@sundogplanets

Elon blew half of it off !!! 😳

our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business

Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed

https://www.404media.co/cops-used-flock-to-track-a-man-across-state-lines-to-create-pretext-to-search-his-car-for-weed/

And then, we confirm something that Hugh Lewis posted previously (sorry for Linkedin, that's where it is https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sun-always-shines-tv-hugh-lewis-tlkbe)

These orbits don't actually stay sunlit all the time! Unless you're above something like 1400km altitude, these sun-synchronous terminator orbits will pass through Earth's shadow at some times of year. That means your data center will have to turn off every 90 min, or have huge batteries. You can't have 24hour sunlight AND low altitude, low-latency orbits.

And then we make a silly but useful assumption. We are very honest about this, the section is titled "All models are wrong, some are useful"

We say that all satellites are spheres. Obviously, this is not true. But it provides a good comparison point. And without completely detailed, perfect info about the shape and materials of every satellite in orbit, we can't actually do a better job of this, and this actually does a good job of reproducing Starlink brightnesses. So, spherical cow it is.

A completely fucking ridiculous drawing in an FCC filing from Cowboy space (I did a thread about that last week, https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117009754043091268) indicates they might have a reflecting area of 4800 m^2. WAY BIGGER than the ISS, the biggest thing ever placed in orbit, in pieces, not as one monolith. These companies are just making shit up. For comparison's sake, we just use 800m^2 for every simulation.

Next we have to make wild assumptions about the size of the satellites, because all of these companies have no idea what the fuck they are doing (and orbital data centers might not even be physically possible), so they haven't actually provided any solid info on how big they are. We are guessing from sketches posted on twitter, basically. SpaceX is ~800m^2 of reflective solar panel, so we use that for every company.

We model 3 different configurations that 5 different companies have asked for variations on. An "X-ring", where both possible nodes are used, so you get one orbit tilted at ~98 degrees (depending on inclination) and the other tiled at ~82 degrees. They make an X over the equator. There's also "X-ring plus orbital shell" which is whatever the fuck SpaceX asked for with their million satellite filing. And a single ring, which is self-explanatory.

These companies all want sun-synchronous terminator orbits, so that they can be sunlit all the time*. Sun-synchronous orbits have a nodal precession rate that matches Earth's orbit period around the sun. Meaning, they keep the same configuration relative to local daytime. If the satellite passes over the equator where it is 6pm directly under the satellite, it will always do that.

*important problem with this assumption coming later in the thread

New paper thread! "Rings in the Sky: Orbital Data Centres and Potential Impacts to Astronomy and the Sky" by A. Boley, me, and @hannorein. Submitted, and posted to the arxiv preprint server.

What would the sky look like if companies actually launch the tens of thousands up to one million "AI data center" satellites that they have asked for? Well, the short answer is, horrifying. The long answer is... this paper! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.02757

The exhibitions I curate couldn’t happen without the work my colleague Susi Barbarossa does to make sure rare and fragile materials are safely displayed. In this post she takes us behind the scenes of constructing a cradle to show a book with a large foldout map of the Siege of Yorktown. https://preservation.library.harvard.edu/news/2026/07/unusual-support

#fiets

linkedin cheat 2026 get a job easy no virus

ik heb gedaan met in brand staan

so about these soft rains I was promised would come

Apple's ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users’ Real IP Addresses

https://www.404media.co/apples-private-relay-is-exposing-users-real-ip-addresses/

New from 404 Media: Apple's 'Private Relay' is exposing users' real IP addresses. Private Relay is supposed to protect all your browsing in Safari. But researchers found a bunch of issues that are exposing real IPs. I verified they do. Not fixed, a live issue

https://www.404media.co/apples-private-relay-is-exposing-users-real-ip-addresses/

Groene daken zorgen voor verkoeling en meer natuur. Toch zijn bijna alle daken in Nederland grijs. De kosten voor aanleg zijn relatief hoog en collectief eigendom van huizen werkt ook niet mee. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/08/05/een-groen-dak-brengt-verkoeling-houdt-vocht-vast-en-is-goed-voor-de-mens-waarom-heeft-dan-van-elke-200-panden-maar-een-pand-een-groen-dak-a4933549?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_term=20260805

Kind of refreshing to read a POPL submission that is sloppy and bad in a way that only a researcher rushing to a deadline could be. The absence of AI stench is nice.

Raccoon at an overpriced artisanal burger joint wondering if the meat is unsalted because the cook messed up the recipe or if bland food is part of the concept.