I’m not sure what your point is. I could certainly not, and I could certainly not write a breakthrough paper in mathematics even with the most advanced AI. I wouldn’t even know what to ask of it.
Perhaps I could set up an elaborate master agent to consider all possible new problems in mathematics and ask sub agents to work on the most promising ones. But then I could probably also program a self driving car system which could win an F1 race as well.
Well yeah of course, using APIs io_uring and grand central dispatch is basically the whole point of all this async stuff in a systems programming language. It’s absurd it hasn’t been mentioned more here.
OS Threads are for compute parallelism, async with stackless coroutines (ideally) or green threads is for IO parallelism. It’s pretty straight forward.
And IMO, Zig has show how to do async IO right (the foundational stuff. Other languages could add better syntax for ergonomics.
It's not the whole point, there's lots of other (albeit smaller) gains to be had once you have a strong async apparatus.
The core of your async implementation doesn't have to care about I/O - as long as it has a way to block/schedule fibers, it's easy to implement io_uring/IOCP based I/O on top of that - it's a matter of sticking a single IO poll in your main loop, and when you get a result, schedule the fiber that's waiting for it.
Another thing you get almost for free is an accurate Sleep(0.3) - your Sleep pushes the current fiber in a global vector with the time to be resumed, and you loop over that vector in your main loop.
We're writing a game engine so WaitForNextFrame() is another useful one - the implementation is literally pushing the current fiber to a vector and resuming it the next tick.
The C compiler was a prime example of an application where the LLM can self-evaluate/optimise, with one of the best set of tests could imagine. Yet the end result was a mess.
I have experienced areas where high productivity can be had without much loss in quality. So I can believe it. But it really depends on what you’re doing and I firmly believe many companies will run out of easy stuff that we can blaze through with AI fairly quickly. At least that’s where we seem to be heading
I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals:
1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free.
2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.
3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.
A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.
I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.
1 - fusion reactor in the sky is not that easy to capture 24/7 due to nights/winter. BESS can partially alleviate the problem, not solve it.
2 - geothermal has an inconvenient property to lower output over time.
3 - nuclear requires far less grid investments, far less mining/materials
4 - If we are serious about nuclear we should investigate up to smallest detail how hitachi deployed first ABWR for such a short time/low cost and do that in series, en masse. I can bet in 20y Germany will still have far worse emissions than France
I missed this, the point was more long term view. If you want a robust power network that doesn't kill the planet you really need to consider a timescale where climate changes effects are observable I'd argue that is a 100 years. We are debately between 100-200 years into the industrial revolution and climate changes worse impacts at still 20-50 years off (Not a lot of time to reinvent the economy just to be clear). But in that conception of time 100 year time frame seems very reasonable.
If you just look 10 years ahead you'd probably conclude solar, wind and maybe hydro is enough because short term thinking will always undersell the climate risk in my opinion. My justification for this thought is look at climate deniers arguments its always about magnitude and speed now because its the last effective argument.
Nuclear cost recovery and profit function for proven GEN4 is also on the 20-30 year timescale (depending on how much cost overruns they've faced it could be 50 years for bad cases) not the 5-10 year timescale. Making them unattractive financially speaking. Despite the fact that after that time which most US reactors are they are extremely profitable for the operator because the fuel -> power out is incrediblely in their favor. Ultimately, it takes longer term risk evaluation to show their benefits but they are undeniable and will be involved in solving the climate crisis.
The new response works for me, because in my mind I’ve always defined “woke mind virus” as a a mental virus which causes people to become absolutely pathologically obsessed with fighting an imaginary enemy they call “wokeness”. It’s the only definition which makes sense. “Woke” itself was never that viral.
People obsessed with fighting whatever they perceive as "woke" which remains ill-defined on purpose so they never have to actually formulate a rational take down beyond their emotional response
I find the talk around Donut so weird. At CES we were told they had nothing because they hadn’t shared third party test. They then shared third party tests remarkably fast. From the dating of VTT reports it’s clear they shared it as soon as VTT finalised their reports. Now they have nothing because they haven’t released enough tests fast enough?
It’s clear they have something very interesting.
We’re mainly missing low temp and energy density test. If they have something real, obviously they’re saving density for last (near the time real customers get their hand on the bike), since it will give them huge amount of attention. Can’t fault them for milking what they’ve got (if they got it) for all the marketing hype it’s worth.
We’re also missing cycle life test but the claims can’t really be fully tested in a reasonable time. So even if their tests show projections that indicate high cycle life, people will doubt it, or shift the focus to ageing effects. So personally I don’t care much, we just have to see how it works out in real life.
The lawsuit incidentally reveal their connection to partners which does reveal that there’s something real there. Another criticism was that the couldn’t have developed all the tech from scratch themselves in such a short time, and now it’s clear they didn’t, they’re using tech licensed by other companies with real competence in the field.
If it’s as good as they say with zero caveats and can be manufactured at scale is another matter
I think by this point they demonstrated basically all the characteristics of their battery well enough, except for the density, but then that was a pretty damn important and big claim. I'm not sure they can afford to delay that much longer. Or the actual shipment of products.
They didn't share third party tests. They shared tests done by a party they contracted, and whose test reports don't back up the claims to the extent that they claimed.
Do they have something interesting? Maybe! But it could also be yet another Theranos. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they haven't exactly been forthcoming with it.
The danger of batteries doesn’t have much to do with their capacity. Many solid state batteries are far safer than liquid electrolyte ones, while also having higher energy density.
Nothing market leading about AirPods? I find it telling that it’s one of the only Apple products that LTT Linus is using, despite not working as well with Android as with iOS. And they have around 30% market share in their product category
You find it telling that some YouTube 'influencer' uses Airpods? You only noticed because of Apple's distinctive white branding, they have market leading marketing, I'll give you that!
Not GP, but I also find it telling that Influencer with a free pick at any sound equipment at any price point, famously not super onboard with the ecosystem (Bar recently with the Neo) still does pick them
Linus is not an audiophile by any means, but he's also exposed to more and better equipment than even most of the already significant outliers in HN
The upshot is it could accelerate the development of smaller local fertiliser factories running on solar power. There’s a few that have been built and demonstrated. If we start to build them in large numbers hopefully the costs will become reasonable.
That’s for nitrogen. Sulphur is another matter. I suppose in the long term we should just adapt food production to what can actually be sourced sustainably and locally.
7 million people per year die prematurely from air pollution alone. Are you suggesting we should just keep killing those people indefinitely instead?
Those 7 million lives were apparently never worth fixing things for; now maybe we can shift away from a fossil fuel-driven economy and cut back on a lot of that pollution, and maybe save a ton of lives in the long run.
Yes it is horrible that people are going to die from famines, no one is arguing against that, but maybe it will result in shifting our economy to something where people don't die of famines and also don't die of air pollution.
I don’t think Microsoft’s approach to perpetually support old apps is unequivocally a good thing. It seems to be getting them into a deeper and deeper mess over time.
As a consumer I prefer Apples approach. If I were an industrial customer relying on old software to operate my machines i would prefer Microsoft’s approach.
Perhaps I could set up an elaborate master agent to consider all possible new problems in mathematics and ask sub agents to work on the most promising ones. But then I could probably also program a self driving car system which could win an F1 race as well.
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