The drive to make warp drives reality seems irresistable. But will they ever actually be possible?

It would seem relatively easy to eliminate this sort of infinite loop by ensuring that all loops are finite, function call depth limited and so on. It isn't a case where you hit the halting problem; the halting problem applies to general programs, not programs deliberately constructed out of parts with finite and calculable limits to runtime - no building the Ackermann function for example, as it contains a recursive loop. With the resources available to Apple, they really have no excuse.

Amusingly, some of this is technically already happening. The shaders pass through downstream compilers that complain if they see what they determine to be a no-op infinite loop. To prove to the compilers that the loop terminates, most WebGPU implementations inject a u64 counter (technically a vec2<u32>) that counts down from u64:MAX and terminates the loop once it reaches 0. But that's such a large amount to count that the WindowServer is long gone. Fun discussion on this PR for wgpu, a Rust implementation of WebGPU: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/issues/6572

Well this is easy to detect and kind of intentionally so, but the broader issue is quite a bit harder. Replace "infinite loop" with some very difficult program that simply takes 30+ seconds to finish and you're back to the same problem.

It doesn't even need to be computationally difficult, you can also slam the memory bus with "far away" fetches that are randomly distributed, ensuring each fetch doesn't share a cache line with any surrounding fetches. There are popular UX effects with basically this workload, even, that's a naive implementation of a large radius gaussian blur basically...

Many cities are doing it already with bike lanes which support both push-bikes and electric bicycles.

With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.

Yes but they're worse than trams and trains.

If only it did. AI is designed to do what you tell it to, and that mostly works. But in the general case, AI does what it does, with no real guarantee of anything.

LLMs seem to have been fine-tuned to use metaphors, presumably because they read like vivid creative writing. The over-use of metaphor in LLM-produced text is exhausting.

Should chips like the Jetson Orin module be regarded as dual-use technologies? Or have similarly powerful embedded processors now become widely enough available that it isn't worth making the distinction any more?

The United States restricts the export of advanced NVIDIA artificial intelligence chips and high-performance data center GPUs to Russia

He's right, of course, for those people who already have a mathematical gift, but the problem with that is that Tao has never experienced not being a mathematical genius, and is no more capable of understanding what it's like to not be a genius as an ordinary person is capable of understanding what it's like to be one.

I found the use of <SYMBOLS LIKE THIS> throughout the text without explanation somewhat off-putting. Clearly some sort of technical usage is being suggested, but it doesn't seem to add anything to the text.

This is a romantic and very appealing idea that flies in the face of reality. The market for skilled trade workers like plumbers, electricians, landscapers and so on is more or less in equilibrium, and the demand side of it is relatively inelastic. Dumping hundreds of millions of new workers into these trades will not increase demand sufficiently to let anyone earn a viable living from them.

There is nothing that can absorb millions of new workers. If AI destroys jobs to that degree pitchfork manufacturers will be the only ones left in business.

Where I live at least right now it is quite hard to find contractors for anything and many are close to retirement age and have a hard time finding replacements.

There's also the thing where trade work is in the process of pricing itself out of what normal folks are willing to afford. Combined with Youtube tutorials and AI help that is getting better, it wouldn't surprise me if more and more people would just decide to do all this stuff themselves at a fraction of the cost.

Yeah, I feel DIY is definitely on an upswing. There's surprisingly decent info, tools and parts for cheap to be found. And materials are getting simpler to work with.

There are still things that will remain difficult (or illegal) in domestic settings for DIY, of course, but that's no model for full employment.

I haven't got any experience with them but there's even vendors for house assembly kits that cost a fraction of a finished one. Imagine you idiot-proof house planning and building: just do exactly what the app says.

I wonder just how far we have to push this until we finally get the 10h work week.