I mention this because in the 1990s, while at uni in St Andrews, Scotland, I remember a trip to the astronomy observatory one evening. There was a peculiar cloud overhead - whitish purple, tube shaped and shimmering. I asked the astro professor what it was. He said, "Its a cloud" and showed no further interest. I took a photo. When I got the film developed and photos printed, you could see bright colours either side of the tube. I've always wondered a) what it was and b) why that astronomy professor was an astronomy professor when he had no interest in what the universe had to reveal to him.

I now believe it to have been a STEVE. I've still got no insight into the mind of the astro professor.

Nowadays, I expect optimizations that minimize energy consumption are an important target for LLM hosts.

I think that era of CPUs used a single circuit capable of doing add, sub, xor etc. They'd have 8 of them and the signals propagate through them in a row. I think this page explains the situation on the 6502: https://c74project.com/card-b-alu-cu/

And this one for the ARM 1: https://daveshacks.blogspot.com/2015/12/inside-alu-of-armv1-...

But I'm a software engineer speculating about how hardware works. You might want to ask a hardware engineer instead.

OK, this is the main thing. Going from C to assembly is not deterministic in a sense because different compilers can produce different output. But the behaviour of the generated assembly is always the same. This isn't true of a spec.

This perfectly explains the feeling I had when, 20 years into my career, I had to start writing specs. I could never quite put my finger on why it was harder than coding. My greater familiarity with coding didn't seem a sufficient explanation.

When writing a line of spec, I had to consider how it might be interpreted in the context of different implementations of other lines of spec - combinatorial nightmare.

But code is just a spec as far as, say, a C compiler is concerned. The compiler is free to implement the assembly however it likes. Writing that spec is definitely easier than writing the assembly (Fred Brookes said this, so it must be true).

So why the difference?

I tried asking Gemini and ChatGPT, "What opcode has the value 0x3c on the Intel 8048?"

They were both wrong. The datasheet with the correct encodings is easily found online. And there are several correct open source emulators, eg MAME.

Does this mean that if generation was free, and there were no green policy costs, our electric would still be expensive?

edit: "Network and Distribution" appears to contribute about 23% of the retail price. I guess green energy increased that cost because wind/solar are more spread out and sometimes off-shore.

Or have I missed something?

FTA: "So to summarize the state of the art in oral peptide delivery: there are exactly two FDA-approved products that use permeation enhancers to get peptides into your bloodstream through your GI tract. Both achieve sub-1% bioavailability. Both required over a decade of development, thousands of clinical trial participants, and hundreds of millions of dollars."

I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...