A colleague of mine working for Motorola patented encrypted memory sometime in the 2006-2010 timeframe. Maybe Motorola figured out that AMD was violating their patent and negotiated royalties privately with AMD. I don't know; I don't work at Motorola, but if AMD had to suddenly start paying royalties, it makes sense that they'd remove the feature from lower end, lower margin processors.

The Texas grid which is separate from the rest of the US has a size issue with balancing and peaking that ha shown up from time to time. Their grid collapse a few winters ago would (probably) not have happened if they were connected to the big grid like everyone else is.

There are two other US grids, the Eastern and Western Interconnects. They are not frequency synchronized, and there are minimal AC-DC-AC interties connecting them.

The big collapse in Texas involved about 30GW of generation going off line. Even if Texas were connected to the Eastern grid, it is unlikely that there would have been 30GW of spare capacity and 30GW of available transmission to draw on.

Perhaps relevant, ERCOT and the Texas PUC have approved the Southern Spirit 3GW HVDC transmission line that would connect ERCOT and the western edge of the TVA's transmission network. The other states that would be affected have refused to approve the project because they believe Texas will screw them over and drive their electricity prices up.

Worth saying: In Texas, it's easy to find 3.75 square miles that's so desolate it's not useful for anything else. My local power authority here in Colorado has a power-purchase agreement with a solar farm about that size. The land it's on is so poor no one has ever trying either growing crops or running livestock on it. With the panels channeling rain water into narrow strips, it might now support enough grass for a small number of sheep, but probably not enough to justify the effort. Even more convenient, the land was adjacent to an existing transmission line, so the connection cost was a smallish substation. The authority's first battery farm is going in right next to the substation. There will probably be more.

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

With respect to being a "lying snake," this is the C-Suite, not rank and file employees. When it comes to the C-Suite, such behavior is generally accepted, if not expected, and hardly a reason for firing.

I mean, can you even name the last time a CEO was fired for lying?

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

So even hackers can be replaced by AI now? What is this world coming to?!

In the military, the mission - and only the mission - matters.

Most of the officers in the position to observe a UFO are not in the position to order an investigation. Even if they were, they'd have to justify the use of taxpayer dollars to support what could easily be characterized as a "curiosity" rather than the fundamental mission of air power. The best most of them can do is record their experience in the debrief, and rely on civilian scientists to investigate it further.

Can we stop pretending that America is still stuck in the 1960's? The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a Jim Crow mindset, and no longer regard as remarkable when a woman or "person of color" (i.e., an ordinary person) does something that white people have been doing for years. Diversity is ordinary now, and has been for the past few decades.

Diversity is like a religion with some people - no matter how much you (Americans) repent, you are still a sinner and in need of grace and forgiveness from TPB.

My GP was ahead of her time. Many years ago she used to tell me, "Climb ten flights of stairs over the course of each day, don't worry about your heart."

Ads make sense for $20/mo services that might be able to make $10 in ad revenue and can sell the service for $12/mo if you choose ad supported.

But AI companies are currently burning $10 for every $1 in revenue. At some point those $60 services need to become $600/mo and the $200 services need to convince you to pay $2,000/mo. Something thatâ(TM)s likely doable when they actually can replace half a $15,000/mo developer.

But when youâ(TM)re paying $2,000/mo for the service, whoâ(TM)s going to tolerate a $1,992/mo service that spams you with ads?

Itâ(TM)s the same reason Jeep may desperately sell in dash ads but Rolls Royce and Bentley know it would tank their sales far more than any revenue theyâ(TM)d gain.

Why has no one considered that the VCs, who got rich funding companies that spam us endlessly, may be inconvenienced by the solutions we use to deal with the problem they created?!

Wonâ(TM)t anyone think of the billionaires?!

Or perhaps they instead voted for a better economy, and this was a part of the package deal, whether they wanted it or not.

We have a republic, not a democracy. We didn't vote for this, but for the person who would occupy the office of the President. How much different would our country be if legislation proposed by congress had to be passed by national referendum? It's not the 18th century anymore. The bills are published on the Internet. We could create an electronic voting system which would allow the public to vote every spring and fall for proposed legislation, except for the fact that such a system would take power out of the hands of the politicians and return it to the people.

I checked at the web site, and like all the other AI chip designers, actual fabrication is by TSMC at 5nm and 4nm. My understanding is that TSMC's fab complex in Arizona can do 5nm parts, and will be able to do 4nm relatively soon. Also that they are at Arizona's capacity for those nodes doing work for Apple and AMD. So FuriosaAI's parts will be made in Taiwan.

The US AI stock bubble is hideously dependent on a few fabs in Taiwan.

I don't get the Rust hatred. C has implicitly had an "unsafe" mode for much longer than Rust.

If you're a C kernel developer, you can jump on the Rust bandwagon very easily: just put the keyword unsafe in your comments and you can write code just like Rust developers.

Maybe, just maybe, this mistake was caused by the fact that the same sort of people who are likely to write bugs into their code are the same types of people who prefer "safe" languages because understanding the subtle nuances of how computers work is difficult. They would prefer a system where they couldn't make mistakes, rather than a system where they had to understand the code and the machine to a high level. There's a place in the world for these sorts of people, but it's not in OS/kernel development. The sort of I-can't-make-mistakes-with-Rust mindset probably lulled the coder into a false sense of security, with the predictable outcome.