... and used Claude to crank the software up to 11. Network management console, RESTful API, added hands hands to the pupils so it serves as a clock, NTP, added sleep mode at night, added different eyes, OTA firmware updates, and more: https://github.com/michael-gebis/creeper-eyes
The book Redshift Rendezvous from 1990 explores this idea. (TBH the story is a little clunky, but if you like to see someone look at the physics in depth, it's pretty interesting.)
I'm reading the clockwork rocket at the moment. It's a little different but it's set in a universe where the laws of physics / behaviour of light seems to be different to our own.
similarly, Einstein's Dreams is a collection of very short stories that explore different flavors of time. For example: time slows as you near the city center - those who approach it end up frozen forever like the event horizon of a black hole.
Yeah, 24 years old. It’s crazy how little has changed in 24 years, other than most of the major sites now supporting IPv6 (with some notable exceptions, such as AWS and GitHub).
Once upon a time in the 90's I was at work at 2am and I needed to implement a search over a data set. This function was going to be eventually called for every item, thus if I implemented it as a linear search, it would be n^2 behavior. Since it was so late and I was so tired, I marked it as something to fix later, and just did linear search.
Later that week, now that things were working, I profiled the n^2 search. The software controlled a piece of industrial test equipment, and the actual test process would take something around 4 hours to complete. Using the very worst case, far-beyond-reasonable data set, if I left the n^2 behavior in, would have added something like 6 seconds to that 4 hour runtime.
(Ultimately I fixed it anyways, but because it was easy, not because it mattered.)
I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of all of this to do an actual calculation, but note that the ISS spends half its time in the shadow of the earth, which these satellites would not do.
The earth is actually a pretty big heat source in space. Solar radiation is a point source, so you can orient parallel to the rays and avoid it. The earth takes up about half the sky and is unavoidable. The earth also radiates infrared, the same as your radiators, so you can't reflect it. Solar light is in the visible spectrum so you can paint your radiators to be reflective in visible wavelengths but emissive in infrared.
Low satellites are still cooler in the Earth's shadow than they would be in unshadowed orbits, but higher orbits are cooler than either. Not where you'd want to put millions of datacenters though.
You would put these in polar orbits so they are always facing the Sun. Basically the longitude would follow the Sun (or the terminator line, whichever you prefer), and the latitude would oscillate from 90°N to 90°S and back every 24 hours.
No. Otherwise how would you power them? We could use nuclear power methods, like we did in the Voyagers for instance. But the press release doesn’t mention that and, for a constellation of satellites around the earth, it would be a terrible idea.
... and used Claude to crank the software up to 11. Network management console, RESTful API, added hands hands to the pupils so it serves as a clock, NTP, added sleep mode at night, added different eyes, OTA firmware updates, and more: https://github.com/michael-gebis/creeper-eyes
It's ridiculous and I love it.
reply