> Hardly seems to fit with the “we’re all in this together” argument.
It's a good job we offset all of our manufacturing to the likes of China, it's not like they have terrible environmental standards or share an atmosphere with us or anything. It's also a good job we closed our coking coal rich mines to import it from Japan instead [1].
I'm left in utter disbelief that any of this was allowed or condoned, it is nothing short of madness. The UK now finds itself in a position where it is incapable of doing absolutely anything.
Asimov appeared to feel uncomfortable with those who thought they were better than others because of their Mensa status, and some he states were typically right-wing. I am entirely unclear though how the claimed racist ideology of John Campbell Jr is related.
> I miss Isaac Asimov, and I miss the America that created him.
An America with a typically right-wing Mensa bias (and likely upper class society)? That's the America that the author misses?
> This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers, around 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-cor, are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
I was under the impression that there was still a trade export from TSMC to China [1]? Not to mention a near complete ban on ASML devices [2]? Maybe they exfiltrated a few chips into a lab, but can they really source production quantities?
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
People using the same C1-Ultra core are struggling to get the same performance in applications where heat and power are important. It would be surprising if this is sustainable and not just a temporary boost.
> The Xring O3 will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the world's first foldable to use it, and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, both launching in China in September 2026. Xiaomi also unveiled the Xring O100 AI chip and the Xring D100 smart-driving chip, the latter built to run models with up to 200 billion parameters locally, with commercial use planned for 2027. Reuters reports TSMC is producing the chips.
I guess we will find out very soon when Chinese customers get their devices. I don't know how they will even source enough LPDDR6 at reasonable prices.
For an OLED low-powered system, I use exactly this approach [1] [2]. The trick is to wake up, do some tasks, then go back to sleep until either a timeout or triggered by an event. The best approach so far has been the light sleep [3] which keeps some things up and running, but just sipping at the current.
I'm taking these learnings and applying them to an 5 inch e-ink device with an ESP32 to be a modern-ish PDA device.
Banksy is an establishment-approved protestor, they promote him regularly [1]. His artwork is regularly on display in galleries [2]. They could easily seize the works to pay for costs, but don't. His name is supposedly Robin Gunningham from Bristol [3], they could take him to court. The whole thing is ridiculous.
Designing/generating those assets is an incredible amount of work, it's the value-add on top of an engine that a game studio spends most of their budget on. Game reimplementations like this one get their own asset-sets sometimes, but it's rare and usually happens long after the game is working
Antenna design is a dark art, I like simple hacks like this.
> The two parts of the antenna are intentionally designed to create an omnidirectional radiation pattern without a pronounced directionality.
I worked on a project a while back to try to utilize this to detect the arrival direction of WiFi signals approximately based on received strength. Do this for enough base stations and you have a very crude positioning system.
As an individual this is mostly true unless you're touching broadcasting proper. As a business this is absolutely not true and noncompliance is a ticking time bomb that will bankrupt you.
As someone in Southern California who uses HAM, this is both true and not true. There's an older gentleman who has already spent time in jail for sitting on frequencies without a license repeatedly. After he got out, he jumped right back on it. He's got tens of thousands if not more in unpaid fines, but as far as I'm aware they cant get blood from a stone.
Another anecdote, dozen or more years ago a friend had a fault cable modem that was spitting out radio traffic I assume on some important frequencies in a dense area. They got a knock on the door from an FCC team who were tracking the interference down.
2.4GHz is already incredibly crowded and prone to interference (in urban environments). I remember once picking up emissions on a Bluetooth headset from a leaky microwave oven.
You can replace an inefficient (turns power into heat) antenna with a more efficient antenna which will then radiate more.
And some frequencies are regulated by effective radiated power, where they basically care about the strength of the signal in the strongest location, so a more directional antenna could push you over the limit.
I'm doing something similar, using the directionality of the antenna to turn an ESP32 into a high RPM gyroscope for use in a combat robot. Standard gyro chips top out well under 1000 RPM, and are much more expensive than an ESP32 board, plus the ESP can serve as the radio control link and brain of the bot at the same time.
cool idea. care to share more? my thought would be continuously measuring antenna impedance over time, and looking for a peak in this signal's spectrum near the rotation frequency. could also try with a photodiode (+ optional light source, or use ambient light) (this would be similar to an optical computer mouse), which i guess could be more directional, and thus give a stronger signal
Combat robots are more like RC cars than autonomous robots, the driver stays in control of the bot over a radio link. I use ESP-NOW, and get about 6000 packets per second from the transmitter to the ESP32 in the box, and each comes with radio link stats, signal strength and Channel State Information. Using autocorrelation on the signal strength gives you the rotation period, and using that you can establish a Phase Locked Loop to remove the drift of integrating rotation speed to get absolute rotation angle.
That exchange is quite a good prediction all things considered.
> Note that "minor" implementation issues like die space, routing, and gate delays, especially of 128-bit adders & shifters are non-trivial, so people aren't going to rush out and build 128-bitters for fun, just as people matched timing dates of their 64-bitters to their expected markets.
