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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I agree! Together, they’re a very entertaining team. I’d like to clarify though, what I mean by “Linus can take responsibility for his own mouth” is not that he has to abandon the spicy takes, but that he needs to listen more closely to what he says and correct himself if he’s being unreasonable. I don’t think it’s fair to rely on other people to do it for him.

    That said, this does seem like one of the things they are addressing; per the video, Linus said that future crisis communication will be handled through the other executives, which strikes me as a simple and effective solution. The main problem for most people I think is letting their emotions cloud their thinking in situations like this; I’m the same way! And, lucky enough to have a few people who talk me through and keep me level. Maybe for the WAN show he and Luke can have a safe word, and Linus can simmer down if he hears it 😂


  • I kinda covered it in this comment about the latest video response: https://lemmy.world/comment/2474701

    But the gist of it is that the video was a much more considered response to the situation (closer to what I expected out of them from the get), and now we will wait and see to see if they make good on it. We don’t have to “trust them, bro”; people are watching, and we will hold them to account if they don’t follow through. All that means for me is that I simply don’t watch this kind of content if I can’t trust it. What drew me to LTT in the first place was the genuinely useful information coupled with high entertainment value; if they can get that balance back, and stick to the guidelines they say they’ll publish, then I see no reason not to accept that they’re doing the right thing with regard to their testing and the accuracy of their reporting.

    Same goes for their response to Madison’s statements, and their “crunch culture” in general. I agree that Madison is just one voice of many, but that doesn’t mean she’s the only one either. What I hope is that it never happens again, but if it does I hope the support for Madison this time will encourage anyone else to speak out about such issues.

    TL;DR, Indeed, don’t take them at their word that they’ll do better. Watch, and see if they do.







  • Solid summary, yep. I will say though that while I understand your anger and certainly share in your disappointment, Linus has a pretty good (but not spotless, not by a long shot) track record of doing the right thing and being a decent dude, and I think he deserves a bit more grace than the more vitriolic comments have been giving him. Saying he’s a piece of shit is a bit much, in my opinion.

    As a long-time viewer, it’s hard to see. I hope he sits and thinks on this whole situation, and comes around to apologise to Billet, to GN, and to the community he spent so long building. In the absence of that, I really hope someone from LMG outlines the steps they’ll take moving forward to address the points raised in the GN videos. I love LMG’s content, it would be a shame to lose them over all this.




  • Won’t someone think of the poor scribes that the printing press will put out of a job?

    Look, I get the arguments, but they are wrong. Even “stealing content” is completely wrong. It’s taken down, shuffled around, and recombined. It works pretty much the same way as human learning, just with fewer layers. The people who oppose AI are afraid of it, because they don’t truly understand how it works. Case in point: OP, in this thread.


  • Look into GrapheneOS. It’s pretty easy to install on a Pixel device if you’re willing to spend a few hours on it (might be less, assuming all your USB cables work first go 'round, unlike mine 🙄) and it’s been a great daily driver for me. You don’t have to install Google Play stuff, but if you need it for an app like banking you can run it all sandboxed and control all the permissions. Only thing I lost was Gboard’s ability to send GIFs (because I have it sandboxed; I could get it back if I wanted to let it connect to the internet). You might be able to get a Pixel 6a for like $200 soon too, I think I saw something about a sale coming up on the Google store.



  • Okay, you’re kind of reaching with that one 😋 I didn’t mention Landauer’s Principle because it’s so negligible as to be irrelevant (seriously, the heat generated by writing or erasing a bit is about equivalent to the energy levels of a single electron in a hydrogen atom, in the range of ~0.018 eV at room temperature), and superconductors will reduce even that. I kind of wish we had another word, for when “negligible” doesn’t do the insignificance justice.

    I do appreciate the clarification on the point of superconducting semiconductors - and the concern for my day haha! It really wasn’t anything to do with you, hence the edit. And, your point here is absolutely correct - LK-99 isn’t some magical material that can be all things to all people. Its other properties may make it unsuitable for use with existing hardware manufacturing techniques or in existing designs, and we may not find superconductors that can fill every role that semiconductors currently occupy.

    Edit: lol, looks like its “other properties” include not being a fucking superconductor. Savage.


  • I sort of covered this in my other reply, but yes, switching losses are also due to electrical resistance in the semiconducting transistor, and yes I’m assuming that semiconductors are replaced with superconductors throughout the system. Electrical resistance is pretty much the only reason any component generates heat, so replacing semiconductors with superconductors to eliminate the resistance will also eliminate heat generation. I’m not sure why you think superconductors can’t be used for transistors though? Resistance isn’t required for semiconductors to work, it’s an unfortunate byproduct of the material physics rather than something we build in, and I’m not aware of any reason a superconductor couldn’t work where a semiconductor does in existing hardware designs.

    Then again I’m also not an IC designer or electrical engineer, so there may be specific design circumstances that I’m not aware of where resistance is desired or even required, and in those situations of course you’d still have some waste heat to remove. I’m speaking generally; the majority of applications, GPUs included, will benefit from this technology.



  • Edit: my first draft was harsher then it needed to be, sorry, long day.

    First of all, nobody’s saying this is going to happen overnight. Secondly, traditional computing systems generate heat due to electrical resistance and inefficiencies in semiconducting transistors; the process of computation does not inherently require the generation of heat, nor cause it through some other means than electrical resistance. It’s not magic.

    Superconduction and semiconduction are mutually exclusive - it’s in the name. A semiconductor has resistance properties midway between a conductor and an insulator. A superconductor exhibits no electrical resistance at all. A material can be a superconductor in one “direction” and a semiconductor in another, or a semiconductor can be “warped” into being a superconductor, but you can’t have electrons flowing in the same direction with some resistance and no resistance at the same time. There’s either resistance, or there’s not.

    Finally, there is absolutely no reason that a transistor has to be made of a semiconducting material. They can be made of superconducting materials, and if they are then there’s no reason they’d generate heat beyond manufacturing defects.

    Yes, I’m talking about a perfectly superconducting system and I’m not allowing for inefficiencies where components interface or component imperfections resulting in some small amount of resistance that generates heat; that would be a manufacturing defect and isn’t relevant. And of course this is all theoretical right now anyway; we don’t even know for sure if this is actually a breakthrough yet (even if it’s really beginning to look like it). We need to better understand the material and what applications it’s suited to before we can make concrete predictions on what impacts it will have. But everything I suggest is grounded in the way computer hardware actually works.