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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • There’s multiple things you’re mixing up here. There’s the “up” in the global coordinate reference frame. This could be based on the local system, though that makes entering and exiting the system a tiny bit more difficult. More likely it’d be based on galactic coordinates.

    There’s also the ship reference frame in the comic. This probably won’t be oriented towards the global coordinate system. It’ll be oriented towards whatever the engines, sensors, and gravity need. Because the ships will all be in orbit, their orientations will probably be changing constantly relative to other ships and the global reference frame. There’s no reason to orient in a single direction and lots of reasons not to (it wastes energy, points your sensors away from the things you want to see, etc).







  • I’m not assuming it’s going to fail, I’m just saying that the exponential gains seen in early computing are going to be much harder to come by because we’re not starting from the same grossly inefficient place.

    As an FYI, most modern computers are modified Harvard architectures, not Von Neumann machines. There are other architectures being explored that are even more exotic, but I’m not aware of any that are massively better on the power side (vs simply being faster). The acceleration approaches that I’m aware of that are more (e.g. analog or optical accelerators) are also totally compatible with traditional Harvard/Von Neumann architectures.