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

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  • I’ve been thinking more about this: It seems unlikely they will ever provide a significant portion of intercontinental traffic, even if there is some latency benefit. The fundamental issue is one of bandwidth. You can stuff fiber optics full of data in ways most lay people wouldn’t believe. Using different frequencies you can put many data channels parallel. 88 x 200 Gigabit/s per fiber is no issue at all with components we bought 5-10 years ago already for our use case on land, and spectral efficiency is still getting better. A typical subsea cable will have around 8 fiber pairs, so 8 x 88 x 200 G in both directions for one cable is probably normal.

    The intersatellite links on Starlink satellites are reportedly also at 200G, and there are three of them on there, but intended to go to different neighbors I think. I’m not familiar with the specifics of free space optics, but I expect both wavelength division multiplexing and space division multiplexing will be much harder.

    So only applications where latency is really critical will probably be able to buy into that limited intercontinental bandwith. High frequency trading maybe. And then diplomacy and military, where the tapping resistance plays a bigger role than the latency.



  • Geostationary satelites at 38000±2000km distance take around 125ms up and the same back down for about 250ms for you to reach a server, maybe you were thinking of that. My uncle has that on his farm in Australia. It’s bad, you can’t have a good IP based phone call because the delay is too long, people keep starting to talk at the same time.

    Starlink flies in low earth orbit 450 - 500 km, so maybe up to 1500 km distance from you if its at the edge of reachability, for a worst case. That’s 5 ms, or 10 ms from you to the server. At those low distances the buffering overhead of their system will dominate like with Wifi. I don’t know how it works for Starlink specifically.

    I think the real killer issue for starlink and realtime tasks is the constantly changing latency, and the handoff between satellites.



  • Holy shit that’s low. So to get even just 8 weeks you need to have worked there for 5 years. And this from a rich company.

    I work for a small company of 150 people. I’ve got 3 months of notice period in my contract, though it’s going both ways. This protection started immediately after my trial period ended, which was also 3 months long. That’s considered normal here in Switzerland for office jobs. The minimum by law after your first year of employment would be 2 months.

    Just for reference, in the European context the Swiss labour laws are considered quite weak. Market liberalism is comparatively strong here.









  • On the MacBook Neo, I can even opt to not use MacOS at all and instead install Asahi Linux if I so choose (assuming Apple continues to allow custom kernel booting as it has in M-series Macs).

    The author is jumping the gun a lot there. The Asahi team recently started getting the M3 support kind of working, but still need to reverse engineer the new GPU and various other things that make them different from M1 and M2 laptops. It will be years until we get anywhere close to support of the Neo.