I fail to see why people want to buy it in the first place. Yes: there is a certain value in rarity ... but so what, are people just betting that some mugs in the future will be willing to spend even more real currency on it and that they will be able to cash out ?

Maybe I just have the wrong mindset - I have never been interesting in gambling.

When there are severe power grid problems in Texas... so severe that one of their senators had to flee the state to Cancun to stay cool during a severe and prolonged outage, it's time to identify the problems and fix them and to tax appropriately. If there's an industry straining an over subscribed grid, the government should be able to regulate their grid usage.

Before you attack the idea that this is a state and non federal issue. The grid is interconnected through multiple states and does impact other parts of the country that Texas does not unilaterally have the right to make decisions for. Texas should either bear the cost of upgrading the grid to support the burdens placed on it by the greatest consumers, or the federal government should require the miners to bear the burden. Either way, there is a problem, it needs to be fixed, and while it may be politically motivated, it doesn't mean it's not a problem.

Ah, but did you know that that was much used in Private Eye ?

I am reminded of some graffiti that I saw in a pub toilet in England "all the beer in this pub has been passed by the management".

Hmmm: I wonder if the use of English is understandable in the USA or elsewhere.

I am a Brit. I was in my 40s before I heard "pissed" meaning angry but when I was younger I went to pubs and got pissed.

The Atlantic is wider than you think.

How much will space grown drugs cost ? Who will be able to afford them ? Are they really that much better than stuff grown on Earth ?

as I do not like finger marks on them. I mainly use Linux at the command line so a touch screen would not be much use anyway. I can touch type, maybe I could be identified from the way in which I hit keys.

of a DNA based storage system could really be something interesting!

Algebra 1 is a pretty trivial course. I taught the full contents of that course to both my children closer to 6th grade.

It takes approximately 4 months to use Khan Academy to progress from Algebra 1 to Multivariable Calculus (I know this to be a fact). Any 12 year old should be able to achieve this with a few hours a day.

If larger corporations control farming and optimize what is farmed, where it's farmed and data is collected to make better decisions regarding the optimization of international farm land, how is this a bad thing?

Same goes for meat production.

I understand that lots of people want to run their own farms and live off of them, but I can't see how this provides value to the non-rural population. I'm actually even more interested in the governments simply taking over farming.... maybe not the US government as they seem to think that using companies like Lockheed is intelligent, but most European countries could do much better if they simply wrested control of agriculture from people who think that running their own farms is some sort of right that everyone else should pay for.

Food, energy and housing are the three key things we should centralize and make the governments guarantee. Of course, I have some serious problems with everything agriculture since commodity markets became publicly traded and things like the cost of grain became influenced by crooks on wall street gambling over harvests.

So, let me toss in my two cents.

I've reached a point where I simply don't even consider looking to England for business or finance anymore. I've been turning down work in England as well since the so called autonomy you refer to requires me to fill out somewhat nasty anti-laundering financial forms which are presented in a way that if you're trying to take money out of England, you must be a criminal and must prove otherwise. Since England is no longer a portal to Europe, it's lost it's value in business. Ireland is far more interesting now. The language is still English and working with Ireland provides access to much larger markets and the stability of a national economy which has the EU to fall back on in times of need.

Those are the business reasons I don't work with England anymore.

The personal reasons are that I'm against people who say things like "muzzies" and "dirty invaders" and support national policy changes based on that type of thought process. I have no interest in doing business with modern day nazis. And I'm not pointing out how England feels towards external races. It's the whole master race thing.

You're more than welcome to hate and attack the people in your country. But I'll have nothing to do with you if you do. When you're hungry and begging for bread because no one wants to do business with you, you're welcome to blame anyone you want for the decisions you made.

When you're ready to behave like civilized human beings, my door will be open to you.

I think with WSL2, Windows is the ultimate Linux desktop and since nearly every modern Windows machine support WSL2, I'd say the Linux desktop is alive and healthy :)

I have a completely Linux based job working in HPC. I use Windows running on a Surface Laptop Studio 2 and I often have dozens or more terminal windows open. The only thing I think which would make terminal on Windows better would be full support for serial port communication.

If you have paid for annual membership then they should not be allowed to change the terms until after renewal time. However there is prolly some clause buried deep in the T&Cs agreement that allows them to do almost anything -- that is part of the trouble with these "agreements" they are entirely one sided.

