Ooh, I'd love that. Or native steam functionality for the same. I never install games onto my SSD for that reason, so I'm at the mercy of whatever windows naturally does in that space. (Possibly nothing, as I don't remember manually configuring a SSD cache file on this computer, and last I checked that was required).
I'm not actually sure on balance how much transcode gets done in hardware vs software, since it's also very amenable to using batch compute that's otherwise idle. I'll guess that most or all live transcoding - streams, on-the-fly transcode into formats not pregenerated - are done in hardware, and transcoding new formats for the back catalog are probably done on a mixture of mechanisms where and when capacity is available.
(Source: Googler, not on YouTube though.)
From my perspective, Bard went from "literally didn't exist" to "released" over the course of about a month. GP seems correct in that it very much felt like something picked up off the shelf, slightly dusted off, and released. Is it as good as chatGPT? From my testing, no. Is it the pinnacle of what Google can create, given motivation? I'm pretty sure also no. In comparison to the state of all the research papers Google and Deepmind release, it definitely feels rushed. So I'd suggest not judging Google on its initial fast -follow project: either Google will come out with something compelling in the next 6mo or so, or we can conclude it really was leapfrogged and has fallen behind. But judging it now seems a bit too conveniently pessimistic, IMO.
(There's a legit chance Google will flub this, don't get me wrong. It's just too early to properly conclude one way or the other.)
Google is in a weird spot. I suspect they are capable of doing so much more, but there is a serious risk to cannibalizing their 99% revenue model (search), which they probably don't yet know if they can monetize in the same way.
Unfortunately for them, OpenAI has forced the question down their throat, which I think is exactly what they intended or at least hoped for.
> My mum owns a small café in Leicester. Her electricity bill has just jumped from £10k ($12k) a year to £55k ($64k) a year.
> Callum's mum may try to avoid shuttering her doors by raising her prices by more than 5x but that will result in $13 chocolate crossiants and $20 iced lattes.
What kind of flawed reasoning is this? The net prices will only have to go up 5x if the price is the product originally was 100% covering the cost of electricity. In practice, it'll probably need to go up something <2x to maintain the same profit margins, with other costs (e.g. wages, property) trickling up at a slower pace (years) as the overall economy adjusts. Which is material, no doubt, but let's not lose ourselves to hysteria here.
The UK is getting hit much harder than other countries.
People talk about Germany being dependent on gas but for heating I think they're about 50% gas while in the UK it's more like 80% and the UK is far behind in insulating homes to be cheaper to heat.
Combine with a government that doesn't actually want to help (which may explain why the houses are so expensive to heat in the first place) and it'll hit much harder.
Combine with a political system designed to let a minority keep control plus Brexit and things could get bad.
Note, I don't think the problem is unsolvable, I just think a lot of the people responsible for solving it will be looking for ways to make themselves money from the chaos.
Yeah, I find the whole nations issues sort of confusing though. We have spent the last 10-15 years voting to make things worse. Our political systems are shit, and we decided NOT to change them. Our PM is a joke and won by a landslide.
Now everyone is acting surprised that the place is getting worse, the government are incompetent and nothing can be done about it.
I am sorry for people who didn't vote for this (including myself), but I have to admit we are a minority and we should really just emigrate...
"Landslide" in this context meaning nearly 44% of the vote, translating to 56% of the seats, meaning they can overule the "will of the people" usually.
I think its more accurate to exclude Scotland and NI which makes those figures worse, but yes. That is a landslide and guaranteed Bojo basically unlimited power under the British system. And people voted 2:1 to keep this system back in 2011
They only got offered one other option though. Because the research suggested a true PR option would win, so they didn't offer it, then they could claim they'd tried and the people had rejected it.
Same trick used in the Scottish and Brexit referendums. Worked out for them with the first two, blew up in their faces on the third go.
People voted no because the same people who ran the Brexit campaign told them not to, with the backing of all the newspapers.
That would have been harder if they'd given a better option, so they didn't.
People should have voted yes, it was the smart best thing to do, but they didn't. Some of them are just idiots, but most were just bamboozled into thinking they would get more money for the NHS by people who hate the NHS.
>The UK is getting hit much harder than other countries.
I don't understand this narrative. Germany will have its gas supply from Russia literally turned off for the next three days!
>but for heating I think they're about 50% gas while in the UK it's more like 80%
I saw that Guardian article too! A further 25% of Germans heat their homes with oil, and another 14% use district heating (which will be fossil-fuel powered).
