Yeah we’re not likely to ever face such a situation and still even need that many computers. It’s an interesting project though in the sense that someone has a 32 bit OS running on every ISA out there (or even aims to).
Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU
It is also interesting in the fact that it is extremely tiny in terms of lines of code, and the approach they took to minimize its codebase is original.
Coming at it the other way, someone is intellectually and philosophically free if they choose to be that way, full stop. They bend their neck to the yoke of an organization in order to gain what they could not gain themselves without access to capital.
For a small few, they can access capital and work for equity while themselves being maintained as they work. But I think it's very common that smart people chafe at the restrictions of their organization, not being able to find a more favorable situation.
It makes sense that fundamental advances have become more rare as our cumulative scientific progress grows bigger.
In order to contribute something fundamentally new, people have to travel further / climb higher in order to see past what has already been done.
But US tech corps are probably not as free to pursue lines of thinking with no link to financial benefit. Academia is pretty broken. People are generally not free, they are economically bound to think about things more grounded in practical needs. The shackles of the almighty dollar.
So maybe more rare as a function of multiple reasons?
Probably. My former employer had a pretty active research collaboration with a number of universities because they weren't that huge (especially at the time) and one professor in particular at a local university wanted the grounding of industry collaboration.
It's a balancing act. Many PhD students also care about working on stuff that real people actually care about.
You know, I didn’t get the joke until you spelled it out so clearly. Thank you.
Also I’ve heard comments to the effect that hyper loop and similar companies are basically performative art, a sort of protest against the heavy regulation required in order to do any real work in some states. The point is that we have technology to be great and do great things, but we don’t do them.
One piece of evidence would be that Russia, Belarus and North Korea have been specifically excluded from US tariffs. You could argue that the net effect is negligible since we don't import a lot from those countries, but the signal being sent to long term allies is devastating to America's future relations with them.
Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.
I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.
I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
Yes, there is a LOT of evidence of this allegiance, although maybe just observing Trump's unwillingness to openly criticize Russia and Putin is highly suspect by itself.
It's a great essay, and I came away with a similar thought.
They mention Erdos and applaud his intensity, transparently mentioning that he was an addict to antidepressants and amphetamines, and without the substance abuse he wasn't able to get any mathematical work done.
To me this is the antithetical to being intellectually rich. More like enslaved to our own intellectualism.
I want to have the freedom to think about the things that I want to think about. Being forced instead to reason through problems, not of my choosing, on behalf of someone else... well that's life for most!
Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.
Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
As I understand the benefits of electric cars themselves, the burning of hydrocarbons at scale is more efficient than piecemeal. So if the ‘bus’ contained a turbine, there would probably be net benefit. Or a nuclear bus!
Plus, even if it’s equal to the present state of affairs, we need a practical road to electrification of transport. I’m sure there are many cheaper options, it’s just fun to think about the infrastructure options.
Regarding growth, there are different career phases. For a new entrant to the industry (new grad) or to the company, just executing on any project is growth. How do you do things around here? What technology do you use?
Years later the gains and performance plateau. These things are now mostly understood, and problem solving in the familiar domain yields less growth.
This is when hot cold is IMO a good approach. . Let people explore different problems, different technology. Try things out at work, crazy stinky skunk ideas.
I have wondered this and occasionally seen some related news.
Transistors can do more than on and off, there is also the linear region of operation where the gate voltage allows a proportional current to flow.
So you would be constructing an analog computer. Perhaps in operation it would resemble a meat computer (brain) a little more, as the activation potential of a neuron is some analog signal from another neuron. (I think? Because a weak activation might trigger half the outputs of a neuron, and a strong activation might trigger all outputs)
I don’t think we know how to construct such a computer, or how it would perform set computations. Like the weights in the neural net become something like capacitance at the gates of transistors. Computation is I suppose just inference, or thinking?
Maybe with the help of LLM tools we will be able to design such things. So far as I know there is nothing like an analog FPGA where you program the weights instead of whatever you do to an FPGA… making or breaking connections and telling LUTs their identity
You don't think we know how to construct an analog computer? We have decades of experience designing analog computers to run fire control systems for large guns.
We have also a pretty decent amount of experience with (pulse/spiking) artificial neural networks in analog hardware, e.g. [1]. Very Energy efficient but yet hard to scale.
That’s a very cool abstract, thanks. I suppose it’s the plasticity that poses a pretty serious challenge.
Anyway, if this kind of computer was so great maybe we should just encourage people to employ the human reproduction system to make more.
There’s a certain irony of critics of current AI. Yes, these systems lack certain capabilities that humans possess, it’s true! Maybe we should make sure we keep it that way?
I had an incident where an older couple were stopped at a green light, angled down hill, in a snowstorm, with parking brake instead of foot pedal, in a borrowed vehicle.
When they asked me for insurance I just dragged it out and made friendly conversation(eventually giving the insurance slip). They got increasingly irate and panicked. Maybe because it was only a glancing blow and wouldn’t exceed even a slim deductible.
This story doesn't make sense: it's not clear who hit who, whether you were scamming them by not giving insurance, or how a dash cam would help when no real damage was done.
The older couple hit him, with their motionless, parking-braked vehicle. Possibly by using dark matter/energy to cause space-time expansion that pushed his car into theirs.
Snow storm detail indicates the road may have been slippery. They might have locked their wheels on an icy hill and skated into the other car. It happens a lot where I live.
If you rear-end someone, it's pretty much always your fault. People are allowed to be stopped in the road for any number of reasons, and it's your responsibility as a car operator to be aware of your surroundings and able to stop your own car without hitting anything.
Interesting but not practical. CPUs are either 64 bit and have memory management hardware or 32 bit and don’t. This dictates whether you have lots of addressable RAM or not, and changes what an OS is for that CPU