No idea about the future of the Moore's law precisely. Yet recent research results show that there is still room for faster semiconductors, as discussed on HN [0].
409 karma · joined July 16, 2020
What we see is a reconstruction by the brain interpolated from our sensors. The idea of Mark is that the image is not only an interpolation of the present, but actually also an extrapolation of what the image will be in the next tenth of a second. For tasks such as catching a ball, this would allow us to compensate for the delay of the signal between our brain and our muscles.
Based on this idea, he wrote a classification of many illusions [2].
[1]: https://www.livescience.com/4950-key-optical-illusions-disco...
[2]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1080/03640210802...
For example, the Dualo touch uses a slider and a gyroscope for analogical input:
The voice recorded through a mic can also be a nice anological input, such as in the Rc-505 loop station:
https://www.boss.info/global/products/rc-505mk2/
Even better if there is an analogical feedback. For example with springs under buttons, rubber bands attached to finger rings or other crazy ideas.
The main illusion of scientific models for predicting the future is that it worked well for group of simple objects like planets or atoms. However, applying this approach to groups of humans is often disappointing.
[1]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65103-9_...
[2]: https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/why-society-cannot-be-modeled
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing#Optical_Four...
This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.
A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.
More precisely, if the key length is w, then radix sort is O(w n) operations. In particular, if the n elements are distinct integers for example, w is greater than log(n).
An advantage of a system where cards or checks are widely used is that it decreases significantly the risk of getting robbed.
In some country with cash only, the citizens would travel by bus with big amounts of cash while bringing back money to their family. Sometimes the bus was stopped by armed robbers. Everybody would have to give their money, or to take the risk to hide it, or to take the risk to fight back. When a minimal system of money transfer was introduced in the country, those kind of robbery disappeared: there was no point anymore for the robbers to stop busses since the citizens didn't have huge amounts of cash on them anymore.
Fully agree. A sci-fi novel from Robert Heinlein [0] was describing end of life as a discontinuity. In this sense, with the very rapid changes of society that we are currently experiencing, we could say that the society is dying to let place to a new society.
As examples of rapid changes, we have social network, climat change, artificial intelligence to cite a few.
From a child point of view it could be harder to project themself in a society changing rapidly. How do you gain recognition for you and your creations using new medias? How do you reach confort and enjoy leisures without causing pollution? Which skills should you learn that won't become obsolete with AI?
It is inevitable that societies change: our current society is very different from the society during middle-age for instance. Yet it is easier to adapt when the changes are slow and continuous than when they are sudden and discontinuous. In the first case, you can learn from your parents and other adults. In the second case, you are on your own. In the history of most countries, recovering from a revolution could take decades.
This reminds me a TV interview of the author Patrick Modiano, just after he won the literature Nobel price. The presenter asked him if the money would help. The author answered essentially that the next time he would be in front of a white page, the money surely wouldn't help.
In the case of surpassing transformers, money could help to give access to more compute power. It could also help to prevent the research from being public.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/quadratis/id1598700673
[1]: https://swissmaprs.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/ParlierTurn...
After all, using the Blender GUI, you can do a lot using only a 2D mouse coordinate and two boutons. So 2D mouse coordinates and text could be better.
A nice evolution would be an AI model that can understand natural language instructions, while taking into account where your mouse pointer, how the model is zoomed and oriented, and that has geometric insight of the 3D scene built so far.
Having somebody else in the house speaking out loud each time they want infos from the internet could become annoying.
Apart from having a mind reading device, I don't see so far a solution to this problem better than text input with a physical keyboard or a virtual keyboard on the device.
Some CPU have the instruction FMA(a,b,c) = ab + c and it is guaranteed to be rounded to the nearest float. You might think that using FMA will lead to more accurate results, which is true most of the time.
However, assume that you want to compute a dot product between 2 orthogonal vectors, say (u,v) and (w,u) where w = -v. You will write:
p = uv + wu
Without FMA, that amounts to two products and an addition between two opposite numbers. This results in p = 0, which is the expected result.
With FMA, the compiler might optimize this code to:
p = FMA(u, v, wu)
That is one FMA and one product. Now the issue is that wu is rounded to the nearest float, say x, which is not exactly -vu. So the result will be the nearest float to uv + x, which is not zero!
So even for a simple formula like this, testing if two vectors are orthogonal would not necessary work by testing if the result is exactly zero. One recommended workaround in this case is to test if the dot product has an absolute value smaller than a small threshold.
[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/this-insect-ha...
This reminds me of this article [1] that summarizes very nicely several data structures that represent sparse tensors. I highly recommend it if you need to work with data in two dimensions (like a list of vectors) or more.
In particular, the Compressed Sparse Fiber is a kind of generalization of the "offset from an array" approach, in several dimensions. That can be handy when working with data in 3D for example.
[1] https://homebrewserver.club/low-tech-website-howto.html#serv...
Here is another idea that could give users control about their data, and that could be more easily accepted by governments and companies.
All the data of user X living in country Y should be stored on a server handled by country Y. Moreover, add the following features:
- User X should be able to see all the people and companies that have access to his or her data.
- Country Y could put some tax on each request, that should cover at least the costs for maintening the servers.
This would give users more control about their data, and this would give countries more compensation on the monetizable data coming from its land.
The compensation would be a motivation for the governments to implement and maintain these servers.
Moreover, as opposed to a full ban on data collection, this approach might be accepted by companies since they would still be able to work with users data: just now they would need to pay for them and also they would need to let users know exactly who they sell the data to. In particular, if they sell the data to agressive ads companies, this would be known by the users and this could decrease their reputation.
From a technical point of view it seems doable and a service with similar features is already implemented in Estonia for example [1].
[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12553-017-0195-1
[0]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/
[1]: http://donkirkby.github.io/live-py-plugin/starting_space_tra...
On the other hand, programming languages are designed first to be easily parsed by computers. With supercomputers, exascale computing [0] is now possible. Yet it is still hard to use fully the power of such computers because what is intuitive for a human mind is not always easy to program. For example the video proof of the inversion of the sphere [1] is checked more easily by a human than by a computer.
Finally instead of using only the power of computers, or only the power of human brains, it is also possible to combine both. This requires to improve the interaction between computers and human beings. In a video on thinking the unthinkable [2], the author notably remarks that the introduction of symbols in algebra allowed human beings to extend the problems they could think about. With better interfaces, the computers could help us to write fuzzy or explicit proofs, but more importantly, they could help us to think.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exascale_computing