I think it's more that the US can still build fast so long as it presents some pressing need for someone: economic, military, or social. As an example, infrastructure projects take forever, but then when there is a piece of infrastructure that actually needs building, governments choose appropriate incentives.
When the MacArthur Maze fell down because of a tank truck fire, the contract paid out $200k per day ahead of schedule the fix was delivered. The winning company bid way under everyone else and just produced quality to inspectors' desire way ahead of schedule to win most of it on early completion bonuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Maze#Rebuilding
And not everything in America is slow to build. Once the F-35 program got going it got going. There are 1100 such jets or something in the world now. 150 F-35 every year or so.
The reality is that for the things that most yuppies want built (housing and transit infrastructure) there are many domestic opponents and a regulatory regime that affords those opponents control over production.
For instance, we wouldn't really have Starlink if it weren't for the fact that SpaceX is using DoD clearance to fly its rockets. The California Coastal Commission would stall all such flight attempts otherwise.
> When the MacArthur Maze fell down because of a tank truck fire, the contract paid out $200k per day ahead of schedule the fix was delivered. The winning company bid way under everyone else and just produced quality to inspectors' desire way ahead of schedule to win most of it on early completion bonuses:
That’s one of the best examples of “your margin is my opportunity”. Estimated cost was $3M, winning bid was $850K, and the early completion bonus was $5M.
Building a datacenter is a project, but it's mostly a regular commercial/industrial project with a large electrical feed.
Site selection is relatively easy, other than for trading datacenters, you don't typically need a very specific location. Proper zoning, reasonable geographic risk, proper electrical feeds, reasonable distance for fiber to the local internet exchange(s). But it's ok if it's 20 miles here or there, and really 200 miles here or there is ok if you're not planning to sell colo space.
Building in a dense metro is harder because finding a site is more difficult and planning approval is more difficult, and if you need to do utility construction, that's harder too, but there's no big coordination problem that makes things super hard to get done.
Also, datacenters like connectivity and on the internet, all roads lead to mae-east. It makes sense to put your first datacenter in Virginia if you serve a global audience. If you've been around for a while, it probably makes sense to upgrade your datacenter in Virginia or build a new one.
Yeah the thing about the twins calling out 20 digit prime numbers did it for me. Even allowing for the twins having some ridiculous magical ability to think up such primes, Sacks iirc claimed to confirm the numbers' primality by looking them up in a table of primes. Nuh uh.
While I also doubt the twins ability to calculate unknown primes, I do think that the article falls prey to many of the same trappings that they are calling out Oliver Sacks for.
While Oliver didn't know math enough to talk about known prime number tricks, the author of the article also clearly didn't know books well enough to include ruling that aspect of the story as false since a commenter found at least a contender for the book, which also opens up the theory that the twins memorized the numbers from a book. To take it a step into theorizing, since it's been shown at least one book existed, maybe others that have been lost to age also existed.
Also, with no proof the article talks about how the twins perceived the numbers, saying "More likely is that they called out the numbers figure by figure" instead of in the extended format. A 25 digit number is only in the septillion area, and numbers follow a latin naming scheme so it's not even that hard to remember. This is comparable to Oliver assuming further numbers were prime with no proof.
Plus there's the fact that this is all in hindsight, I think it'll be fun to look back in 40 years from now and see how the article stands the test of time. Maybe we discover an easy way to calculate arbitrary primes in our head and the original story becomes believable.
Same. And yes, I also feel the "satisfaction of witnessless vindication," since I was almost treated as a blasphemer when I criticized him in my circles.
Side note, whatever happened with the great Unity pricing debacle? Did developers end up moving en masse to Unreal and Godot? Or were Unity’s walkbacks and contrition sufficient to keep it a going concern?
Eh, some people moved, but probably not many people that were knee deep in a project. I'm sticking with Unity for now myself - for all of its annoying eccentricities and bad developer relations it fits in pretty snugly between the power and complexity of Unreal and Godot.
The number of variations produced by evolution is truly astonishing. Dizzying to think of every species of the past 500 million years that we will never know.
"…scanlines were used to blend “pixels” together, plus “pixels” on a CRT tend to bleed color slightly and artists would also use that to their advantage."
For competitions, the performance benefit is zero time lag between controller inputs and the screen output.
Also, it's very very difficult to get the "look" right on an hdtv. The original graphics were intended to be displayed on a slightly "fuzzy" CRT, and if you care about the aesthetic, just transferring those same graphics to an hd-tv display often doesn't look right in a bunch of different ways. (Pixel aspect ratio, aliasing, frame blending effects, color bloom effects, interlacing artifacts, etc.) It's a very deep rabbit hole you can go down.
Aside from the visuals (4:3 to 16:9, etc), converting the analog console signals into digital formats for your flatscreen creates lag, enough to often ruin the gameplay.
Even though I have a CRT and NES, I bought one of the NES minis when they released.
I played some Mario Bros 3 and... I kept dying. Jumping too late led to running into holes and enemies. It was so bizarre, I couldn't believe how bad I'd gotten. Tried the next day, same deal.
Then I had a thought re delays. Pulled out my NES and hooked it up to the CRT and all that stopped
There was sufficient delay in the NES mini and modern TV it made a huge difference.
I'm sure I could retrain myself, but it was honestly stunned at how much of a difference it made
It’s difficult to overstate just how little lag there is in such setups. These systems had no frame buffer whatsoever - everything rendered on the fly. You could potentially affect a frame after it already started.
That said, if you ever get an urge to play Mario on modern hardware, try run ahead emulation. It’s quite magical.
I've always found the litmus test of choice for measuring lag is NES Punch-out - your performance in that game is heavily dependent on lightning fast reaction time and any additional latency towards the later stages will 100% get you KO'd.
At the time Ford was looking to build EVs, and all manufacturers were trying insane things leading into the 1970s, where an oil production crisis severely impacted American drivers. Chrysler made a turbine car that could run on either Jet Fuel or Soybean Oil, some of these are still driving, and are amazing in their own right.
Exxon responded to the 1970s by recognizing that data was going to be a huge part of the world going forward. I'm guessing their early experiences with what was "big data" at the time to do oil field exploration clued them into what was about to happen.
Then the 1980s happened with massive shifts in geopolitical borders and in the energy sector in particular so both companies got cold feet on these long shots that previously seemed existential to their futures. This isn't a particularly surprising story.
People think that art from the past must have all been done by masters, but just as with any pursuit at any time, most practitioners are mediocre to bad.
