I wasn't aware of it, but found it extremely interesting. A topic I find particularly interesting is the illusion of longevity many have in modern times. Look at the Ancient Greeks and most of them lived 70-100 years of age, with a median age beyond 70. [1] The typical argument is of a survivorship bias, but most/all of the Greeks we know of today would still have gone in history if they had died many decades prior.
You can also look at other samples like the Founding Fathers of the US. Most lived past 70, and some even lived beyond 90. The only people who died before 60 were Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel and John Hancock, died of gout - which can be caused by things including excessive drinking. There was indeed a very low life expectancy in the past, but it was 100% due to infant mortality. If one child dies in infancy, and the other lives to 80, then you have a life expectancy at birth of 40.
That the Bible itself also noted this, is extremely interesting. Not even from a religious perspective, but from a historic one. It's really interesting to think about. As an adult today, you have a similar life expectancy to an (upper class) adult from thousands of years ago. There are many implications that one can apply to modern life. For instance it's safe to say that their dietary/lifestyle choices are very much worth considering, if not emulating.
Yes, basic physics shows [1] that we can use (free space) optics instead of wires inside chips. This will improve energy use and speeds by 3 orders of magnitude. Next to a transistor you put a photon detector. You can flip the transistor with the voltage from the photon detector by sending 10000 photons (or less). Pictures of such systems in the slides [2].
We can beam billions of optical channels with different frequencies in parallel across chips, exabits (yettabits, yottabits) per second.
We will not compute with photons tough [4][5], the optical structures are to large and it would only work for very specific types of computations.
We design wafer scale integrations (very large chips) this way we can start making these fast on-chip interconnects around 2027 if we invest a few billion today in making free space optics. A layman's introduction in my talk here [3].
How much parallelization is required? Any idea how fast a single channel could get with optical transport and photon-detecting transistors?
As an Elixir dev (where parallelization is relatively easy), I think there is a lot of potential for parallelization that isn't being used by most programs, but for serial algorithms where multi-core can't be used, I wonder what the ceiling will be.
> Any idea how fast a single channel could get with optical transport and photon-detecting transistors?
Terabits per second per channel would be possible but it would require to much high energy SerDes (serializer-deserialiser) circuits. It will be more energy efficient to have more parallel optical channels (bundled) switching at the low power optimal speed of the transistors, around 1-2 Ghz instead.
>I wonder what the parallelisation ceiling will be? How much parallelization is required?
There is no ceiling, no limit, for example look at an "existence proof": there are around a hundred trillion cells in your body that perform billions of computations chemically and also with DNA processing by ribosomes in parallel. No limit. Those 8 billion bodies theoretically could learn to work together with the aid of internet and personal computers. There are 10^24 stars in the universe.
Your thinking, your imagination, your thinking brain modelling of parallel systems is the ceiling, the limit. But you can learn, experiment and improve over time so your limits on thinking up better ways to parallelise computation will improve. Humanity could dedicate itself to the open ended creation of knowledge (of knowing how to compute in parallel with photons without limits) [1].
Right now our computation limits are limited by our knowledge (of manufacturing at atom scales), the energy output of the sun and the amount of atoms in the solar system we could rearrange [4].
We should fund our scientists to create the knowledge we need to enlarge the limits [5]. I hope you'll fund me as well :-)
> Elixir development
Smalltalk, LISP, Erlang, Elixer, Actor Language are some of the best message passing programming languages for massively scaling parallelism.
Alan Kay [2][3] has great lectures to get you started in thinking better (including about (computational) parallelism, scaling and message passing). A few others have written some papers as well (see links in my HN comments the last 12 weeks). I can teach you a bit too, write to morphle73 at gmail dot com.
A professional manufacturer would not put any cell in series but instead would have a charger/discharger with voltage per cell, with current and temperature sensors as feedback loops.
The danger of cells in series differs with the cell chemistries.
Using a BMS is another indication they are not professional or even had an engineer design them.
Sadly I know of only a very few small professional battery pack manufacturers, certainly none of the EV or bike makers.
> A professional manufacturer would not put any cell in series but instead would have a charger/discharger with voltage per cell
My Bosch e-bike has 4 cells in parallel and put 10 of those in series. This so called 10S4P is a very typical setup for e-bikes. Each individual cell does definitely not have their own current/temp sensor. The BMS will check voltage for each of the 4 cell blocks.