I think we're stuck with 64 bit for quite a while. The circuit size jump from 64 bit to 128 bit is significant. There's no fixed scalar or apples to apples comparison (that I'm aware of). Just for adders though, 2 bits requires 2 full adders, 4 bits requires 4 adders, 8 requires 8, etc.
Another way to look at this is that 16 bit gives addressable memory up to 65k, and quite a few programs had to deal with paging in architectures like the 8086/8088. 32 bits gave us up to 4GB addressable memory, and not it's now not uncommon that a program such as a web browser exceeds this. 64 bits would give us up to 18 exabytes of addressable memory. I'm not aware of any common programs breaking into the terabyte category (even in most research), let alone petabyte and then exabyte.
Even iterating over that many numbers becomes a large computational task. Just a quick test program:
// gcc -O3 count.c -o count
#include <stdint.h>
int main(){
uint64_t z = 0;
for(uint64_t i = 0; i < UINT64_MAX; i++) z += i;
return (int)(z % 2);
}
Using uint32_t and UINT32_MAX, it returns almost instantly. For uint64_t and UINT64_MAX you will be waiting a long time. 128 bit values? Even longer. Maybe many many cores could break that memory up, but then it makes sense to have a 64 bit system with some kind of ability to occasionally change page.
> I'm not aware of any common programs breaking into the terabyte category (even in most research)
Wouldn't that be the commercial LLMs? ChatGPT, Claude etc are estimated to be in the 2-10 TB range, and a large portion of the population of developed countries are using those apps commonly. Not on their own systems, but if we're in the 1995 academic perspective, multiuser systems are assumed.
I imagine the strongest reason we won't need 128-bit memory addressing is because horizontal scaling is easier. If OpenAI had needed a single addressing plane to cover all their users, 128-bit might be required. Similar to how the internet hobbles along fine with 32-bit addressing by just adding a layer of indirection to the internet with NAT.
I guess the other example of 128-bit addressing is ZFS. What are the biggest ZFS file systems? And who has more data? S3? Once you get bigger than 64-bit you want to scale out horizontally anyway and not just put it all into one flat addressable plane.
> Wouldn't that be the commercial LLMs? ChatGPT, Claude etc are estimated to be in the 2-10 TB range, and a large portion of the population of developed countries are using those apps commonly. Not on their own systems, but if we're in the 1995 academic perspective, multiuser systems are assumed.
I think each part is generally treated like an individual large program - which makes sense because otherwise you have large parts of the model sitting there doing nothing. You want all of your silicon running hot, RAM sitting doing nothing for a period of time is a waste.
> If OpenAI had needed a single addressing plane to cover all their users, 128-bit might be required. Similar to how the internet hobbles along fine with 32-bit addressing by just adding a layer of indirection to the internet with NAT.
I think even then, 128 bit memory for OpenAI et al would be more of a headache than it is worth. Economically it's not worth building the 128 bit systems. The fact that servers and consumer CPUs have a lot of re-use within their designs reduces the costs for everybody. Sony for example stopped producing their 128 bit CPU [1], where it was mostly about pushing more data between CPUs and VPUs. Now we have specifications like PCIe where you can just adjust your pipe width to increase throughput.
> I guess the other example of 128-bit addressing is ZFS. What are the biggest ZFS file systems? And who has more data? S3? Once you get bigger than 64-bit you want to scale out horizontally anyway and not just put it all into one flat addressable plane.
Yeah exactly. The other thing to consider is that it doesn't matter how many bits wide you can go, the bottleneck is the smallest width. With ZFS, at some point you likely need to send it over a network, and I think fibre is up to 64 bits via parallel transceivers. If that points outwards, it'll probably be single bit by the time it gets to you.
Dunno, a 128bit integer add is essentially 2x as expensive as a 64 bit one, a multiply is 4x. We've already had SSE in the early 2000s that could do computations like this in a single cycle (tho on multiple 32 bit numbers, not 128-bit ones).
I think on x86, we're still limited to 48 bits of address space on 64 bit systems, not sure if this has changed, but even 64 bits is so vast (16exabytes) , that you'd need a supercomputer with a single address space to fill it, but at least the latter is practically realizable.
I am compelled to point out how much "For uint64_t and UINT64_MAX you will be waiting a long time" really undersells it.
If we assume that the uint32_t version runs in one second, the u64 version will take 136 years.
In reality, on the machine in my lap, u32 takes 0.6s, so we can expect the u64 version to take at least 81 years!
Statistically, "you" will not be waiting a long time, because you will die first.
"128 bit values? Even longer."
Yes, 2^64 times longer than u64, and 2^96 times longer than for u32! 2^96 just about 80e27. Age of the universe is ~13.8 billion (13.8e9) years, or ~435e15 seconds.
If we consider a more moderate 96-bit size, and I started at the very beginning of the universe, I will only have been able to run that program just over 25 times by now. That's all.
It's a good job we offset all of our manufacturing to the likes of China, it's not like they have terrible environmental standards or share an atmosphere with us or anything. It's also a good job we closed our coking coal rich mines to import it from Japan instead [1].
I'm left in utter disbelief that any of this was allowed or condoned, it is nothing short of madness. The UK now finds itself in a position where it is incapable of doing absolutely anything.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp311nr7w34o