An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer

Even assuming the robot existed, which it doesn't, (Maaaaybe it was tethered, so it didn't have to carry around batteries and a hydraulic pump) I'm quailing at the task of programming the thing. To match human performance would be decades of work for thousands of programmers.

(The robot picks up a screwdriver, and a screw. Then the screw slips out of its fingers. Now what? It lines up the screw and the screwdriver. It applies torque. The head of the screw strips out. Now what? The pain of robotics is that you need to cover each and every little error case, because if you don't, the damn thing doesn't work, because it has no brain! This is why every industrial robot is massively overbuilt, and it's environment and fixturing is carefully simplified and fenced off, because error handling is such a pain in the real world, where a dropped item bounces away and hides under a bench or in an orientation where your gripper can't pick it up. 1 in 1000 is too high of an error rate. 1 in 10000 is too much. It has to function perfectly, every time, every grasp.)

And the maintenance costs! Mechanical humanoid hands are terrible end effectors. All little moving parts and lousy tolerances. They would need constant repair and replacement. It couldn't possibly be cheaper than a human in 2021 or 2030.

You can just license full CPUs and major IP blocks for stuff like IO from companies such as a ARM.

The machine-learning parts are custom but the rest are probably similar to what you would find in a smartphone chip.

I don't know about cesspits & idiots, but a little smell can develop that does tend to bring the intellectual level toward the below-average rather than above.

For those that want to push downward, the present system highly leverages their ability to do so simply through the process or habit of frequent downvoting.

If there is any perception that there was a time when there was very little detectable smell by comparison, it would be good to assess the average downvote-per-user rate then, and compare it to today's figure.

Then measure each user along this scale, perhaps including a time component, or relative to activity in some way.

Allowing for a reasonable standard deviation, it might be better if frequent downvoters past a certain range had the weight of each downvote normalized and see what happens.

This could possibly also be tuned to achieve a target level of discourse relative to a previously-considered-desirable data point in time.

Alternatively, users alone appear theoretically able to overcome the issue if there was a widespread concerted or random effort to frequently upvote the comments or postings seen descending, whether fully deserved or not, keeping them at least neutral without having a negative effect on the commenter's rating.

Mathematically a small uptick in "compensatory upvoting" habits among average users could bring the target way up as long as the overly-frequent downvoters are in the vast minority.

Then when there is true downward consensus it will still always drop through, but those who participate mainly to downvote will have less negative impact.

The only thing worse than the "nattering nabobs of negativity" are the non-nattering nabobs of even worse negativity.

If we ever use reversible computing it won't look anything like this Tesla stuff, that's for sure.

To design your own IC has at the same time become extremely complex and very approachable, if you have the money for it.

A multi-billion transistor CPU is an insanely complex product, there are multiple layers coming together to make it possible. The base layer is the foundry, here TSMC, which does the manufacturing and provides reference design kits. They contain for example the blueprints for transistors and other electrical components. For a digital chips like processors, they are usually used as they come from the foundry.

Next is a layer of software which enables the chip designs, provided by the big EDA companies. This is a rather huge layer, enabling the basic designs on the one side, but also including all kind of simulation and verification tools. And quite some engineering knowledge comes along with it.

So if you want to start designing your own CPU, you still need good engineers who know what they are doing, but large parts of the whole "stack" can and have to bought from the vendors listed above. This enables the quick entries of companies into the market, who were not traditional chip design houses.