Each pack only had a single BMS connection for every clump of 74 cells! Presumably they only got away with doing this by doing extensive binning/characterization of the cells before building them into packs.
What people should do is not have flammable batteries in a vehicle unless the whole system, the entire RV or EV, has been designed by experts. I built custom designed safe solar starlink campers as whole systems and make physics simulations and do extensive tests. That is how you prevent most battery fire in a car or off-grid tiny house in a desert.
I design big custom battery packs in car trailers or shipping containers for storing them outside of infrastructure. If the battery catches fire you can drag the trailer or shipping containers further away to let it burn out. Of course it gets harder to drag them away after a few minutes of fire when the axles and wheels start to melt.
The point is to never put Lithium-ion batteries inside buildings, especially not put them inside heavy (metal) boxes bolted to the building.
You will have to do some research to find out what the new laws in the making and fire department procedures say about garages and multi-story car parks in 2024.
A quick review by me just now suggests the government regulations still have not yet caught up with the new reality in the US and EU:
EV's and large batteries inside buildings are not yet forbidden but probably will be soon.
Fire departments choose to evacuate a building with EV fires (and other industrial fires) and just let it burn out [2].
Fire departments only quench a fire by sudden rapid cooling if possible, for example by drowning [1] the entire Li-ion fire in a basin. Taking the oxygen away is not the goal.
I design neighbourhood batteries as two shipping containers underground. In the bottom container the batteries with multiple infrared camera's looking at all battery sides and also with redundant temperature sensors. The top shipping container will deliver 60.000 liter of water into the bottom container in seconds. Testing such a setup would make for a hot and cool spectacular Mythbusters episode.
EV's and large batteries inside buildings are not yet forbidden but probably will be soon.
I'd like to see a reference for that, the closest I can find is this NFPA bulletin calling for updating fire protection and electrical standards for parking garages, nothing suggesting a ban.
I wish, it'll cost a million dollars or more to test at this scale and it would still be one data point. Instead I simulated these systems to test the physics.
But please, come help me do this test in real life, it will be fun!
Are you representing these devices to others as safe, with safety mechanisms? That is, are you selling or even giving them to people?
I hope only you are at risk from these devices (and I hope you are safe too, but that's your choice). Untested technology can't be depended on. As a rule I don't believe anything works unless I see it with my own eyes - if I swap in a new patch cable, I ping something. Safety equipment for mortal risks is on a different level.
Sounds like a sound design to me. If he gets sued at least he can argue he did everything reasonable to prevent and quench a battery fire. That's how gen 4 nuclear power stations are designed to cool the core in the event of a loss of coolant incident. The other way is to use LiFePo chemistry which doesn't ignite like LiIon but has half the capacity.
> Sounds like a sound design to me. If he gets sued at least he can argue he did everything reasonable to prevent and quench a battery fire. That's how gen 4 nuclear power stations are designed to cool the core in the event of a loss of coolant incident.
"Sounds like a sound design" isn't sufficient engineering; doing everything reasonable would include testing or using an existing tested design; and nuclear power station designs certainly are tested.
> EV's and large batteries inside buildings are not yet forbidden but probably will be soon.
Really? That would more than inconvenience millions of people who already have such things. Seems most unlikely to me. Here in Norway we have about half a million EVs many of which are parked in private garages overnight and in multistorey car parks during the day. I can't recall a single incident where the battery either caused or exacerbated a problem.
Links/pointers? I know only of Achronix' original Speedster series, which was alas abandoned for a conventional architecture ("Power" was the reason I was told).
Building your own optical fiber ISP, even rural, is not hard if you use the right tech [1], but most use the wrong technologies [2] and are more expensive to get of the ground.
I would be thrilled to set one up for you (remotely).
You need 1000 customers per employee and starting capital of $100K to be profitable. You use Starlink as backup to your main backbone.
Can this be done for smaller areas by sharing a full time employee? For example, our community has a shared well and reservoir with a part time water manager that administers/maintains our system along with many others in the area.
Seems like you missed the part where large ISPs have successfully forced states to ban municipalities from building their own networks.
It doesn't matter how hard or easy something is if it's illegal, even if the laws that make it illegal are themselves extremely obvious examples of regulatory corruption.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=extr...
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
A crucial insight:
Amino acids are part of a group of reactions of molecules of life that happen spontaniously:
https://youtu.be/Lh98fyNtPKM?t=1866
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhPrirmk8F4