nwiswell

The expectation return for having your money in equities is lower because of the high valuations, but it's not negative.

The "fundamental value of the business" is not an exact amount. The day-to-day variation in price (to the extent it isn't correlated to the index, anyway) can generally be viewed as a side-effect of uncertainty about what it actually is. In some sense, the value is unknowable, because it is a function of other things that are not knowable (e.g. future interest rates). So there's a measure of "other people would find an argument for this valuation reasonable", even for the fundamentals.

In any event, this sort of news generally does not move the fundamental value of the business in a way that exceeds the "uncertainty band", so pretty much all of the active trading is necessarily in anticipation of how others will view the news.

This is in contrast to e.g. merger offers, which are much more about the actual value of the business (which has suddenly become very concrete and precise), and not trying to judge the reaction of others. But major events like that are a small minority.

Can you elaborate on the distinction between these?

What is a "direct response"? Any change in price is still the result of individual actors expressing directional opinions.

> AMD has nothing of the sort, and it's hurting them.

What are you talking about? Have you looked?

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/amd-mi210-300w-pcie-64gb-pas...

https://www.bitworks.io/product/amd-instinct-mi210-64gb-hbm2...

Yes, that's why you'd choose AMD, I'm saying that you don't enter the ecosystem for the first time by purchasing the absolute cutting edge hardware.

As far as I'm aware you can't simply buy an Nvidia B200 PCIe card over the counter, either.

Why would you be looking to dip your toe into the AMD ecosystem for the first time using an MI300X? It doesn't make any sense. It's not entry level hardware.

> I don't see a "buy now" button or a PCIe version anywhere here

"Buy now" buttons and online shopping carts are not generally how organizations looking to spend serious money on AI buy their hardware.

They have a long list of server hardware partners, and odds are you'd already have an existing relationship with one or more of them, and they'd provide a quote.

They even go one step further and show off some of their partners' solutions:

https://www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-instinct-deep-learni...

FWIW I believe Supermicro and Exxact actually do have web-based shopping carts these days, so maybe you could skip the quotation and buy directly if you were so motivated? Seems kind of weird at this price point.

https://www.exxactcorp.com/Exxact-TS4-185328443-E185328443

While I agree with you in principle, sometimes you actually don't know what you want until you see it on the shelf. HSC had that magic... I would see stuff and suddenly whole projects would form around it in my head. And the prices were such that you could afford to make it happen.

This will sound mundane, but I remember back in college, I was working on a solar water heater competition project with a budget of something like $200. We'd decided on copper pipes and a metal solar collector spray painted black, but the trouble was making a good thermal connection between the two.

Up until that point, I didn't even realize that solder bars (think solder ingots) existed until I saw them on the shelf for $3 each.

This is like saying that if you've only seen 250 people in your life, it's hard to imagine someone who is at the 99.8th percentile of height.

I think it's important to separate "crypto, the technology" from "crypto, the financial system".

But, yes, I agree. It's not good for the original value proposition, but I'm not sure that's relevant anymore -- does anybody really buy crypto in order to use it in the real economy (drugs aside)?

The timeline might be compressed for crypto, but this seems to be true for banks as well.

Looking back to the financial history of the 1800s, it seems to be the case that it is only the massive intervention of government beginning in the 1900s and especially after the Great Depression -- in particular aggressive regulation and oversight, central bank systems, deposit insurance -- that prevents perennial banking failures. And it happens anyway: see 2008. Reportedly, even the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank threatened contagion before the FDIC made the extraordinary decision to protect balances in excess of $250k.

So really, it appears to me that crypto is merely an immature financial system that is learning the lessons of legacy finance in an accelerated fashion.

> If (fake name) EconoAir's manager at your local airport did not understand Flight Plans well enough to quickly draw one up - would you want to own EconoAir's stock, or fly on their airplanes?

So since universities obviously do not focus on teaching that material, do you suppose that people in positions of authority at airlines don't understand flight plans?

Universities are institutions of higher learning, you can acquire the industry-specific mundane details on the job.

If you used Scheme in your CS program, you can figure out whatever tech stack your company is using. It's really not any different.

In general the incoming power from the sun is so many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of power we usefully extract that it's hard to imagine it having any material impact on the biosphere.

The physical presence of solar cells and wind turbines is a different matter, but it's largely a local effect.

I definitely agree, but in the meantime we cannot depend on these strategies when making long-term plans to combat climate change because we don't know whether their side effects will prove to be tolerable.

Yep. Geoengineering like seeding clouds or atmospheric aerosols (albedo modification) and fertilizing the ocean could absolutely have an impact on global temperature and CO2 levels respectively, but also would almost certainly cause environmental impacts at least on the scale of climate change, and possibly worse.

So GP is mistaken: if we threw environmental caution to the wind, and given sufficient funding, we absolutely could produce tangible reductions in AGW using today's technology.

Yeah, what?

