fungicide

Depends where it happens. The speed of light is quite slow relative to the size of the universe. So Higgs field collapse could happen a long way away and take millennia to reach us. Perhaps as the collapse propagates across the in universe it meets some huge energy event which pushes the Higgs field up again and rescues matter.

What the hell is water?

Surely you mean easier. It's easier for governments to control electronic money than cash. The government knows nothing about all that cash under that mattress.

I think it's probably virtue signalling rather than appeasement. Advertises probably welcome anti-vaxers as they are demonstrably gullible and easy to persuade.

Sure. But how would it compare to a CPU clocked at 3.5Thz?

If you think that's cool check out some cave movies. https://kottke.org/12/09/cave-paintings-were-stone-age-anima...

Plenty of info here. Enjoy https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node

"Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch. Nevertheless, the name convention has stuck and it's what the leading foundries call their nodes"

..."At the 45 nm process, Intel reached a gate length of 25 nm on a traditional planar transistor. At that node the gate length scaling effectively stalled; any further scaling to the gate length would produce less desirable results. Following the 32 nm process node, while other aspects of the transistor shrunk, the gate length was actually increased"

Because "nm" doesn't mean nanometer anymore. Not in the context of CPUs anyway. Some time back, around the 34nm era, CPU components stopped getting materialy smaller.

Transistor count plateaued. Moore's law died.

To avoid upseting and confusing consumers with this new reality, chip makers agreed to stop delineating their chips by the size of their components, and to instead group them in to generations by the time that they where made.

Helpfully, in another move to avoid confusion, the chip makers devised a new naming convention, where each new generation uses "nm" naming as if Moore's law continued. Say for example in 2004 you had chips with a 34nm NAND, and your next gen chips in 2006 are 32nm, then all you do is calculate what the smallest nm would have been if chip density doubled, and you use that size for marketing this generation. So you advertise 17nm instead of 32nm.

Using this new naming scheme also makes it super easy to get to 1.4nm and beyond. In fact, because it's decoupled from anything physical, you can even get to sub-plank scale, which would be impossible on the old scheme.

Edit: Some comments mention that transistor count and performance are still increasing. While that is technically true, I did the sums, the Intel P4 3.4Ghz came out 2004, if Moore's law continued, we would have 3482Ghz or 3.48 TERAHERTZ by now.

"The Fourth Industrial Revolution" is one of the most successfully lobbied and marketed instruments of our time. It has preoccupied governments and distracted them from addressing existing inequalities.

Where infant mortality is high, humans tend to have more children.

Tesla is a car maker, not a tech company. They don't sell Autopilot to other car makers.

They've been repeating the same message of doom now for 30 years and it always fails to materialise. Eg 1989 "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown"

https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

Actual temperature anomaly is 0.8 degrees. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ So we're doing better than the best models predicted and we've massively increased co2 output beyond what those early modelers anticipated; Apparently those early climate modelers had not heard of China.

No kidding. CERN takes in public money which it turns into research. It then gifts that research to businesses (frequently owned privately by CERN employees) who then sell products which generate billions in profits. Following the money at CERN is a very complex task, but to the best of my knowledge none of those profits go back to CERN. The gifting of patents seemed like a good thing at the time, but now I think if CERN had a different model, where they kept a small percentage stake in the patents, they would have more than enough cash now to fund themselves and build the next collider, without all this daft lobbying and begging for public money.

"Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA

Where does he mention "Ancient Rome"?

Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.