So, the Vision Pro is a tool which provides access to phone and Mac (probably Windows and certainly Linux) desktops. It allows non-disruptive augmentation of daily tasks as well. You can wear a Vision Pro while working at a desk, have a conversation with a person next to you and get your job done... and of course add a film in the corner of your eyesite for a little noise.

The Quest... you can... well you can ... I know it can do something. There is a fairly expensive app called Virtual Desktop which is usable, but takes over the headset and places everything else on hold.

The Quest is being made for the VR world where you leave everything on this earth behind and go someplace else. Which sounds great, for a few minutes here or there

Then there's the whole .... "Apple has made absolutely no secret that this is a developer preview" thing. The US patent office has been working overtime for years with Apple patents for natural eye glasses with augmented reality. Meta has been working on making a virtual world which everyone lost interest in before they ever reached beta. Unless Apple screws up massively and pulls a Microsoft... who mind you had functional AR years ago... but then decided to just sit on their asses while every other company swooped in an stole the whole market right from under them, the next version of Vision Pro will be much closer to the original promised product.

Meta still needs to find a market for Quest. It might be a great VR device, but it just doesn't do anything. There's no killer app.

Vision Pro does do 3D and that's exciting, but first and foremost, it's a Mac/iPad/something which is currently packed in a somewhat bulky device.

Of course there's also a brand issue.

To use Quest, you have to link your Facebook account which, let's be honest, you don't want to mix your work with your play like that. This is kinda like how LinkedIn is a tool and Facebook is a toy. You talk to associates and colleagues on LinkedIn and you, well, we don't use Facebook anymore except to see if someone's kid graduated college or is someone's mom died. Facebook, is for old people. (says the nearly 50 year old man who isn't old enough to use Facebook anymore).

Who care's if Quest is better than a beta version of Apple's product. Meta has had a decade to try and make Quest useful for anything other than being a toy. They have even had Hololens to use as a roadmap. And it's still just a toy. Apple came out on day one with a device as a beta version which provides a development platform for something much better.

As for field of view. Yeh... here's the fun thing. Do you honestly think Apple couldn't have done full submerssion? The FoV they provided was similar to a pair of glasses so that all application developed for the Vision Pro would look natural on a pair of Oakleys

What I think many people are missing is... well Seymore Cray.

I make this point because Cray started his super computing journey by building highly advanced machines connected to a single centralized memory system.

As things stand right now, probably the biggest problem we're facing in AI is cache coherence. The bigger the machines we build, the bigger this problem is. Currently, I'm trying to troubleshoot a fairly small HPC, about a thousand cores. As the system exists in its current state, the more cores to a single node I add, the slower the machine gets. This is because the cost of sharing memory between the cores is just too high. HBM2 and HBM3 don't help at all because it's an operating design issue. Thrashing the memory which is what AI does means the number of CPU spinlocks increase. Historically, the cheapest form of shared memory has been atomic variables. They exist in a single page and are always cache coherent. Right now, every access of such a variable is taking a very long time because the kernels are initiating spinlocks to wait for coherence. As such, 128 core or larger processors are generally a lot slower than much smaller processors with duplicated memory in readonly regions.

We need to see progress made in high performance multi-ported memory systems. I think that specialized data lines, for example entirely separate LVDS pairs for reading and writing synchronized (coherent) memory regions could be helpful. Any writes to memory in specific regions would be multicast across a full mesh and spinlocks on reads could be local to the core. As part of the multicast LVDS mesh, there can be a "dirty" status line where a centralized broker would identify writes to a region (as any mmu would) and with minimal propagation delay, raise a dirty flag at the speed of electricity to all subscribers of notification to said region.

Honestly, Cray would probably come up with something much more useful. But, with optimizations like these, performance can improve drastically enough that substantially fewer cores could achieve the same tasks.

From what I've been looking at, GPU is trash for AI. I have racks full of NVidia and AMD's best systems, in a few cases, I have access to several of the computers ranked in the top 10 on the Top500 list. And the obscenely wasted cycles and transistors in general for AI processing is unforgiveable. a chip specifically designed to run transformers should hold at least 100 times the capacity of a single GPU. Then there's the additional fact that by optimizing the data path for AI in combination with smarter cache coherency, we could fit maybe thousands of times more capacity into a single chip.

Strangely, right now, I think the two most interesting players in the market are GraphCore and Huawei. They both have substantially smarter solutions to this problem than either NVidia or AMD.