HN user
Counterpoint: I know my car can brake and turn much harder than I do (it's not a sports car by any mean, but that's beyond the point).
I'd rather not change my tires and brake pads all the time though, and keep some margin for whatever unexpected stuff is hiding behind the corner. Also I don't like having to stop because everyone in the car got motion sickness.
Once any HDL is translated to a bunch of primitives (gates, LUTs, flip-flops, etc), that's the job of an automated place-and-route, which already exist. It's independent of the starting language.
The graphs are beautiful, however they're independent of the language (because they're a visualization of the resulting gates). You could get the same graphs from VHDL or Verilog.
I don't like the "fallback" mechanism, because it will be used when "something goes wrong", without being specific about exactly under what conditions should the fallback happen. Maybe I made a mistake, "something" fails at a step I didn't expect, and this will silently implement in a way I didn't mean (maybe the result is even correct, just using way more gates than needed).
Good for american hobbyist I guess. It's not an option where I live unfortunately (orders above 75€ have free shipping though).
Some still do, but they'll only send to businesses, not to individuals.
What's annoying for me is Digikey and friends insisting on only delivering with express carrier. I'd like to have a cheaper, slower option.
Assuming the orbit is at 200km, these mirrors could only focus the image of the Sun on a 1.7km wide disk (that's (Sun diameter)/(Sun's distance)×(Earth distance)).
Moreover, the Sun's illuminance is about 1kW/m2 around Earth. 10000×60m2 satellite will thetefore intercept 600MW, so that's 260W/m2 on the focussed area. You're not going to burn anything with that.
It's not for doing nothing, it's for fooling around at the edge of knowledge. Sometimes, very useful stuff emerges.
Conveniently, there's already an electric cable sized to transport a few MW nearby. This might reduce the cost of installation, also there'll be no land acquisition/impact study issues.
However, I agree that putting solar panels in between or near rails will increase the cost of maintenance: the technicians will need to travel longer times to the work site, and now they also need to be certified to work near railroads.
That "if it hits a populated area" reduces the probability by a factor 100 (because about 1% of the world's surface is urbanized [1]).
So the actual frequency of "city wiped" is more like once every 10000 years. Completely negligible compared to other city-wiping events (earthquakes or floods for example).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_land_use_for_food_...
The french government (more pro-business than pro-ecology, but not climate deniers) is seriously planning for how to manage 55C heatwaves around the half of the century.
Because climate scientists agree that's what's coming (except for extreme, immediate reduction of fossil fuel burning).
European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.
I don't understand this argument. When someone uses a tool to create something, they are the copyright holder. Why would it be different when the tool is an LLM?
Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.
Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one.
The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.
You got it backwards, Watts are Joules/second (or joules are Watt•second).
Enjoy the annoying-to-debug errors when someone inevitably mixes arr[0] with arr[1] and tramples the heap (this could be mitigated by accessing the fields with macros), or writes arr[3] because they forgot this is not a regular array.
The second tome I had to do that for the same project (new computer), I sarted taking very detailed notes when doing this kind of unpleasant, supposedly one-off things.
Inference can only happen after having invested in training and datacenter construction. Arguing about "inference profitability" sounds a lot to me like ignoring large cost centers of these comanies.
To be clear, I was answering your second paragraph, about "funding oil extraction that is happening anyway". I understood this as "buying shares directly from the extracting company".
I agree that buying on the secondary market doesn't directly give money to the company. However, it increases demand (and therefore price) of shares in petrol companies, which might help them raise more money per share for new projects.
The earnings coming from such shares also comes from actively encouraging CO2 producing activities. Some people don't want to earn money that way, because they think it is morally wrong.
Both are asking for money to extract oil (and hopefully sell it for more money). I don't see why the oil well being already drilled or not should make a difference if I don't want to invest in CO2-producing endeavours.
The space shuttle stack has a net thrust (thrust minus weight) of about 9 MN at lauch [1]. High carbon steel has a yield strength of 700 MPa [2]. So you need a piece of steel with a cross section of 0.013 square meter to hold it down. That's a rod 6.5 cm / 2.5 inches in diameter. Hardly impossible. Your nearest road suspension bridge probably has cables bigger than this.
If you want to argue that it's impossible in practice, I'll point out that SpaceX's Starship first stage has a net thrust of 53 MN [3], and it does static fires (without the weight of the second stage on top) [4].
The space shuttle didn't do static fires because of the solid rocket boosters that would need to be teared down and reconstructed afterwards; not because it's physically impossible to hold it down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
[2] https://www.unionfab.com/blog/2024/03/yield-strength-of-stee...
For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).
The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
People change their minds. Is that illegal? Maybe they had the intention to only be in the US temporarily at first, but now they'd like to get permanent residence. Why shouldn't they be able to apply for it, from the US, while still on the temporary visa?
Then the administration can say yes or no, in the same way that they can say yes or no to someone applying from abroad.
It would be nice to be able to access the website on a smartphone (even if the experience is suboptimal), instead of denying access.
That's what formal verification is about. I did some (using PSL for hardware verification); writing the formal spec is way harder than the actual code. It will find a lot of subtle issues, and you spend a most of the time deciding if it's the spec or the code that's wrong.
Having the code-writing part automated would have a negligible impact on the total project time.
Thanks, I didn't think synchronizing the pixel clock would be needed, but this makes sense.
In what situation would nanosecond accuracy be needed between cameras? Millisecond accuracy should be enough to get camera feeds in sync, even when looking at videos frame by frame.
There's no one person that knows everything about (say) modern food production
True, but it is possible to assemble a team of people that does, with backup for each person. There's also teachers and written knowledge to educate new team members. That's what makes it resilient.
I think that's a very different situation from what's decribed.
Or they'll use a pair of binoculars (or a drone with a camera) to ignore the decoys and shoot at the actual ship...