Viewing profile — Symmetry

Essentially every cell phone out there has a VLIW DSP like Qualcomm's Hexagon cores (though AFAIK Qualcomm is the only one who lets you run your on programs on their DSP).

Between the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killi…

There actually wasn't any appreciable fallout after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Fallout is mostly generated when a bomb explodes close to the ground so that its neutron…

It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different word…

At the time (the 1950s) evidence from fruit flies was essentially all the evidence there was. But as the article points out we have pretty good data showing it works the same way i…

Even before Linear No Threshold was a thing scientists were doing experiments showing that dosing fruit flies with radiation all at once would lead to a highly mutated second gener…

The spectrum is the big thing. If they wanted a revenue stream they could just buy bonds.

I wish they wouldn't call these "open source" models. The output weights are open but that's more analogous to a binary. The source would be the training data and techniques that w…

Except for a brief spike during Covid unemployment has been below 5% for a long time which has led to more wage growth for cooks and waiters than for programmers.

In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water …

Not if you first absorb heat with your solar panels. Conservation of energy and all that.

Yeah. I don't have any doubts that this is something that can be done. But doing it cheaply enough to be worth while is the difficult bit. Elon does have reputation for delivering …

Nobody (sane) is talking about putting nuclear reactors on Satellites in close Earth orbit so we don't have to worry about them generating heat. They've got solar panels that move …

Selenian Boondocks did a whole series on Venus and what could be usefully extracted from the atmosphere a decade back. https://selenianboondocks.com/category/venus/

.03ns is a frequency of 33 GHz. The chip doesn't actually clock that fast. What I think you're seeing is the front end detecting the idiom and directing the renamer to zero that re…

There's been a lot of churn over the years but additions being done in the same timeframe as XORs has been pretty constant. The Pentium 4 double pumped its ALU but both XORs and AD…

For a 32 bit number you're looking at going from using 256 to ~1800 transistors in the operation itself. A modern core will have roughly 1,000,000,000 transistors. Some of those ar…

Right. Keeping down the number of slots the scheduler and bypass network need to worry about is an important design pressure.

There's a structure called a carry-bypass adder[1] that lets you add two numbers in O(√n) time for only O(n) gates. That or a similar structure is what modern CPUs use and they all…

That's all true, but on any modern x86 processor both the single pair of gates for the xor and the 10 or so for a carry-bypass 64 bit wide subtraction both happen with a single clo…

There's only a few grams of hydrogen in the reactor's plasma, it's reaction with oxygen wouldn't be much more exciting than just losing containment. There are engineering challenge…

"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection...except for the problem of too many levels of indirection."

With NVidia/OpenAI actual graphics cards did change hands. Vendor financing, like when a car dealership gives you a loan to buy a new car, is actually pretty normal.

It does have oil. And the reason the UAE is backing the RSF is that they have gold interests there.

On my laptop I have a yin-yang with DRY and YAGNI replacing the dots.