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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You could, of course, simplify the timing model a lot. In the end you get down to “there is some time passing for the signal to get through this logic, we don’t know how much but we assume it’s less than any clock period”.. in which case we end up with delta cycles.

Then you’d say that Apple doesn’t make their laptops. Foxconn does.

The kind of work ARM would do to “make” a chip themselves goes beyond just design. It’s synthesis, P&R, test, packaging (generally a different company than the fab), yield management, inventory/logistics, etc.

But in the field of integrated circuit design there’s lots of apps that are Linux-only. I’ve tried to run some of them in containers on Mac. But XQuartz is awful.

If they ever transitioned to Wayland perhaps this would let us run these apps on Mac in a nice way.

On the other hand some of them have started getting ARM builds (for running simulations on certain cloud environments) so maybe native Mac GUI builds could happen someday soon.

I don't know if such a solution exists right now, but I'm thinking there's a fair chance it will soon as the Mac Pro disappearing creates a demand for something like it.

It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)

When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:

1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.

2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.

There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.

Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.

> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.

I do agree, I am in a similar situation.

China also needs to change something drastic to avoid brain drain. The migration of competent people is still one-way. There no path to become a Chinese citizen. China has come a long way, but Europe is still ahead on building liveable communities and wok/life balance, while the US is still attractive to those seeking freedom and prosperity. China has avoided issues due to a huge population and that demographic dividend. But eventually it’ll become an issue

Perhaps this could be a step in that direction. If we can associate the attribution with likelihood of being true. E.g., Arxiv would be better than science fiction in that context. But what is the attribution if it hallucinates a citation? Im guessing it would still be attributing it to scientific sources. So it does nothing to fix the most damaging instances of hallucination?

The reason solid state is exciting is the promised high energy density, and in some cases better safety. We shouldn’t care if it’s really “solid state” or not. That’s just marketing fluff. It doesn’t even really have a good definition as some chemistries are somewhere in between (sometimes described as semi-solid state).

This test confirms the charging speed and basically confirms the energy density (estimates people have done based on the video/report put it in the ballpark of what’s claimed)

You and I should really not demand a test that it’s actually solid state. That just doesn’t matter. We need energy density tests, cycle life tests, puncture tests, etc. If all those specifications are confirmed, whether it’s solid state or not becomes completely moot.

And in the end what truly matters is if it can be mass manufactured at low cost, which can’t be tested anyway. All these social media demands for tests are kind of ridiculous, since the only thing publishing the tests does is give Donut more PR. They’re basically laughing all the way to the bank considering how easy it has been to manipulate YouTube, Reddit and HackerNews into giving them free press. We will have another round in a week when the next test is published. I’m honestly impressed.

Personally I reserve all judgement until the promised bikes are on the road and torn down by third parties.