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Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years.
by bashtoni 6mo ago
Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse.
I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
- pixl97 6mo agoI expect my 5 year old desktop will last a lot longer, but start worrying about the bathtub curve.
- andrewstuart2 6mo agoFinally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoVibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.
- jaggederest 6mo agoThis is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
- Grosvenor 6mo agoSo Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.
- jaggederest 6mo agoYeah actually I worked with Pascal early in my career and that's kinda the vibes I am thinking about, with maybe a stronger type system more ada-esque though (composite, partial and range-and-domain types, all that jazz)
- aryonoco 6mo agoHave a look at Nim Pascal inspired syntax Ada inspired type system Lisp inspired templating and Macros Compiles to C
- aryonoco 6mo agoI vibe coded a library in Nim the other day (a language I view very much as a spiritual continuation of the Pascal/Modula line), complete with a C ABI. The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch. I then compared the results. Found one or two bugs in the AI code but honestly, the rest of our differences were “maters of taste” (is a helper function actually justified here or not kind of things).
- throwaway23795 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoYou can get more forward thinking than that: AI will output machine code, compiling it directly.
- attentive 6mo agojust do vibe performance optimization (I am not even kidding)
- therealdrag0 6mo agoYep I’ve seen multiple instances of this so far.
- leptons 6mo agoYeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me.
- lelanthran 6mo ago> Yeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me. Remove the "I actually only want a slideshow" instruction from your prompt :-)
- nehal3m 6mo agoTry converting the Javascript into a slide deck and spam the next button.
- ekaryotic 6mo agospeedrunning super mario world with neural nets is weirdly effective though. i guess you need a genetic algorithm to refine different approaches rather than a neural net.
- dartharva 6mo agoHonestly speaking, it has started to look like AI coders could actually do a better job than 80% of app developers in writing efficient apps just by being set to adhere to best-practice programming conventions by default (notwithstanding their general tendency of trying to be too clever instead of writing clear and straightforward code).
- imtringued 6mo agoThey would do well just by letting the AI generate Rust code.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoUltra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium? Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?
- AngryData 6mo agoHelium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices. Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.
- seany 6mo agoThe fact that all helium escapes the atmosphere, and is essentially impossible to produce makes things a bit more complicated.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway2037 6mo ago> Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. This is wild. I never thought about how they separated gases from natural gas fields. The carbon footprint of each kg of that helium must be astonishingly large.
- citrin_ru 6mo agoI hope systems which separate helium: 1. have very good thermal insulation 2. use heat exchangers so separated gases can cool down incoming gas.
- margalabargala 6mo agoFirst time in your life? Were you born after COVID and the 24 months of dire component shortages that followed?
- paulddraper 6mo agoWe couldn’t even make cars after COVID.
- throwaway2037 6mo agoI ask ChatGPT about this. It says the root was demand collapse at the start of COVID. So fabs stopped producing the many low-end chips reqd for modern cars. They retooled/pivoted to higher-end chips. When auto manufs came back knocking after COVID, the fabs didn't want/need their biz of low-end chips.
- crote 6mo agoThat's what happens when consumer demand rapidly shifts, and businesses start panic-buying and panic-cancelling. As far as I recall, actual chip fab output didn't really change that much.
- est31 6mo agoThis one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships. If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US, but it is going to take time, those fabs won't have capacity for the whole world, and they still heavily depend on Taiwan based engineers if something goes wrong etc. Just like with COVID you don't know how long this shortage will last.
- nullbyte808 6mo agoHypothetically what would happen if China took over Tawain and TSMC?
- helsinkiandrew 6mo ago> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- leptons 6mo agoConsidering helium is a finite resource on earth, it should be made illegal to put it in a party balloon.
- Hendrikto 6mo agoIt’s not illegal to put gas in your car. That is a finite resource too.
- MSFT_Edging 6mo agoIs it illegal to pull the ladder up behind you in a flood?
- dj_mc_merlin 6mo agoThis is a really interesting question. Is it? My intuition would say no since you have no inherent duty to protect or help others. I have no clue though.
- Groxx 6mo agoIf there's no downside to leaving the ladder in place, then I would think yes - there's a reasonable expectation that people will die due to your actions. You'd likely have to argue about "involuntary manslaughter" vs something more intentional though, depending on circumstances. If there is a reasonable downside, probably no? You have a right to try to keep yourself alive, in nearly all contexts.
- TechSquidTV 6mo agoWe stood still on Intel 14nm for YEARS, then a few years of decent progress, and now this. Moore's law is taking a beating.
- leptons 6mo agoMoore's law only really works when at least part of the world is functioning under practically ideal conditions. Right now that's far from what's happening.
- stackghost 6mo ago>I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. This happened for a while with CPUs in 2004 or 2005, IIRC. At the end of the Pentium 4 era clock speeds and TDPs were so high that we hit a wall. Nobody was pushing past 4 GHz even with watercooling (I tried). Dual-core processors were neither widely available nor mainstream yet, and those that were available had much lower clock speeds. It definitely felt like we hit a lull, or a stagnation, in those years. It picked back up with a fury when Intel released the Core 2 Duo in 2006, though.