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Resistance is inherently dissipative, so there is no coherent path the electron can take. No quantum effects here, the electron is always interacting with the resistor lattice.

Not sure if that’s because I’m not a native speaker, but unless I make a conscious and quite tiresome effort to listen to the lyrics, the human voice is just another instrument among many.

I’m also talking about personal use. These are research devices for my PhD. I’m obviously not paying out of pocket, but my funding agency does.

I’m trying to convey that if a tool increases your efficiency by more than it costs then it’s worth paying for it regardless of how expensive it is. It’s how the economy works.

I work in a cleanroom to fabricate semiconductor devices and I spend hundreds of euros per hour to use specific tools which mostly just use electricity and maintenance. Should we complain that it’s too expensive or should we use them because they’re worth the price?

Things have a price for a reason. It’s up to you whether it’s worth paying that or not.

I use qwerty-fr [0] for this. It's pretty nice, since it works on all three major OSes and is basically a few compose layers on top of a US base layout. I use it to type greek letters, swedish vowels, italian accents and math symbols. A couple of non-breaking spaces are also there. It's the only layout I use nowadays.

[0]: https://qwerty-fr.org/

Trapped-ion and neutral-atom QC require lasers because the light signal needs to be coherent. That's the main feature of a classical laser, really. The explanation with the number of photons doesn't really cut it, because even a perfect laser does not have a definite photon number: coherent states are inherently uncertain in both photon number and phase. But LEDs are even worse, because the light signal is truly incoherent. It's not even a good quantum state, it's a classical superposition of incoherent photons that you can't really use for any quantum control.

But even more than that, this seems to me like a purely on-chip solution. For trapped ions and neutral atoms you really need to translate to free-space optics at some point.

This is a laser controlled device. Even the terminology of "interconnect" is not really applicable. Your best hope is an optical waveguide coupled to the device, definitely not a metal line. It's not even a transistor in the traditional sense really.

This is an optical transistor, meaning that a current is controlled with an optical pulse. That means that you can't pipe these things into each other, unless you can build an equivalently fast and efficient light->charge transducer (i.e. a photodetector). Moreover, this physically can't be scaled below approximately the wavelength of the laser (meaning at least 10x larger than CMOS transistors).

It might turn out to be great for the applications that they point out in the paper itself, not so much for logic. I would say bitcoin mining discussions are a bit premature, and potentially not relevant.

Of course some works are indeed genuinely good ideas. But sometimes things just don’t work out quite as well. Many nature papers in my field are dead ends applications-wise.

I’m not saying any of those works specifically are, just that research should be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Don’t give too much importance to individual papers. At best, you’re mostly disregarding all the work that lead to it. At worst, you’re placing a lot of faith on an idea analyzed through rose-tinted glasses and presented with a lot of intentional omissions.

How would you explain when these predictions then turn out to be right? People who are this skilled at reading others are rare, but they do exist.

Well, 2^53 milliseconds is indeed 285 414 years.

Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.

I wonder if you could make deployment / installation even cheaper by making big “rolls” of panels and unfolding them directly on the ground. No ground pillars of any kind.

If you built a zigzag pattern into the panel, possibly with some ultra-cheap alternating cylindrical ground support, you could easily deploy them in this East-West configuration.

You will have to drive some pillars into the ground to secure them anyway, but it might be much faster and require little labor.

I appreciate frugality, but a clothesline takes significantly longer to load and unload. It’s not an ideal replacement.

Definitely, if your analog substrate is implementing matrix vector multiplications (one of the most common approaches in this area). Then your differentiation algorithm is the usual backpropagation, which has rank 1 weight updates. With some architectures this can be implemented in O(1) time simply by running the circuit in "reverse" configuration (inputs become outputs and vice-versa). With ideal analog devices, this would be many orders of magnitude more efficient than a GPU.

Why are you so surprised? We understand how gravity works to an incredible degree of precision, and anyone with a physics degree is able to explain it.

You seem to have some misconceptions around physics. If you go through the formal training that we go through (i.e. spend years thinking about physics problems, papers and textbooks) you should understand that mathematics is a tool, and that physics is our best attempt at building mathematical objects that behave like the real world.

What I mean by this is that we’re well aware that our theories are not perfect, and we can point to what doesn’t work (within our respective fields) quite well. At the same time, we’re aware of certain “features” of reality that cannot possibly be otherwise. Thermodynamics or special relativity are simple examples of this. Their validity is not in question, just as our existence in the first place is not in question (if you want to argue about philosophy go ahead, but that has nothing to do with the point I’m making).

Therefore, even though we don’t have a perfect theory of physics, we can say that we understand certain stuff quite well. And vague statements about life and “new ideas” don’t help us advance our understanding.

