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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Tesla is famous in the US for inventing polyphase AC and induction motors, but this is really one of these stories were a bunch of people invented the same thing very closely to each other due to a precipitating reaching of understanding.

Note that Tesla's designs were IIRC two-phase which is largely inferior to three-phase. The push for three-phase and associated designs and inventions (three phase transformers on a single core etc.) came from outside the US.

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> but this is really one of these stories were a bunch of people invented the same thing very closely to each other due to a precipitating reaching of understanding.

This is by far the dominant case of invention. Truly independent work is incredibly rare.

And yet we grant patents so liberally, giving a windfall to the first person who files.

Remember the long view - patents cause people to hurry to publish and share their ideas publically. Why shouldn't they be granted liberally.

In a few years, the temporary monopoly falls away and the benefit passes to everyone.

I think they should work to make them even cheaper and easier to file.

20 years is a long time. For some fields, it is perfectly reasonable, but 20 year patents on many recent CS inventions would have significantly bottlenecked development of the industry - Look at how much mess was created by the JPEG patents, for example, and similar problems have existed for every other not-explicitly-libre A/V codec.

While we're on the subject of patents and Nvidia, their patent on using quasi Monte Carlo in rendering is allowing them to hold basically the whole path tracing world hostage, e.g. possibly forcing people to use CUDA who might otherwise have used OpenCL.

They didn't even invent the numerical methods themselves (pure mathematics from other countries from long ago), they were just first to file for a particular application.

I believe a few years is 20 years though. I haven't thought of patents from this perspective but 20 years is still a long time (and large chunk of your working years) to benefit from something.

There's a strong adverse selection effect, though. Because you need to publish to be granted a patent but can sue whenever anyone infringes (whether willful or not), the incentive is to patent obvious approaches that don't work well and hold the best approach that you're actually using as a trade secret. That way, anyone attempting to replicate you likely ends up in a patent minefield, yet you don't give away the keys to the castle in a patent where you have to detect infringement yourself.

Indeed. I found it quite enlightening to go through this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

The thing that's a little different about Tesla in the US at least, is he is so incredibly fetishized by eg high-profile idiots: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla, or conspiracy nutjobs like the International Tesla Institute (http://teslatech.info/ttevents/prgframe.htm http://tesla.org/tesla_fair_abq.htm) publishing and promoting Tesla related conspiracies and hawking investments in snake-oil technology like Rand Cam engines, VMSK, and all manner of "over-unity" machines

I've always enjoyed the oatmeal's comics. What is your reason for referring to him as an idiot?

Actually at first I thought idiot was a bit harsh.. but then I reread what I had forgotten about that post - I think if he's juvenile to promote the vandalism of wikipedia over a completely fantastical, out of context reinterpretation of history to label Thomas Edison a "douchebag", well then it is fair to label him an idiot on a limited forum.

Also, there's no accounting for taste but I find even his non-serious comics puerile and not terribly funny - pretty much one step above Taboola chum, or Jim Davis for millenials. Most of the "humor" and overplayed hook is simply describing everyday things with odd adjectives, ie hair cave=vagina, saliva=evil mouth juice, wow. There's probably a term for this trope.. Anyway, it gets clicks on Facebook.

Ironically, that's what they put on the PCB. Those yellow things on both side of the chip package are actual micro transformers made of some material with very tricky magnetic properties.

I wonder, was the name Ampere a reference to its titanic current consumption?

Those only reason to put those on the PCB would be to provide current above 1kA

You're looking at an SXM module, so that PCB is the whole thing. TDP is 400 W. I assume these run at a sub-1 V core voltage due to their relatively low clocks, so yeah, you are looking at a core supply current that may well exceed 500 A at full load and has to be provided by those VRMs crammed on that board.

Worth pointing out that that's not really new. Gaming cards have been running at about a Volt for a bunch of years now and all of those chuck 250+ W, so the currents are rather substantial.

If rebuilding a grid today, would going to DC power be advantageous to AC?

What has changed between then and now? High voltage DC also works well for long distance transmission but is only preferable to AC at even higher voltages.

HVDC works for linking grids and for very long distance transmission between few stations. It does not work well at all for distribution. Never did. Never will. Sorrynotsorry.

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