does synergy works better now? 3 years ago, every week I would get into a situations where one machine was not connecting to the other, and I had to randomly restart synergy so maybe it connects. fun to do that 5 min before the meetings.
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions).
France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with each reactor scheduled for completion 1-2 years apart, but that is only expected to reduce costs by 30% compared to the (hugely expensive) EPR.
Small modular reactors hope to improve things but it's far from clear they will end up any cheaper. Historically making reactors bigger makes them more efficient. The Rolls Royce SMR is just under 1/3rd of the size of the EPR so even if successful any cost reductions are not likely to be dramatic.
Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...
Gas is dispatchable. You can treat it like a huge battery. Nuclear power not only isnt a substitute for gas, it needs gas as a backup and to mediate supply and demand.
Gas is also waaaay cheaper than equivalent amounts of nuclear power - like 3x cheaper.
I suspect that you can modulate nuclear power too, but why do it? after you started the reactor it runs practically for free? (the fuel cost is so small; or it costs the same to run full power of half power). disclaimer: I did not read actual details about nuclear power plants designs in the past 20 years, so i'm vibing from first principles and bad memory
"No statechart will survive contact with real world applications".
I mean, when you have external dependencies, multilayer protocols, multithreading, perf requirements, the state will becomes an ugly mess. One can only dream of a clean statechart.
Hierarchical state machines are common in hardware development. I've also used them for embedded systems, and dug my way out of spaghetti nightmares in distributed systems by reworking a system into a set of state machines.
Is it clean? Not always, it gets messy. On the other hand it is deterministic and traceable to specifications. Specifications as state machines can be easier understood and shared than raw code or raw prose.
I also think more effort is needed to synthesize a clean set of state machines with hierarchy for a system at scale and I'm sure there are times when that effort is not warranted.
Sometimes the complexity is unavoidable and you have to pick the lesser of many evils. Oftentimes complexity management is trying to model the system in such a way that the complexity moves to the area which is most easily understood. It doesn't make the system less complex, only easier to reason about and maintain. State-oriented design is just a (very powerful) tool in the toolbox.
Even when I haven't actually used a state machine, I've modelled problems as state machines just to help me think about the system. Thinking in terms of state can often help traditional software designs.
I agree, we try to think in terms in state machine. Just complaining that somehow this is not good enough, in practice we need to add random flags, and it is not clear how to separate the multitude of separate state machines all active at the same time.
But I see all the "QR codes" have a hexagonal symmetry? So basically you can use only one corner (1/6) to represent a node? Why do they keep the entire hexagon?
The article notes near the end that the authors think the diameter of the hexagon is tied to another constant, so I would guess that they kept the full hexagon because studying a regular polygon has advantages that studying a wedge doesn’t — so, since they aren’t done studying this all yet, perhaps they have causes to consider a full hex rather than a wedge that are still WIP.
And then you try to actually build a GPS network, and ask yourself: what kind of antennas should we use? what should be the freq? how much power? how will the receiver detect the precise nanosecond when it receives an incredible weak signal? (in current GPS the signal is bellow thermal noise)
- They don't use GPS frequencies because there is receiver on the moon that receives GPS L1 signals (LuGRE and potentially more in the future)
- Make it easy to acquire for low complexity hardware
- Use 5G forward error correction code to reuse existing hardware implementation
- Design the signal in a way so that the user can easily find start of a data frame
And those are RF level considerations... there will be more considerations needed for the data transmitted over those navigation signal that the receivers need to use to determine navigation satellite position as lunar orbit is much more complicated than Earth orbit
(also you receive the signal from all satellites at the same time, on the same freq, and some random reflections. and then you need to extract independent streams of bits for each satellite, each with its own nanosecond timestamp for receive time)
The hw implementation of xor is simpler than sub, so it should consume slightly less energy. Wondering how much energy was saved in the whole world by using xor instead of sub.
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 are for vector operations that aren't involved in a xor or sub, but most of them are for allowing the core to extract more parallelism from the instruction stream. It's really just a dust mote compared to the power reduction you could get by, e.g., targeting a 10 MHz lower clock rate.
I am always puzzled by such articles - its actually very well made, drawings are good, little interactive pipeline animations are fine. But in order to follow it you must already know and understand what its writeen about and if you dont - the content is just noise for you.
Hi, I'm the author! Thanks for saying it's well made :).
I actually agree with you, the intended audience isn't someone who has never heard of CPUs before.
I tend to either write for myself: you know the saying you don't understand something until you try to explain. Or I'm writing for the person self-studying that is looking for that one explanation where everything finally clicks. I always get a lot out of those type of posts myself, so like to create them for others too.
You could use colors in the step-by-step simulation to show dependencies.
Also show some tooltips/comments when things happen (that you described above). Ideally one should press next next next in the simulation, and understand what happens better than the paragraph description above.
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