P.S. my view of the common “nobody understands quantum mechanics” saying is that only people who are too attached to classical reality can hold that opinion. The great founders of QM grew up without it, so are excused in thinking that QM is unintuitive. But for the most part the uneasy feeling about QM disappears when you let go of classical assumptions for good.

Italian here. We learned about the existence of different projections in school, but only used Mercator when actually discussing geography.

I work on semiconductor devices for edge AI, so… mostly yes?

Are you proposing that atoms are organisms and/or that astronomical objects may be organisms? I feel like you are just inflating the meaning of “life” without justifying why.

Defining it properly is a very interesting problem, but I think this is an extremely active field of study. Saying “what if subatomic particles are actually living organisms” is not a productive line of thought.

I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.

When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?

I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.

That’s right. Back in the day we used to have only clear and descriptive names, like C and GNU.

Dopamine is not permanent, though. We're talking about long-term synaptic plasticity, not short-term neurotransmitter modulation.

Did you happen to miss recent US news?

The Roman salute has no direct connection to the Roman Empire. It was largely an invention of the 19th and 20th centuries and was popularized by fascist movements.

> The most reasonable criticism is calling it a Roman salute and saying it bears connotations to imperialism, and that it was most recently practiced by Hitler.

For the past >100 years, it’s been the gesture representing the fascist party in Italy and the Nazi party in Germany. You sound like you want to defend the gesture for some reason.

> I think, if you want to read into his deepest, unspoken intents, he probably compares himself to Caesar more than Hitler. Just like Zuckerberg, and all the other multi-billionaires who want to see themselves as the de-facto leaders of the world.

Comparing oneself to Caesar is still a profoundly disturbing thing. He was an oligarch first, then a lifelong dictator, and later a literal deity (according to the Senate).

> He never showed up at a white supremacist rally.

I’m sure you’re smart enough to understand that if he actually showed up to a white supremacy rally, he would be financially destroyed. He’s already lost his public image completely in Europe. So not putting up a KKK hoodie is weak evidence for him not being a white supremacist.

But in any case, none of this matters. Whether or not he personally identifies with fascist ideology is secondary to the effect of his actions. Blurring the line between reasonable discourse and fascist apologism trivializes extremism and hate, and that’s the last thing we need.

I think the misconception you have is that nazism means “WW2 anti-semitism” for you. The education on the topic that we get in many European countries goes deeper than that.

Would it be better if they called Elon a fascist? He did the fascist salute, after all. And as other commenters have said: if it endorses authoritarian far-right parties like a duck, has controversial white-supremacist parents like a duck, and does the fascist salute like a duck, at which point do we start wondering wether he’s actually a duck?

Great example of how information is sometimes compartmentalized arbitrarily in the brain: I imagine you have never been confused by sentences such as “I’m running at 10 km/h”.

Not really. These are wafer-scale chips, which (as far as I'm aware) were first introduced by Cerebras.

Cost reduction for cutting-edge products in the semiconductor industry has historically been driven by 1) reducing transistor size (by following the Dennard scaling laws), and 2) a variety of techniques (e.g. high-k dielectrics and strained silicon, or FinFETs and now GAAFETs) to improve transistor performance further. These techniques added more steps during manufacturing, but they were inexpensive enough that they allowed to reduce $/transistor still. In the last few years, we've had to pull off ever more expensive tricks which stopped the $/transistor progress. This is why the phrase "Moore's law is dead" has been circulating for a while.

In any case, higher performance transistors means that you can get the same functionality for less power and a smaller area, meaning that iso-functionality chips are cheaper to build in bulk. This is especially true for older nodes, e.g. look at the absurdly low price of most microcontrollers.

On the other hand, $/wafer is mostly a volume-related metric based on less scalable technology and more conventional manufacturing (relatively speaking). Cerebra's innovation was in making a wafer-scale chip possible, which is conventionally hard due to unavoidable manufacturing defects. But crucially, such a product (by definition) cannot scale like any other circuit produced so far.

It may for sure drop in price in the future, especially once it gets obsolete. But I don't expect it to ever reach consumer level prices.

Your comparison with Conway's Game of Life is interesting, since that's inherently local.

More importantly, I'm skeptical towards non-locality because it is an extremely strong assumption with very weak effects: the only place it really shows up is in post-correlations between measurements of previously entangled systems, which notably cannot transfer any information faster than light (in fact, they require classical communication to even be noticed). Moreover, the only way to get entangled systems in the first place is through local interactions.

By believing in non-local hidden variables you get a deterministic universe with a mysterious, otherwise undetectable ether that instantaneously notifies quantum entities that they should update their behavior. By not believing in them, you get rid of the only n on-local "phenomenon" in physics (really, more of an interpretation) but you have to accept that some things are fundamentally random.

Easy choice, if you ask me (or most of the physics community).