"If you're young, handsome, educated, and cartoonishly well-endowed, you might be qualified as a gigolo to an unfaithful heiress!"

A great deal of the money trickles down from the Olympics/IOC (WADA).

Individual sporting bodies are also under a great deal of pressure to comply with WADA standards, since there is a very real threat of being kicked out of the Olympics for insufficiently draconian enforcement (a perennial story with Weightlifting / IWF). So in many cases the athletes themselves pay for it via their dues to their sporting body.

I guess we know that they'll regret this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580549

It's probably not feasible to stock every piece part for every legacy product. Imagine how many parts that is just for one keyboard.

Maybe that could be subcontracted out but I can see why it's just simpler to replace the whole thing.

Mmm, pasta hydrocarbonara is my favorite.

> Is success measured by the biggest budget or the complexity of the problem?

Certainly not by the budget, spending money isn't hard -- but by success in the face of complexity, yes, absolutely.

> Are Voyager 1 & 2 the greatdst scientific achievement of the human race? I think it's an easy argument to make.

I can't really agree. Voyager 1 & 2 have been extraordinarily successful machines but that's aided by the simplicity of their mission and their design. The core scientific purpose of the missions (visit and survey the outer planets) has been repeated many times over by other craft (Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons, Juno) with greatly improved instruments.

Compare Voyager to the Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project, sequencing the genome, or even the Opportunity rover. All of these projects were successful despite being massively more complex undertakings.

It's comforting to know that the human race will leave a trace beyond the gravity well of our own star, but hurling a chunk of metal away from the sun is not an inherently great achievement.

> Is this mostly an anthropomorphization of the events

Yes.

Basically everything is bumping around until the desired reaction or configuration is obtained. The irrelevant proteins are generally not shown.

The length scales involved are extremely short so the chaotic soup works itself into configuration shockingly quickly.

There are also membranes, vesicles, and organelles (e.g. Golgi) that partition, package, and redistribute proteins so that they tend to be more concentrated where required.

Vegetation reporting in, can confirm I have no mouth with which to eat avocados.

> it's training data for the brain.

Has the word "education" fallen out of favor recently?

> No, but I do expect any reasonably competently run company to figure out that the person they hired isn't actually able to do their job, especially after 7 years.

Oh, they did. This person probably did not get paid as much as their peers. A great deal of compensation is discretionary.

Whether any decision-maker actually stood to benefit from removing this person from their position is another matter, however. Firings seem very uncommon, and layoffs depend on business conditions.

Not at home, but at professional printing houses absolutely.

This isn't hypothetical, I've done it -- in grad school we would send out (I believe) 30000 dpi print jobs on transparent polyester film, and then adhere those to glass blanks to create cheap masks for MEMS fabrication. We had an old Canon i-line lithographic aligner that accepted the glass blanks.

I think the print jobs cost us about $100 each.

Here's the first Google result for a vendor (I don't remember who we used). There's a price list on their page and it looks like they have capability up to 50,800 dpi.

https://www.fineline-imaging.com/plotting_services.shtml

I can't believe that worked.

Industrially (by which I mean how it was done circa 1970), silicon oxide and silicon nitride was etched using a buffered HF solution known as BOE (buffered oxide etchant). The buffer was typically ammonium fluoride; because of the presence of the buffer, the concentration of fluorine ions in solution stays constant even as some of the fluorine attacks the substrate to form e.g. hexafluorosilicic acid. Since the concentration of fluorine stays constant, so does the etch rate.

If you just pull some rust cleaner off the shelf at home depot, the etch rate will crash as the concentration of fluorine ions decreases. That's compounded by the fact that the HF concentration isn't very high in the first place.

As a result it would be very difficult to determine how long your wafer should remain in the etch bath. Underetching could easily cause "opens" in the circuits from unremoved insulator, and overetching and/or undercut can destroy the patterns you're trying to produce. Either way it can ruin the chip.

You'd spend far more than 6400 euros to do it at home.

If you did it often and didn't count your own labor costs, then maybe the average cost would be less, but that's an incredibly specific situation.

> I believe the way Sam Zeloof circumvents the enormous amount of capital needed for a chip fab by relying on modern technology to create 1970’s technology

Yes, exactly.

Old lithographic technology is so crude that you can even use modern high resolution laserjets to print masks (10000 dpi is less than 3 microns).

Even so, 1970s-era CVD, PVD, and plasma etch is still quite complicated, and CMP is impossible (it hadn't even been invented yet). So the devices you can create are significantly integration-constrained.

It's very similar to creating clothes by hand at home.

Can you do it, given the right tools, training, and patience? Yes.

Will they be any good? No.

Will they be cost-competitive? No.

Getting chips made on a shuttle run for an old node is very affordable. There's really no need for it.

(According to one MPW supplier, 10mm2 of 340nm, up to 10 dies, costs 6400 euros, and it's unlikely 340nm is achievable in a garage anyway)