Germany imports 98% of its oil, 95% of its gas, and a large amount of its coal, with a total of 63% of all energy being imported.
On the upside, the premature end of this age of exceptionally unreasonably cheap energy will hopefully teach us all a thing or two about what sustainability really looks like.
The problem is gas (and electricity) are a market and have prices set by that market. If a British company can make more money shipping gas out of the country, they are going to.
If a Norwegian company can make more selling to someone other than the UK, then they will. And those profits go to the Norwegian government, which isn't the case in Britain.
There are some limits due to transport but countries with more links to suppliers and storage can ride it out better even before getting into political responses.
I understand that. However, the political aspect will be the dominant factor. You can have all the links to international suppliers, but it won't help if they won't sell to you. Russia has already decided to f** with Europe, and in a way that I can't see making any (short-term) financial sense for their own economy. France may decide to stop exporting quite so much of its nuclear-generated electricity. The UK could decide that it needs to slow exports of its gas, and keep it back for its own citizens. Germany will basically have to turn back to its own brown coal reserves for electricity generation, although that won't help its citizens heat their homes.
Working together obviously makes it easier for everyone. But we have whole political parties built on ignoring that principle and blaming foreigners for everything.
What does help, is everyone using less natural gas.
edit: some green Tory ideas that accept that reality:
>it's just a type of "Beggar-thy-neighbour“ game theory failure
Funny how much international politics looks like a "game theory failure", right? If only we could get along!
I'm mostly looking at this from the perspective of the "begger" - hence me originally pointing out that, in the current narrative of countries that are doing badly with energy geopolitics, Germany is in much bigger trouble than the UK. You can be the nicest country in the world, but you can't really predict or change what others will do.
For that matter, why should other EU countries bail out (in the form of energy exports) another country that has become absurdly reliant on energy imports from a hostile neighbour?
>What does help, is everyone using less natural gas.
Humans have burned stuff to heat their homes since the dawn of humanity - it's hard to see what could possibly replace that, unless we go nuclear. Heat-pumps require quite specific circumstances to function efficiently.
We don't have to replace it, well not in the short term. Just turning thermostats down a little, increasing insulation, stopping doing low value things with gas that we don't need to do, shifting electricity use to times when we have wind/nuclear available etc. is enough to ride this winter out.
And the whole point of "begger thy neighbour" is that it hurts you. So saying "I still really want to punish my neighbour because this is his fault" is literally punishing yourself. It doesn't make sense.
As I said, not a technical problem, a political problem.
Your solutions are essentially what I've been doing for years - short of a benevolent government paying for people's lack of discretion when it comes to longer-term financial and energy planning, I don't see what could make people do any of that unless energy suddenly became more expensive.
>And the whole point of "begger thy neighbour" is that it hurts you
Not necessarily, and not necessarily across differing timeframes. Using the scenario at hand - Germany is reliant on a hostile regime to keep its lights and heating on. Why is it necessarily in some other country's own self-interest to send some of its own energy supply based purely on international economics, and not the needs of its own citizens?
A blind application of this "principle" would mean that less wealthy countries would be obliged to help out a wealthy neighbour in a time of distress, and just hope that the wealthy neighbour will be nice to them when they can. It assumes best intentions all around, which is nice but unrealistic.
Okay, I see this reality isn't politically correct for you so I'll not push it too much.
If actual Conservatives can't convince you this is in your best interest then I have no chance.
But this is a good example of why the UK is and probably will continue to be hit hardest by this. The EU will be working together, and UK businesses will be selling out to them for profit, and the only politically acceptable solutions will be economic self-harm, leaving the UK with the worst possible outcome.
>Okay, I see this reality isn't politically correct for you so I'll not push it too much.
You mean this idea that "beggar thy neighbour" is not in someone's self interest? You haven't explained why that is necessarily true. The (very short) wikipedia article you linked also does not talk about "punishing other countries", and in fact is specifically focussed on reducing imports. In the context of our original discussion, we were talking about how Germany is now being screwed by the country it has signed up to gas deals with. How does that fit with your "be nice to everyone" idea?
Ultimately if the UK were to start protecting it's gas output then a) the value of British currency would likely drop even further, pushing up inflation and prices further and b) the UK can't cover it's peak electrical supply, and it is unlikely the rest of Europe would continue to sell it electricity to cover peak if the UK was entering into that sort of protectionism.
