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pillusmany

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Our power problems today are far away from the theoretical limits you described.

But reversible computing is inevitable in quantum computers, so it's researched in that context.

A reasoning and conscious machine would be just as or more moral than us. There is no rational argument for it to exterminate life.

We drove the mega-fauna into extinction without actually planning for that or desiring it.

Same thing today, where we are crowding out all the other animals and causing mass extinction, without desiring particularly to harm them.

Games targetting pre-Pentium PCs also used precomputed trig tables.

Pentium was fast enough that it didn't matter as much.

Just a few years later it was slower to read a trig precomputed table.

90s apps used these Windows handle controls and it was not a performance problem. On computers 100 slower than today and with 1000 times less memory.

BTW, the current Windows Task Manager still shows the total HANDLE count on the CPU page.

They were not used in apps with complex UIs because native controls were hard to skin and didn't work very well when their size was very small (as complex UIs tend to need)

Pro cameras have a volume problem. Too few are sold.

Imagine if Intel only sold 10000 CPUs a year, but the fabs still cost billions of dollars. Do you still think you would have $500 CPUs?

Tensor cores massively accelerate matrix multiplication with no algorithmic breakthrough. Just by being smart about how you move/cache/reuse values, operations which are considered O(1).

There should be an O notation which takes into account everything - various kinds of memory latencies, speed of logic operations, .... Obviously we have wall clock or total energy used.

It would be odd if our immune system, as had apparently been speculated, became less effective against pathogens that it saw a lot.

That actually can happen. It's called "original antigenic sin" or "immunological imprinting".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin

It's especially prevalent in respiratory viruses. The flu is a well known case. The more flu shots you have (the yearly one), the less effective they become (while still more effective than nor having one).

The only solution to the drug problem is full legalization of all drugs.

They should be manufactured by big pharma and sold in grocery stores. No question asked. Poor people should have acess to subsidized prices.

We should also invest in educational programs where people are taught about drugs and how to consume them in a safe way. These programs should sample all major drugs so that one can find out if they should become a consumer and what is the right drug for them.