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I'm not sure this is obvious. For the consumer market, maybe. But at the end of the day, there are physical limits on how much compute you can squeeze into any given area. If your job requires more parallel compute than can reasonably be squeezed into a package for power/thermal reasons, then distributing the workload off-package is a requirement.

Maybe hardware will morph into a more heterogenous mix than we have now, with many single-package cpu-gpu nodes working in parallel, instead of a few cpus orchestrating a gigantic sea of GPUs, but maybe not.

I'm more convinced that this is just one stage of the cycle. GPUs in consumer hardware weren't really a thing before the 90s. From the 90s to like 2013 graphics software (and it's ability to load hardware) improved rapidly. Since then it's kind of stagnated and a lot more of the focus has shifted to doing the same amount of rendering with less power/less heat/less space. Even if we do see a shift toward SoCs/APUs/whatever in consumer hardware over the next few years, I'd bet on some sort of paradigm shift to come along (fully raytraced rendering?) and swing the pendulum pack toward big discrete GPUs at some point again.


This is a nice anecdote, but it doesn’t mean anything.

In the US at least, being raise by a single parent is a massive statistical indicator for basically every negative social outcome. Poverty, criminality, future generational single parenthood, etc.


I wasn’t raised in the US.

Aside from that my anecdote is no less scientific than your conjecture. Correlation is not causation, it is far more likely that this statistical indicator comes from a third variable, say poverty.

USA has a abysmal social safety network. Single parents are left to fend for them selves, without protections in the workplace (meaning they can loose their jobs), without child sick leave, without financial support, with unavailable and unaffordable child care, etc. etc. Of course a kid raised under these conditions is gonna be statistically more likely to correlate with other negative outcome.

PS. I’m slightly insulted you unapologetically put future generational single parenthood in the category of negative social outcome. As if you’ve already concluded that it is bad.


This is basically the case for any digitally controlled effector/sensor. Need a serial bus to get data from some ADCs? An FPGA can do N buses in parallel. Need a PWM to control a motor? An FPGA can do N PWMs in parallel.

The problem of course is that the effector/sensor is usually still a physical object that has a cost to replicate, even though the control circuitry in the FPGA is free to replicate. As is the case with ultrasonic transducers.


Just spitballing here but it might have to do with the fact that materials that absorb light are more heat conductive than materials that are reflective.

The SR71 was famously painted black as a mitigation for surface heating issues because the black paint conducted heat away from the areas the were really susceptible to ram-heating.

Perhaps reflective surfaces reflect some percentage of the incoming energy away, but thermally conductive surfaces conduct a larger percentage of that energy away and are able to safely sink it into some thermal mass.


Black surfaces are good at absorbing AND radiating heat. I think that’s why the SR-71 was painted black. The amount of heat it got from absorbing the sun’s rays probably paled in comparison to the heat it radiated from all the friction as it flew.


From what I understand, the SR-71's black paint did radiate thermal energy, but also made the plane harder to see in visible light at night, and on radar. It was a RAM coating impregnated with iron to reduce the radar cross section. The characteristic chines along the edge of the fuselage were also meant to reduce the radar cross section.


I’m generally skeptical of pharmaceutical weight loss solutions as a bandaid over the underlying problem, but for this statement to mean anything you’d have to compare it to traditional methods of weight loss.

If you simply eat at a calorie deficit and aren’t taking specific steps to preserve muscle (resistance training and high protein), a lot of the weight you lose will be muscle mass.


But the people most in need of the intervention are also the ones least likely to take those muscle-preserving steps.

And if you can get them to take those steps, the need for the drug decreases.


This is kind of weird because there’s a lot more data to suggest now that dietary fats are almost never the problem when it comes to obesity, and in fact dietary fats are really important for a lot of critical processes (brain function, neuroprotection, hormone synthesis). I get it for caloric restriction though since fat is denser than protein or carbs.


It's complicated. Reducing calorie intake is absolutely a path to weight loss, but we tend to ignore the adaptability of the body. If you suddenly reduce your caloric intake, the body thinks it's entering into a time of scarcity and will lower its metabolic rate through hormone modulation and by shedding muscle.

This is one reason why people struggle so much with dieting. They lose lot's of weight at first, but then plateau when the body adapts. When they get discouraged and fall off the diet, they put the weight back on quickly because they now are burning less calories than when they started.

The most effective way of losing weight long term is likely some combination of a slight caloric deficit paired with resistance training (to discourage the body from shedding metabolically expensive tissue) and short bouts of reverse dieting . (ie. slight deficit for 3 weeks, then 1 week of a slight surplus, etc.)


This is largely incorrect, and also not what the person you're replying too is saying. Calorie numbers in food are just a weighted sum of the grams of carbs, fats, and proteins in the food. Each of those groups are assigned a fixed weight based on an estimate of how many usable calories are in a gram of each.

The commenter above is talking about how we often ignore the adaptability of the body, and that if you suddenly cut caloric intake by say 300 a day, the body will surprisingly quickly adapt by lowering metabolic rate to compensate. This can be done through the simple modulation of hormones and may also involve the shedding of metabolically expensive tissue, like muscle.


compute in memory


I agree with this and would even go as far as to say color E-INK screens are basically ready to push out greyscale ones right now. The problem is that no one is making a device with them that's any good. I owned one of the boox color e-ink devices for like a week and the experience was awful because it's a full android os shoehorned into something that kind of works on an e-ink display.


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