>the value of British currency would likely drop even further, pushing up inflation and prices further
Why?
Examining a relatively similar historical record of exporting scarce resources that are in high domestic demand, are you telling me the Irish potato famine was the best that could have happened?
In economic terms, if they could sell the produce for more money to the UK and use that money to buy food to feed themselves, then they'd come out ahead.
Instead, very similar to what the UK is doing with gas, they sell the gas to the EU and keep the profits in private hands and let the poor people starve/freeze.
The key missing element is a government that cares about your life if you are poor and can't be bought off by fossil fuel interests.
Ah I see - the idea is sound, it's just the implementation that was faulty. Tell me, how do sellers access international markets without several layers of collective bargaining?
Because currency markets are generally negative towards government intervention and economic protectionism. You can say that's reasonable or unreasonable, but it's unquestionably true. The UK has suffered over the last six months for example from not increasing interest rates faster. An increase in interest rates would have been unpleasant for homeowners (I know, I am one), but it would have strengthened the value of the pound against the dollar, and that would have helped with energy costs significantly as it would have increased the UK's ability to buy.
I'm not really sure the Irish Potato Famine is relevant, given Ireland barely had it's own currency at the time (British pounds were in widespread use, and the value of the Irish pound was fixed to the British one).
Thought experiment: between you and the AI, which would do a better job depicting a giraffe skeleton? A giraffe in it's natural habitat? Their favorite tree to eat? Species on the genetic tree closest to giraffes?
If we assume this AI or a successor can win that evaluation, in what way would you say you know what a giraffe is better than the AI?
I've long been enamored with the idea of learning from analog computers to build the next generation of digital ones. In some perspective all our computers are analog, of a sort - today's computer chips are effectively leveraging electron flow through a carefully arranged metal/silicon substrate, with self-interference via electromagnetic fields used to construct transistors and build up higher order logic units. We're now working on photonic computers, presumably with some new property leading to self interference, and allowing transistors/logic above that.
"Wires" are a useful convenience in the electron world, to build pathways that don't degrade with the passing of the elections themselves. But if we relax that constraint a bit, are there other ways we can build up arrangements of "organized flow" sufficient to have logic units arise? E.g. imagine pressure waves in a fluid -filled container, with mini barriers throughout defining the possible flow arrangement that allows for interesting self-reflections. Or way further out, could we use gravitational waves through some dense substance with carefully arranged holes, self-interfering via their effect on space-time, to do computations for us? And maybe before we get there, is there a way we could capitalize on the strong or weak nuclear force to "arrange" higher frequency logical computations to happen?
Physics permits all sorts of interactions, and we only really use the simple/easy-to-conceptualize ones as yet, which I hope and believe leaves lots more for us to grow into yet :).
Electricity is also a wave. The wires are essentially waveguides for particles/waves traveling at near luminal speeds. So in theory anything done with electricity could be replicated using other waves, but to make it faster you would need waves that travel faster than electrons through a wire. Photons through a vacuum might be marginally faster, but pressure waves though a fluid would not.
If bitflips are a problem in a modern chip, imagine the number of problems if your computer ran on gravity waves. The background hum of billions of star collisions cannot be blocked out with grounded tinfoil. There is no concept of a faraday cage for gravity waves.
Nitpick: gravity waves [1] pretty universally refer to waves in fluid media in which the restoring force is buoyancy. Ripples in spacetime are usually called _gravitational_ waves.
You're right that the speed of light remains a constant limitation on propagation delay, but the defining limitation on the speed of computation is rather the clock speed - how long it takes for each round of computation. Electrons are comparatively slow due to the time it takes to fill and stabilize a transistor. Our hypothetical new type of computer will have to be faster to converge, rather than faster to propagate.
You're right about the bit flips though. I don't know if a gravitational wave computer is actually ever going to be feasible, just an interesting dream for the far future. Hopefully there are more options to consider in the meantime :).
Gravity is a poor source of computation because it is incredibly weak - 10^-43 vs electron force. Even if you add several powers of 10 for all the metal wire harness and battery chemistry around the electrons, you still get far more usable force per gram from electricity and metal than you do from gravity.
That doesn't change the tradeoff; in a Big computer that's also a galaxy any of the stars used as an instrument for gravitational computation can't provide nearly as much compute as having a planet-sized electronic computer powered by that star.
