation from a H100 are known, and thus whatever they’re applying to deal with it very can’t be lightweight/little
note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!
compute! in space! "what do you mean 'compute what'? compute!" I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it'll run Gemma![0] magic!
SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.
scan-time "inference", like you'd definitely know every parameter you'd want to query and every result you'd want to have, first-time, at scan! there's a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.
and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that's before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list
good god.
I guess the one good bit here is that it isn't the "we're gonna micromachine them in orbit!" bullshit fantasy, but I bet that's not far behind
[0] - "multimodal and wide language support" so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs... input... and... response... which again goes back to all those pesky "interaction" and "network" and "storage" questions.
rubber duck debugging with a cost multiplier magnitude coming in at a couple of zeroes tail end of the figure
and worse results