Thanks for a really interesting read. I wonder if it's worth thinking more about the FLOP/$ as a follow-up. If a performance limit is reached, presumably the next frontier would be bringing down the price of compute. What are the current bottlenecks on reducing costs?
Thanks for really interesting discussion and summary of the state of play. I'm curious what you think of Ben Thompson's point that China could have an advantage at the "trailing edge"(28-45nm, and 45+) if TSMC were taken off the board?
https://stratechery.com/2022/chips-and-china/
Maybe the play is to focus on the trailing edge, which is easier to take control of, but still v important in the short-term at least, and temporarily let go of the cutting edge?
Hi all,
Does anyone know why US cases and deaths tend to be lower on Sundays and (especially) Mondays, compared to other days of the week? Is it something with the timing of how the data are processed?
I put up some quick plots here:
https://twitter.com/Nick_Lutsko/status/1254067996990959616
Apologies if this has been explained before and I missed it.
I have a friend who makes a (great) living as a professional gambler. He's originally from outside the US, but was living there during 2016 and, like everyone else in our friend group, started following the election. Since he loves to gamble, he also decided to bet on the election.
I'm not sure what his political leanings are exactly, but he's a sensible guy and made fun of Trump like the rest of us. But he also ended up betting on Trump to win, and won enough money to pay for a trip to Houston to watch the Super Bowl live in January (flights+hotel+tickets...I told you he does well).
When I asked him why... (read 254 more words →)
Thanks for the response!
It's interesting to see what your concerns are. There's probably less research on these kinds of feedback loops/tail risks then there should be. Part of the problem is just how uncertain they are -- a combination of the difficulty of measuring things like methane releases and the problem of not being able to resolve these processes in models. Our best guide is probably paleoclimate observations, but I'm not an expert on these.
In terms of blogs, Real Climate is the best place to start. They can get combative, and they aren't always the most rigorous researchers, but they at least give you a sense of what's going on. Isaac... (read more)
Hi, I'm a postdoc in climate science, just made an account. I've been reading SSC off and on for about two years, then started exploring LW more recently and wanted to join the discussion.
I'm curious what questions you have about climate science, and what resources you think are needed to make it more accessible? More blogs? More easily accessible review papers?
Thanks. Another naive question: how do power and cooling requirements scale with transistor and GPU sizes? Could these be barriers to how large supercomputers can be built in practice?