Yeah but there are other factors. Resilience for example.
A simple black hole approaches the trajectory of that planet sized-computer and plop! All that computation gets condensed to 3 single numbers and all the information is lost (that last part is a very hot topic).
For a Galaxy computer on the other hand, blackholes could be the NOT gates.
If you have the ability to position stars and black holes as gates for computation, then the same ability enables you to ensure that they are positioned so that tinier computation around these stars can happen not disrupted - the resilience is enabled by the fictitious future technology even if you don't use that gravitational complexity.
> All that computation gets condensed to 3 single numbers
> For a Galaxy computer on the other hand, blackholes could be the NOT gates.
i.e. in the worst catastrophic case the former carries more information (3 numbers) than the best case of the latter (one bit).
Is it even theoretically possible to waveguide gravity? The electric field can be positive and negative, but gravity is unsigned -- there is no anti-gravity. This is probably related to what you're saying about faraday cages.
Gravitational waves can either stretch or contract spacetime relative to a baseline. Since the Einstein field equations are nonlinear, I think gravitational waves can be "refracted" when traveling through a region with a high baseline curvature, so maybe waveguides are possible. Gravitational lenses do lens gravitational waves in addition to light.
I realize this is a joke, but it isn't! Play a video of a ball flying up and then back down again and it'll be the same forward or backwards (up to air friction anyway).
If it wasn't a joke, then that was simply a misleading false statement.
Let's take the simple example of earth orbiting around the sun. Playing time backwards gets you a orbit in the opposite direction, while gravity becoming antigravity would mean that earth would get repelled by the sun and thus go off to infinity.
That's interesting. Playing time backwards long enough would see the earth disassembled into rocks, dust and gas, repelling each other and indeed flying off into <far away>. Same with the sun. But the short term orbit example challenges the intuition. Perhaps the answer is that the time-forward orbit is (conventional) downhill in spacetime, and the time-backward orbit is uphill in spacetime, but both trajectories are seen in conventional space as a curved path around the center of gravity.
> Playing time backwards long enough would see the earth disassembled into rocks, dust and gas, repelling each other and indeed flying off into <far away>.
No, playing time backwards long enough would see a hot earth exploding into rocks, dust and gas that are attracting each other - just the initial velocity is large enough and attraction is not strong enough to stop them from flying out into <far away>. They would be slowing down when flying off, not accelerating as if they were repelling each other.
They would then be joined by the dissolving sun and form a cloud of dust which some time later (i.e. earlier) would converge (because the dust is attracting itself) into some earlier massive star(s) out of whose remains our solar system was formed.
If an asteroid hits the earth, the gravitational potential energy (of an attractive gravity) gets turned into kinetic energy as it accelerates when approaching the earth and afterwards into heat as it impacts it; playing time backwards, the heat gets turned into kinetic energy, which then gets turned into gravitational potential as it distances itself from earth.
Electricity travels faster than the speed of electrons (which only travel at ~3 cm/s!), it travels proportional to the speed of light, it’s speed is instead described by the Poynting vector, an energy wave.
??? Indeed everything I have written is accurate, not sure your point since we are talking about electron directional velocity in a wire not the speed of energy propagation...
> In fact, electrons in conductive media do not travel at c, they travel at incredibly slow velocities, on the order of a fraction of a millimeter per second. The rate can vary, and the amount of current in the conductor is a function of the average speed of the electrons in it. [1]
Links [1] and [3] are wrong, and link [2] is correct but has nothing to do with this discussion. Link [1] is so full of errors it isn't even worth discussing. The pingpong ball analogy is wrong--it's all wrong. Link [3] commits the sin of ascribing single-electron behavior to parameters extracted from the Drude model. This is a semiclassical analogy and worked essentially thanks to units.
Here's the link you're looking for. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/Fermi.html . Two electrons can't occupy the same state. In a metal of finite size, the momentum spectrum becomes quantized. Two electrons can occupy each k-state, one for spin up, one for spin down. Considering an empty metal, we can insert electrons one by one. They will find their lowest energy by packing into a sphere in k-space. Electrons inside the sphere have no states to scatter into, and there are no electrons occupying states outside the sphere. This means that only electrons on the surface of this sphere participate in conduction. The radius of this sphere is called the Fermi wavevector, and converting to units of velocity you get the Fermi velocity. All electrons participating in conduction travel at approximately the fermi velocity... at room temperature plus or minus a tiny fraction of a percent.
