The concerns expressed seem a bit silly, unless the various Euro systems didn't take the very basic approach of using open standards and avoiding lock-in. Oh, and they should be backing up their data somewhere besides "in the cloud".
If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial.
If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there...
All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.
“the very basic step” is a lot less basic than you imply.
There’s a million little proprietary APIs and the temptation to glue one to another, especially circumstances like AWS where they use lambdas for basic functionality that should have been just provided by the cloud provider itself.
Coal and nuclear are both reliable sources of energy, unlike solar or wind. I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
Also, as far as "coal trending downward", that isn't the case outside the US.
We're going to need a vastly increased energy supply in order to meet the world's needs. Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production.
Beyond that, high density energy sources are highly desirable off-planet. :-)
> Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production.
Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change.
But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this).
I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past.
> I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
Tow points here:
Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume).
Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there...
> Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider:
Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this?
My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants).
Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.
Ever heard of Chestertons fence? Coming into a government for over 300 million people without the faintest clue how it works, removing stuff that doesn’t look too useful is the worst possible strategy to improve efficiency. You don’t renovate with a wrecking ball.
This is a silly take, primarily because it's centered on a single benchmark, Lightroom image import.
Image import is generally I/O bound, so not a good fit for CPU comparisons.
The GPU issue is relevant, we'll see how the M2 does there. Will Apple need a discrete GPU to compete?
All that said, the M1 is most impressive in terms of performance/Watt. We'll see how the M2 holds up against Threadripper/Epyc once the Mac Pro refresh is done and it's benchmarked with many CPU/GPU bound pro workloads.
The M2 should be nice for Macbook Pros though. Looking forward to it!
primarily because it's centered on a single benchmark, Lightroom image import.
It's not a very interesting article but it specifically talks about the relative non-importance of that particular benchmark, beside the results being largely a wash:
I sorely miss the benchmark I saw in some other publication but can’t find now, where they measured the interactive performance when you load up a series of photos on-screen. These import & export measurements are useful, but frankly when I do that kind of thing I go read email or get a coffee while it’s happening, so it doesn’t really hold me up as such.
To date, I haven’t heard anyone saying Lightroom is significantly snappier on an M1 than on a recent Intel MBP. I’d be happy to be corrected.
One mans new cpu that’s as fast as the highest end Intel chips at the entry level is another persons not snappier. This is the Louis C. K. thing about Internet on a flipping plane not working perfectly and people being super entitled to nice things!
The highest end Intel chips are really middle of the pack AMD chips, which is the other competitor the M1 is really competing against. All in all its much more of a wash.
The other silly thing is that it's presenting the M1 as a big change that they could do again, while it's the result of a series of incremental improvment on the iPhone, and a big change with vertical integration on the laptop that they can't "do again".
I read the article as arguing the low hanging fruit are picked, and that performance can't quite make another leap. Can't bump up clock speed because it'll use more power or because the CPU design won't support it.
There isn't evidence that Apple's team has run out of architectural improvements however, so I do think performance gains are still out there. Plus there's always the possibility of going to smaller semiconductor processes.
>One would say the target audience of Julia - matlab converts, would barely use that feature (macros) directly.
The 'target audience of Julia' is everyone, not just 'Matlab converts'.
It is most focused on high performance numerics, but is a true general purpose programming language. I expect its use to grow explosively as more and more people recognize its elegance and power.
My perspective is that of a senior engineer with decades of experience with dozens of programming languages.
Nice writeup! I think Taiwan will remain free for at least a few years, as China would pay a very heavy cost for not too much gain invading Taiwan in the near future. We'll see if Taiwan goes nuclear in the interim. The Hong Kong experience might be pushing things in that direction.
I completely agree about space being a viable new frontier. People don't seem to get that with effectively unlimited energy, habitats throughout the Solar System and even out to the Oort cloud can be arbitrarily luxurious and enjoyable.
Advances in spacecraft design and propulsion will only accelerate things... heh
> You can have all those wrapped under a high level API, with much nicer implementations, with more support, more documentation, more eyeballs (due to more adoption) in a "slow" language.
You 'can' have those things, but 'should' you? Julia is well designed, so 'nicer' is not a given. Julia is also quite a high level language with excellent metaprogramming facilities. Otherwise, everything you listed is based on adoption level.
Why use a "slow" language if you don't have to? Especially when the faster language is actually better designed...
'Also it is not object oriented which is probably the most popular paradigm.'
Popularity isn't a suitable metric for 'good'. Look at McDonald's food.
'Python will not be overtaken soon by such an exotic language.'
Python and Julia aren't competitors. Python is suitable for scripts and gluing high performance code together. Julia is a general purpose language which is suitable for writing high performance code.
Object orientation was likely a mistake. The industry is slowly moving away from it. There is no abstraction you can express with object orientation that you can't express with multiple dispatch. Structs are very much like the data part of objects.
If those very basic precautions had been taken, migrating to a Euro cloud, or a private environment (open cloud stack) would be trivial.
If not, a lot of people should be fired...but granted, there are a lot of stupid people out there...
All that said, I'd say the concerns around this are vastly overblown.