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Gordon Moore has died

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211–220 of 250 posts

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of this..all of us..basically coalesced from star dust that will one day again be star dust :)

Maybe. Might just end up being a dense ball of nothing.

To be fair, "star dust" is not rigorously defined, and the cosmological definition of "dust" includes some pretty big chunks. So after the sun swallows the earth, there's a very good chance we'll qualify. :)

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Might just end up being a dense ball of nothing.

To be fair, "star dust" is not rigorously defined, and the cosmological definition of "dust" includes some pretty big chunks. So after the sun swallows the earth, there's a very good chance we'll qualify. :)

Also we are more patterns in the dust given that most of the atoms in our bodies swap for new ones over a couple of years. The patterns may be able to continue separately from the dust.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Might just end up being a dense ball of nothing.

To be fair, "star dust" is not rigorously defined, and the cosmological definition of "dust" includes some pretty big chunks. So after the sun swallows the earth, there's a very good chance we'll qualify. :)

At the cosmological scale, stars are dust.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

density would double every year I'm not a physicist, but I think they need to get smaller to do that.

Smaller transistors is one way to get more transistors per chip. Chips could also get bigger, or the transistors could be packed in more densely (my VLSI is rusty, but not all transistors are minimally sized; a wider transistor can be used to push more power for example).

Chips are not getting bigger really. Its just very large 'chips' are multible chiplets package in on bigger part. And that's not what Moore was talking about.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#215
post #179

I would like to propose "Grove's Axiom" which basically states: If you're failing, pivot to what your replacement will do before you fail. "In the midst of the doldrums of 1985, Grove posed a hypothetical question to his colleague Gordon Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove…

This reminds me of the advice: When deciding what to do, imagine that you are not talking to yourself but rather what you would tell someone else to do in your situation. This simple mental shift apparently removes a lot of cognitive biases and emotional baggage that might be affecting your decision making process.

People ask me for advice and I immediately realize why am I not following it myself? I have had multiple people come back years later and tell me that they would have never done X or achieved Y if it weren't for a discussion we had years earlier.

The analytical knowing mind has to drag all this other stuff around!

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#216
post #182
post #179

I would like to propose "Grove's Axiom" which basically states: If you're failing, pivot to what your replacement will do before you fail. "In the midst of the doldrums of 1985, Grove posed a hypothetical question to his colleague Gordon Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove…

That's a pretty powerful axiom. I wonder how applicable it is to life in general. Relationship is failing (and you want to save it): what will their next partner do differently? Do it now! Worried you might be kicked off a sports team: what will the new player do better than you? Practice that! Imposter syndrome has you worried your boss will fire you: what will the replacement, the "real" person do that you aren't?…

I would be careful applying this one to imposter syndrome. I think of imposter syndrome as a failure to calibrate your expectations of yourself with the reality of what your work requires. Asking yourself what the "real" person would do that you aren't doing seems to me like it would play into that miscalibration. You might be better of asking _someone else_ what your replacement would do.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#217
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading errata for Intel/AMD processors would be an eye opening experience then. There are so many bugs in features you never heard of, just like software. It is inevitable given the complexity.

I'm sure there are tons of bugs, I was told a few stories by people in aerospace industry. But I think they cannot survive if they don't keep the number ultra low, because they can't fix it (well except microcode level).

Reminds me of the classic aerospace joke.

Q: In the age of Pentium, how do you pronounce IEEE-754? -- A: AAAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#218

Wow, we have lost a true legend. As I get older, I marvel a bit at the giants I once shared time on the earth with. Sometimes it feels like we don't have giants in the 21st century in the same way.

I sometimes make myself a mental list of famous people who are expected to die soon. The following people will all die in the next few years: Jimmy Carter (98), Henry Kissinger (99), Dick Cheney (82), Pope Francis (86), Paul McCartney (80), John Williams (91), William Shatner (92), and Ali Khamenei (83).

Even in death Ringo will be in Paul McCartney's shadow haha.

A huge one for me is Mel Brooks, it is pretty rare for a celebrity death to have an impact on me but that one will.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#219
post #120

How incredible is it, that I'm writing software on a laptop, connected to the internet over wifi, all while being 38,000 feet in the air. And all this enabled by billions of tiny transistors made from sand. And to make this all the more surreal, I'm sitting next to someone who knew him. Thank you Gordon Moore. RIP.

Cloud computing!
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