Drift velocity has everything to do with the discussion, which is why you brought it up.
I’m familiar with Pauli exclusion principle I’ve worked on real semiconductors.
Your last point is wrong, everything else you said is correct but it remains irrelevant since it does not contradict what was said. Both links are correct.
As you know the net fermi velocity of a fermion is 0. The directional velocity resulting from an electric field on an electron, the fermi velocity which becomes directional due to net flow, is the drift velocity. Which is what we care about.
You can do a simple experiment with NMR to measure the speed of electrons. Indeed they’ve done it and it corresponds to the “wrong calculations”.[1]
Edit: Good resource [2] to help you understand the difference between those two velocities:
> However, the drift velocity of electrons in metals - the speed at which electrons move in applied electric field - is quite slow, on the order of 0.0001 m/s, or .01 cm/s. You can easily outrun an electron drifting in a metal, even if you have been drinking all night and have been personally reduced to a very slow crawl.
> To summarize, electrons are traveling in metals at the Fermi velocity vF, which is very, very fast (106 m/s), but the flux of electrons is the same in all directions. That is, they are going nowhere fast. In an electric field, a very small but directional drift velocity is superimposed on this fast random motion of valence electrons.
> All electrons participating in conduction travel at approximately the fermi velocity... at room temperature plus or minus a tiny fraction of a percent.
> Your last point is wrong
> To summarize, electrons are traveling in metals at the Fermi velocity vF
your own quote. come on. I have a phd in this shit.
Many people on HN have a PhD in similar fields but that isn't relevant, though it's the smart people here that give us these thoughtful conversations on HN.
No one has disagreed with it, I explicitly agreed with you on the existence of Fermi velocity. I don't have the ability to downvote, but you were downvoted because you mentioned the fermi velocity in contradiction to electron flow even though it is the drift velocity that is pertinent in the original context of electricity (which requires a non-net zero velocity).
> So in theory anything done with electricity could be replicated using other waves
I sort of get this in a discrete digital logic scenario but out of curiosity as someone not big on Photonics, what would be the light 'equivalent' of an electrical AC signal? I'm kind of struggling to visual that.
> It employs two-dimensional quasiparticles called anyons, whose world lines pass around one another to form braids in a three-dimensional spacetime (i.e., one temporal plus two spatial dimensions). These braids form the logic gates that make up the computer. The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable.
(Python isn't my usual language these days, but this is a great example where the seamless bigint support shines. The number of possible sets grows fast!)
Hyperscalars use a blend of storage flavours covering the whole spectrum, and for most data-heavy purposes can mix hot and cold bytes on the same device to get the right IO/byte mix. At which point you can simplify down to _"are they currently buying disks to get more bytes or more IO"_ - if the HDD mix skews far enough that they're overall byte constrained, yeah they'll be looking to add byte-heavy disks to the pool. If they've got surplus bytes already, they'll keep introducing colder storage products and mix those bytes onto disks bought for IO instead.
> Hyperscalars use a blend of storage flavours covering the whole spectrum
Probably including taping, which most non-enterprise folks are often surprised still exists.
There's an upfront cost for the infrastructure (drives, usually robotic libraries), but once you get to certain volumes they're quite handy because of the automation that can occur.
Tapes are awkward though, since they can't directly satisfy the same random-access use-cases. E.g. even GCS's 'Archive' storage class, for the coldest of the cold, offers sub-second retrieval, so there's at least one copy on HDD or similar at any time.
Tapes are suitable for tape-oriented async-retrieval products (not sure if any Clouds have one?), or for putting _some_ replicas of data on as an implementation detail if the TCO is lower than achieving replication/durability guaranteed from HDD alone. But that still puts a floor on the non-tape cold bytes, where this sort of drive might help.
> The recent change, implemented without a formal announcement, is meant to present a variety of skin tones in image queries related to beauty, such as “beautiful skin” and “professional hairstyles,” as well as simpler people-related searches like “woman” or “happy family,” the Alphabet Inc.-owned company said Tuesday.
How is this not what you searched for? Is there an implicit constraint you think Google should be applying?
Note that search results have long favoured giving you an intentionally diverse selection of results in ambiguous cases, so you can narrow down for what you want more easily. Otherwise you'd probably get 12 different images of whoever the most popular celebrity is, which is probably not the most useful result in practice.
