qchris

> When I joined Oxide last year, one of the first things I was introduced to was our racklettes; that is, smaller than average racks of four sleds and two switches each. These racklettes can be initialized and run just like a real rack, precisely because they are a real rack. Just not in any form factor it would be economical to sell.

Probably shouldn't have mentioned this publicly ;) Every time an Oxide post comes up, there's people in the comments expressing fervent wishes for just this sort of thing. Now that they know it exists, I imagine the the voices asking to make it available for developers and homelabs will grow even louder.

Anyone interested in this might also enjoy the book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, by Simon Winchester. I read it a few years ago, and thought it was a really interesting journey through bootstrapping precision and how that fundamentally changed our relationship to certain types of things, particularly related to mass production of "good enough".

I've played around with most of the solutions in this space (OnShape, Fusion360, FreeCAD, Solvespace), but honestly at this point would probably just end up paying for the Solidworks hobbyist license; it's like $4/month and I have a Windows desktop available. That said, there's been some consensus built over the past few years about what the next-gen CAD software should probably look like, ranging from modern scripting capabilities to version control and intermediate shape representations.

A big of the attraction of re-building this kind of foundational software isn't the base capability (commercial 3D CAD has barely even seen incremental improvements for more than a decade, in large part because it's just pretty well solved in the existing programs), but that a modern kernel would be a major step forward for unblocking implementation of some of those other capabilities.

I'd love to see something like this for Solidworks, but think you're in for a boatload of trouble there. OpenCASCADE is less capable than Parasolid, and a true Rust-based parametric geometry kernel capable of boolean joins, fillets, etc. needed for anything resembling a modern feature set is wickedly difficult (that's one of the reasons why everyone licenses existing ones and don't try to roll their own).

Don't let that discourage you, though! A fast, local, fully-featured 3D parametric CAD program that takes advantage of modern hardware parallelism that can be extended/scripted is just basically one of the holy grails of software and even exploratory efforts might uncover some great paths forward to making that a reality!

I'm not sure if this author used an LLM, but I think you've misunderstood that paragraph. At worst, the line you're referencing is a tongue-in-check little introduction into a paragraph that describes the top-level differences in approach to serialization that the two libraries take.

The company's name was iRobot, not Roomba.

I spent a little time working there around 2017. Whatever you're implying my former colleagues' thoughts on the subject are (or mine, for that matter), you're probably wrong.

What kills me about this is that 50 TB isn't actually that much data, and they could have pretty easily had a first-party, offline backup of this. You can buy a 16 TB hard disk for <$700 on Newegg (even with the storage price increases), and any halfway-decent IT person could have set up their own storage backup server with a ZFS pool on commodity hardware within a day or two. That's probably, all in, probably under <$3k in hardware and a bit of labor to have a local redundant backup (of cold, rarely accessed media) for everything before they uploaded it to the cloud that would have de-risked this whole situation enormously.

I'm going to be blunt; this is a wildly bad-faith argument. You started the quote right after the important word: illegal.

> the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center

Illegal. These turbines are illegal. What xAI under Musk's direction is doing is illegal. A business that must break the law to be practical isn't a business, it's a criminal organization operating by hurting people (which is WHY it's illegal to run gas turbines like this), and both it and those running it must be held accountable.

You're arguing that it's fine to break the law if it would otherwise cost a business money. I don't accept that, and nobody else in this community should either.

Years ago, I did some work on thermal management of small satellites, mostly for cooling higher-power onboard computers. The scale is different, but the physics are the same.

The story of SpaceX is often that Musk tried to buy a rocket, got a price estimate, and did some first-principles evaluation of the materials and engineering costs he believed was involved that came out to be much less than the going price. He ended up (through fast-forward view doing a lot of work) being largely correct.

The data-centers-in-space in space thing does not work out from a first principles approach. The waste heat generated by chips and the cooling method available (ultimately, radiative cooling), and the structures required create those surfaces, would be orders-of-magnitude beyond what could reasonably compete with a terrestrial version with the same capacity. There's no "but launch costs are dropping" adjustment that can possibly make up for that. The physics involved are the blocker.

Starlink is actually a good counter-example of where the execution--building and coordinating satellites in volume--was the bottleneck, not the underlying physics of the networking and SpaceX was in a great position to capitalize with their engineering expertise and reduced launch costs. It's a totally different situation for the data center thing, though.

I don't love this comparison, because I have to use Linux, not Mac. It's not really optional for me, and Asahi simply isn't far enough along to fill the gap.

As a result, the question is more Framework vs. Dell or Lenovo, and that creates a much smaller gap in capability in the 13" form factor.

Not that it's super relevant to this discussion, but I think the largest individual machines operated would probably have to go to high energy particle accelerators like the LHC at CERN or those operated by Fermi Lab.

Billions of dollars in cost, run 24/7 with virtually no downtime during regular operations, in underground tunnels with circumferences in the tens of miles, and all throughout is actively-coordinated super conductors and beam collimation in a high-vacuum tube attached to absurdly complex, ultra-sensitive, massively-scaled instrumentation (not to mention the whole on-site data processing and storage facilities). Certainly open to bring convinced otherwise, but aside from ISS in pure cost, so far it's my understanding that those are the pinnacle of large-scale machines.