Symmetry

43 ms·

691.
by Symmetry 4y ago
It's a little known fact that IBM creates its SMT-8 cores by taking two of its SMT-4 cores, having one stand on the other's shoulders, and draping a trenchcoat over them so they count as one core for Oracle licensing. The trenchc
692.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Other sources can do better but the problem of transferring heat from plasma erupting in a vacuum chamber lined with mirrors seems really hard to me compared to the problem you have in a natural gas power plant, say, so I'd expect even
693.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Well, land reform helped create a broad consumer class but at the same time subsidized industries were required to compete in international markets early to keep their privileges so they didn't get complacent. In places like Indonesia
694.
by Symmetry 4y ago
It's not that it's difficult, its just that it's not perfectly efficient. So once you include the inefficiencies of the heat engine it not necessarily producing energy on net. But there are also some engineering challenges t
695.
by Symmetry 4y ago
This was when I was at a FFRDC doing work for the DoD, the rules might be different elsewhere but I wouldn't be surprised if they were the same either.
696.
by Symmetry 4y ago
When I was working for the US government we had to obey rules against shipping "freeware," which RHEL wasn't because we payed for it. But it was cheaper and easier to do most of our development on CentOS systems and because
697.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The best non-fiction book I read in 2022 was Plagues Upon the Earth ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57423807-plagues-upon-th... ) a history of infectious disease in humans. It really changed my views on a lot
698.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The "Network transfer speed / cost." issue was worse than this make it seem. In the first CISC designs you were reading in the instruction one byte at a time over the same bus that you would use to load or store data. An ex
699.
by Symmetry 4y ago
> And virtually all the plastic produced by Coca-Cola is 'new' plastic made from Crude Oil. To me this is one of the big arguments in favor of plastic bottles. Hydrocarbons locked up as plastic waste in landfills seems far pre
700.
by Symmetry 4y ago
SpaceX actually has used them on a bunch of Falcon 9 launches. But I'd worry about how well a GoPro would survive in the long run in the harsh radiation environment outside the Van Allen belts.
701.
by Symmetry 4y ago
That's true on the current margin in the US but only on the current margin. Creating one more pound of beef than we currently do does require a lot of farmed soy and other crops and ends up very inefficient. But there's also a l
702.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I came here to pose that same thing. Hydrogen in the creation of fertilizer? An absolute necessity, we need a good source of green hydrogen to run the Haber-Bosch process. Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible id
703.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I'm going from John Mashey's famous Usenet post on the issue. https://userpages.umbc.edu/~vijay/mashey.on.risc.html So that would be things like Vax that not only have load-store opps, they also have things l
704.
by Symmetry 4y ago
aarch64 is only targeted at higher end devices where you'd expect to have at least 128 megs of RAM, enough to make the memory savings from Thumb2 not noticeable in practice. Thumb2 was remarkable for getting so close to the performance
705.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I think it's not an accident that the two most successful ISAs today are x86, one of the simplest of the CISC ISAs, and Arm which was the most complicated of the RISC architectures. Arm 64 has reduced that complexity somewhat by getti
706.
by Symmetry 4y ago
I'm not a lawyer but that sure sounds like it would be a case of promissory estoppel to me. That is, if someone relies on Tesla's word and makes investments based on it they'd have a legal case to prevent Tesla from trying t
707.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Akino Arai also had a haunting song about the Sputnik 2 mission as a metaphor for a breakup. Translation: With enough air and water for seven days And someone's uncompromising wishes The laika dog on Sputnik Doors which will
708.
by Symmetry 4y ago
In terms of fusion drivers I've always liked NASA's PuFF[1] or Pulsed Fission Fusion. The idea is to use a normal z-pinch pulsed fusion setting, which won't normally be self sustaining. But if you surround the D-T mix with
709.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Sure. The FPU is optional on a Cortex M2, for instance. But those don't have MMUs. You'd certainly need an expensive architectural license to make something with an MMU but no FPU if you wanted to and given all the requirements
710.
by Symmetry 4y ago
If you've got some management core somewhere in your silicon you can, with RISC-V, give it a MMU but no FPU and save area. You're going to be writing custom embedded code anyways so you get to save silicon by only incorporating t
711.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Many branch predictors have traditionally used perceptrons, which are sort of NN like. And I think there's a lot of research into involving incorporating deep learning models into doing chip routings.
712.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Language drifts. You might as well be upset that a British pound is longer a pound of silver. Or that people now use "very", "really", and "literally" as intensifiers rather than as claims to absolute truth.
713.
by Symmetry 4y ago
That's only loosely a function of process node. Even for the same chip it will vary drastically depending on temperature, voltage, etc.
714.
by Symmetry 4y ago
The number of transistors per square centimeter will vary a lot depending on application. High speed logic is less dense than power efficient logic is less than RAM, for example. I suppose you could use a metric like a minimum size 8T SRA
715.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Single use plastics that end up in a landfill won't be turning into microplastics. It's more a matter of re-usable plastic items gradually wearing down.
716.
by Symmetry 4y ago
There's always cross OS performance tests like this one https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021/2
717.
by Symmetry 4y ago
From years of reading Phoronix articles, scheduling is generally one area where Linux really shines compared to other OSs. There are particular workloads where someone does better but not overall. And many of the problems described in thi
718.
by Symmetry 4y ago
He got his career started in software but my overall impression from Ashlee Vance's book, news reports about Tesla, etc is that Elon just doesn't have the same good judgement in software that he does in engineering. I mean, he&#x
719.
by Symmetry 4y ago
More than just sanctions, Russia is the sort of a country where if you start a company and its too successful someone with connections might show up one day with documents "proving" you signed it over to them for a fraction of its
720.
by Symmetry 4y ago
Give some to ULA just to taunt Bezos? But seriously, I'm not sure why they aren't looking to sell them to other US rocket companies.

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