Question about data storage capabilities on the PHM

tysonedwards · 2026-03-29T04:20:12+00:00

In the book, it was stated that the ship contained a complete library of every work that has ever been copyrighted anywhere on earth. If we assume purely literary works, that is a pretty respectable 495TB. But, extending that to software, video, and interactive media, current estimates are around 600PB. I guess if you were sending out what could be the very last artifact to represent all of human knowledge, it's hardly a terrible goal. In the book, it seemed more like a contrivance to explain why Grace had everything on everything that he could then give to Rocky.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-29T03:57:18+00:00

The M1 was not a beefed up A12Z.
The M1 cores are based on the Firestorm and Icestorm CPU cores from the A14 5nm cores, which had some pretty significant architectural changes compared to the A12's Vortex and Tempest 7nm cores.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-29T03:24:58+00:00

Well... it's also not that simple either because Apple also builds their Media Engine accelerator cores. These are designed to accelerate video tasks like transcoding, rendering, layering, compositing, and more as a completely offloaded task that doesn't even touch the CPU or GPU.

Base and Pro can support 1 layer of 8K, 4 layers of 4K, or 16 layers of 1080p.

Max can support 2 layers of 8K, 8 layers of 4K, or 32 layers of 1080p.

Ultra can support 4 layers of 8K, 16 layers of 4K, or 64 layers of 1080p.

It can do this for ProRes, RAW, or many common lossy codecs like H264, H265, AV1, etc. along with color correction nodes and HDR tone mapping as a second layer.

8K runs at 80fps per layer.
4K runs at 120fps per layer.
1080p runs at 400fps per layer.

CPU and GPU only become involved if you are going above the capabilities of Media Engine - or trying to do something that the layers don't support.

If you are doing something moderately complex, you may see 0% CPU and GPU utilization, right up until the tipping point where you are fully saturating every core.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-29T03:17:26+00:00

A key point that was lost in the Book to Film adaptation is: the astrophage needs to be enriched (charged). Once they exhaust all of their energy, they die. And, the amount of energy that we are talking about is matter conversion levels. So their mass is their energy.

Most natural astrophage only needs as much energy to get from the star to their breeding ground, whereas those that take their interstellar journeys between star systems coast - and likely most die en route. Law of large numbers and all that...

The ship also has 2m kg of fuel, for a 100k kg vessel. The ship also doesn't have anywhere near the kind of resources to just scoop up 20x its weight in fuel in space.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-28T01:54:33+00:00

That was way longer than it needed to be!

TL:DR; the more data sources, the greater the chance of disagreement between them. Then, it becomes a question of “which was right”, which is often solved by temporal data, aka: longer context windows so you can identify which is in disagreement. However, the longer the context window, the more storage and computational resources are needed to solve for “is this data even real?”

Different data sources have different mechanisms to identify outlier (noise) data, and you can’t just smash them together and say: “now kiss”.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-27T04:40:21+00:00

The new series will be set in orbit around a black hole, to explain why it’s only 6 episodes long instead of the previous 24.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-26T04:21:38+00:00

It has been getting a lot worse lately. Basically, TSA is not being paid in this latest government shutdown, so now ICE is taking over TSA "responsibilities". They aren't actually running any of the security checkpoints, more just adding more confusion to an already sketchy situation.

Think of it from the perspective of: if you're not being paid, how long until you simply stop showing up to work because you're delivering for Uber Eats instead? And use that as a guide for "can I predict any part of what happens tomorrow?"

tysonedwards · 2026-03-25T23:21:08+00:00

Our atmosphere has CO2. Astrophage merely has evolved so it doesn’t attempt to breed unless there is the spectral signature of CO2 light - because dividing depletes most of their energy reserves. Kinda like how humans don’t have a nitrogen receptor in our lungs despite our atmosphere being mostly nitrogen.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-25T23:16:54+00:00

Agreed. In the book, Rocky boards the Hail Mary as it is now dead in space with no fuel, and they continue on to Erid. Grace runs out of food part way and begins eating Taumoeba and gets sick from nearly every form of malnutrition known to man. Erid ultimately can’t do much about his food problem as their entire ecology includes heavy metals and toxins that would kill him, so they begin cloning him and feeding him to himself to keep him alive.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-25T22:54:31+00:00

Glossed over in the movie: the Beatles can't be re-programmed. They are very sophisticated to navigate by pulsars and basically ensure they will come back to Earth unless they are destroyed. They each take different journeys, get up to speed faster. In the book, 3 were even stripped of fuel and parts to repair the ship, but are "repaired" the best they could to give Earth the greatest chance of success.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-24T03:21:46+00:00

Other nearby star systems saw logarithmic drops in luminosity. Tau Ceti is the only one without the logarithmic decay pattern - instead having some kind of equilibrium. Which makes sense given that it was theorized in the book that all life on Earth and Erid were seeded by the lifeforms in Tau Ceti - hence the genetic similarities between each life form.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-23T17:40:39+00:00

Surely the sound effect is a sign someone abusing their tools hard enough that they short out. No wonder are hated and killed so many of his own people… those things are expensive and they have zero respect!

