I assume GP was referring to Tor Books, (which name confused me immensely at first since I've been using the Tor project for many years) but that would have been an absolutely hilarious joke and I think you interpreting it as a joke is totally reasonable given how prominent the onion router project is.
- High risk of losing the entire equipment to a rocket failure (not infrequent even for modern launch vehicles)
- Supplying enough electrical power would be extremely difficult
- Cooling would be extremely difficult
- Geosynchronous orbits have at least 200ms of communication latency
- Lower orbits means the data center would not stay in place and require complicated tracking antennae and/or a communication mesh a la Starlink, again increasing latency and complexity
For someone who is "increasingly bothered by the lack of rigor in the current discourse", the author sure has no qualms about using LLM outputs as primary sources. This is an immediate red flag that discredits the entire article.
The init program is just the first process (PID 1) that the kernel starts. It starts other stuff and cleans up zombie processes.
For a single game: yes, you can absolutely just make your game PID 1. No need for systemd or anything else. When the game exits, the kernel panics and reboots.
ISO vs container: ISO boots on bare metal with your own kernel. Container needs a host kernel and runtime. If you're making a dedicated game appliance, the ISO approach works fine - simpler actually,
since you skip all the container orchestration machinery.
In theory yes, though depending on the complexity of your game you may need to bundle a lot of userspace libraries and other programs along with your kernel to make it work. Most graphical applications expect a display server like X11 or Wayland to talk to, at minimum.
Witch from Mercury isn't the latest show, FYI. The latest is Gundam GQuuuuuuX (yes, really, that's the name). But I wouldn't recommend it as a first entry. Despite being set in its own universe, it's supposed to be a sort of alternate version of UC and assumes viewers are already familiar with the original.
The thing we do technically know how to do just haven't yet because there are no economic incentives to even tackle the finer engineering aspects let alone the regulatory approval ones, is to put a large vacuum-insulated (like a thermos/dewar) liquid hydrogen tank in the middle of a jet or a more-spherical shape front and back of the wing; and then just adjusting the plumbing and combustion chambers and nozzles to work for hydrogen instead of regular diesel-like jet fuel.
We have gas turbines running on hydrogen. They just work. We have tanks like it, just none tuned for the needs and wants of an airplane specifically.
They are more range than a normal jet fuel tank, because hydrogen is just so much lighter per energy.
The only issue is that the insulation needs and the sheer volume make it impractical to keep in regular jetliner wings.
Thus the need for putting a more-spherical tank in the tube shaped fuselage body of the plane.
I think such a plane would be around 5x as expensive today to operate due to fuel costs, and have otherwise pretty comparable performance specs.
There would probably be a separate front and rear cabin, though.
If you tax the CO2 enough you'd trigger such or similar to be put into production.
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