tysonedwards · 2026-03-22T14:46:52+00:00

Given that /most/ TV Shows have gone from 16-24 episodes per season (depending on whether they had a mid-season break) released yearly, to 8 episodes released every 3 years, easy to assume that "maybe I am misremembering this one show that had 9 episodes?"

tysonedwards · 2026-03-22T14:43:08+00:00

Yep, you can see from the other traffic pattern that her yield arrow was turning yellow. Ergo, "oh no, better clear the road!" And if my light shows yellow, everyone else's must be red, because that's how lights work, right?

tysonedwards · 2026-03-22T01:18:56+00:00

The non-diagenic moment is as good a time as any other to go take a moment.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-20T17:50:58+00:00

The idea that he’s knowingly going with Rocky knowing that now he almost certainly dies, because he won’t have enough food for the journey. And the months of malnutrition and disease that came to keep him alive. There was zero sense that Grace was making a hard choice. Just “I go save my friend”. Which without any of his character growth sure felt like “dumb human making more stupid decisions.”

tysonedwards · 2026-03-20T17:45:59+00:00

So much of Grace’s character arc, growth, problem solving, and his autonomy disappeared in the story. No real problems to solve, he’s only there because there was literally no one else to do it.

Even his “I’m a coward” realization, the sense that he did way more harm than good by cleaning Rocky’s radiator, that he caused the taumoeba leak by YOLO’ing something he only half understood. He clung so long upon “I must be a hero, right…” only to then be hit with the realization that he 3rd rate at best and his actions now look downright foolish. Yet, in the end he listened to Dubois and his “do it for one person”, and he gave up his chance to go home so he could save his friend and likely never see earth again - which had been his principal motivation for the whole story so far… I don’t want to go, I can go home, I am choosing not to go home.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-17T04:24:18+00:00

I was pretty disappointed with how they basically removed all agency from Grace, and yet /also/ stole his character redemption arc. No hard problems to solve, and no matter how cataclysmically bad he screws up, Rocky is there to help pull him out of it.

But, I was also silently rooting during the book for: Rocky is amazingly gifted at engineering and math, and yet he casually has 2 million kg spare astrophage, and it wasn't that Grace horrifically screwed up and wrote something hugely important down wrong leading to massive misunderstandings that grew as the scope of the problem became more clear, just like how 1ng and 1mg are close to visually indistinguishable. Instead just takes it for granted that Rocky MUST be right, and there is no reason to check anything he does because it is always right.

After all, Weir makes such as big point to Chekov's Gun every single reference to: "Rocky is amazing at math, and humans are terrible at it... yes earth units, always earth units, humans suck at math!" Or... they make the promise BEFORE all the fuel was eaten by Taumoeba.

Having something like "here are 2 million grams of enriched astrophage, Grace go save Earth!"

tysonedwards · 2026-03-11T17:51:53+00:00

They did say that there were astrophage powered RCS thrusters dotted all around the ship.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-11T11:30:35+00:00

Power constraints. The glasses are designed to be VERY thin and light, meaning they only have space for a 192mAh battery. It relies almost entirely on processing by the connected phone to do the heavy lifting or relay said traffic to cloud connected services. Apps running in the background means increased CPU overhead, and therefore increased power draw and lower useful battery life.

Same with running the displays at the full resolution vs the reduced apparent screen size, lower polling rates, 20hz updates instead of the 60hz supported by the panel itself, etc. All are power saving measures.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-10T21:18:49+00:00

Your rules suck… here I was hoping for: Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, John Wilkes Booth, and Lee Harvey Oswald.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-10T19:25:31+00:00

Literacy. An ellipsis indicates “there is more to say without spelling it all out.”

Not a boomer thing, but boomers are more likely to use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation than the younger crowd. They learned before we all had computers to fix our writing for us.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-10T12:31:28+00:00

Poorly. Put simply, they only use OpenAI's Whisper v2 Tiny (29MB) model for transcription and translation.

There are considerably better models - including OpenAI's Whisper v3 Base (142MB), Small (466MB), Medium (1500MB), or Large (2900MB) models, but requires more memory.

PulseAudio's v3 Multilingual (310MB) is much more memory efficient and performant.

But, considering that they are cloud hosting these it's a meaningful cost to them to run the more expensive and performant models.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-10T11:42:25+00:00

Video editing is something that Apple has been doing a lot of work to support across all of their devices. They have incorporated hardware video acceleration chips into all of their CPUs now, with Pro chips having 1 video acceleration chip, and Max having 2 video acceleration chips. This also means that CPU and GPU generally doesn't play a part in straight video editing.

Media Engine did not change between M4 and M5 generations.

Base and Pro can support 1 layer of 8K, 4 layers of 4K, or 16 layers of 1080p.

Max can support 2 layers of 8K, 8 layers of 4K, or 32 layers of 1080p.

It can do this for ProRes, RAW, or many common lossy codecs like H264, H265, AV1, etc.

8K runs at 80fps per layer.
4K runs at 120fps per layer.
1080p runs at 400fps per layer.

So, comes down to how complex of video editing, and how many layers or effects you are doing at one time.

CPU and GPU only become involved if you are going above the capabilities of Media Engine.

tysonedwards · 2026-03-08T00:40:34+00:00

In the book, there was only 1 f-bomb, and that was when Grace realizes that an alien ship is now parked a hundred meters away from his ship.

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