Some cheap and durable archival storage would be nice. Perhaps by storing data in grooves on ceramic discs. (Which is essentially what cds did). Though, preferably without high speed rotation, and reading more than one bit at a time by e.g. taking a picture of the surface through a microscope. How about 1 PB per disk?
I was wondering why we dont have something like that.
Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.
Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/
I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.
Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage.
By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with.
This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.
The pulsetime is just to advance the clockwork one step, and is kept fixed, the advancement driven by the mechanism is discrete. As long as you keep track of the count, you wont accumulate drift. The adjustment is to get that stepping working, if it doesnt miss a step, youre good.
In a perfect world, yes. But mechanisms aren’t perfect and it’s entirely possible if not likely that steps will be missed as friction increases over time and things wear.
I’m not saying these things matter much in this context.
The clock will still be far more accurate than purely mechanical version. And, re-synchronizing it is as trivial as turning the knob, just as you would for the all mechanical mechanism.
I had a clock where the second hand was not properly balanced and it would miss steps fairly reliably in the second-half of the minute (when the heavier side of the hand was going up). I added some tape to the counterweight to fix it.
The "premium request" billing model where you pay per invocation and not for usage is very obviously not a sustainable approach and creates skewed incentives (e.g. for microsoft to degrade response quality), especially with the shift towards longer running agentic sessions as opposed to simple oneshot chat questions, which the system was presumably designed for. Its just a very obvious fundamental incompatibility and the system is in increasing need of replacement. Usage linked (pay per token) is probably the way to go, as is industry standard.
Paying per token also encouragages reduced quality only now you pay. If they can subtbtly degrade quality or even probability of 1shot solutions, they get you paying for more tokens. Under current economic models and incentive structures, enshitification is inevitable, since we're optimizing for it long term.
For that to work it requires a free market, llms in their current format are a neccesarily closed market. It's like mobile phones. You'll get a sleek somewhat passable product increasingly dated and dysfunctional which every year serves you less and someone else more. Given I can't decide smart phones in their current form are shit, i'll make something better (without enromous capital) meams we're failing open market conditions. Do you see the point i am trying to make?
Tell my economics textbook not me. Free markets are defined, in part, by the absence of coercive impediments to economic activity, which explicitley includes restrictions on entry.
"Low" is relative. But we've got people creating new models with millions of dollars, not billions. Granted, not thousands either. It's low enough that I don't think the barrier to entry is a problem.
right, so basically the only people who can enter the market are those part of the same club who have brought us the stripped down and dated wonders before us today.
Take the mobile phone market, there is basically no innovation going on these days. Small iterative steps and minor improvements, each new generation another sensor removed or new consumer hostile bloat added, because everyone in the club agrees on how to fuck the consumer, irrespective of what the consumer wants. It's an illusion of choice.
Tbh, i've encountered residental areas where the houses happen to have exposed roofs. I suppose that might be one of them places you could throw those panels.
Regarding the amount of rare earth required to make just one solar panel, i was surprised to find out that effectively all you need is something called 'silicon' as well as an initial investment in energy to bake the thing.
It just so happens to be
that, according to google, this 'silicon' stuff is quite abundant and can for example be found in desert sand.
Since you can stack those fusion reactors vertically, i suppose they'd come out on top in the power/sqft category.
A magnetic field is the result of moving an electric charge (in this case electrons). Applying the voltage will move the electrons. The only thing the material being a superconductor changes is that the electrons will lose less energy to resistance while traversing the sample.
I was curios about that 16GB pi. (I want to have one myself :) Unfortunately, it looks like soldering the 16gb ram chip onto the pi did not increase the usable memory due to other hardware limitations. [1] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=350514
Im amazed that we still get such finds! I would have expected all discoverable sites to have long since been exhausted due to people running automated analysis programs over high res aerial footage, that would turn up anything out of place. There ought to be many people that would happily add "discovered ancient maya city" to their resume. Perhaps foliage obscured the view? But then couldnt someone just attach a gpr system to a plane?
There was a good book about a recent discovery a few years ago, Lost City of the Monkey God. The locals had stories about some city in the jungle. The team managed to find it with LIDAR, but it was a slow, difficult process. They then had to land in fairly distant clearing and hike to the location. From there the team had trouble finding ruins even when they had their exact location, even once standing in right the middle of the city. The jungle hides a lot. The team members also came down with cutaneous leishmaniasis. Finding locations might be getting easier, but I imagine it would be difficult to find people with the right combination of skill and willingness to die a slow, agonizing, and disfiguring death to actually excavate some of them.
If you go to see them in person it becomes clear why. The jungle foliage in this region is so thick that you could be standing 2 feet away from an ancient pyramid and not even realize that’s what you’re looking at. Besides that the area is very hot, difficult to navigate, and not particularly safe (full of narcos and rebel groups)
This area is 60km into Balamkú ecological reserve. Are you familiar with that area? This state (Campeche) if famous for being one of the safest areas in Mexico. No, there are no narcos or rebels in these jungles. You would have to travel several hundreds of kilometers north in order to find any danger related to narcos. Everything else you said is true: Thick jungle, hot and difficult to navigate, but humans are the least dangerous things in that area.
Agreed. That area of the Yucatan is not exciting to drug cartels specifically because of its inaccessibility. By far the biggest risk is from disease which can be deadly due to the difficulty of getting back out of the jungle.
I’m referring to the Mayan civilization at large, which extends through Guatemala and Honduras. Which is certainly not safe by any first world standards (but also not as dangerous as one might think)
Yucatan state is quite safe, it’s one of the few in Mexico without a US travel advisory. It’s also got to be the #1 attraction in the state and a major source of revenue judging by how much they charge to get in
But “the area” in question is not that. Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras have serious challenges but you do those and the reader no favor by conflating them.
Campeche also contains some of the most interesting ruins in Mexico, like Calakmul (close to this area in question, think) and a bunch of smaller sites.
Specifically, there are huge areas only accessible on foot or by helicopter. And good luck getting cell service. This means any injury you get can be life threatening since it may take days to get back to any kind of road.
We do, but that still doesn't change the reality on the ground. The jungle is a pretty brutal and disorienting place. I've done a few walks in the jungle in Colombia and Panama and it is incredibly beautiful but you also quickly realize that without a guide you are going to be lost in 30 seconds. Foliage so dense you can't see more than a few meters ahead and behind of you, dense enough to obscure the sun to the point that you can no longer navigate, and sometimes dense enough to interfere with GPS unless you plan on staying in the same spot for a long time. It is also incredibly alive for want of a better word.
"couldnt someone just attach a gpr system to a plane?"
That's exactly what's driving a lot of new archaeological scholarship in jungle areas. It's not as simple as "just" though, it takes money and time and effort.
I went on a tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone before the war. There are parts where the bus drives through a rough path, barely squeezing through the tree branches on both sides. It looks very much like driving through an abandoned road through a forest.
And then once in a while you see a house in ruins through the window. It actually used to be a road going through a town, but it's been swallowed up to the point that it doesn't even look like one anymore. The city is of course very recognizable still, but there were plenty smaller villages.
Since Phobos isnt areostationary, the base of your tether on mars would have to move around for this to work. Additionally, you would have to constantly adjust its length. Therefore, boarding the elevator would be more difficult.
I was wondering why we dont have something like that.
Unfortunately, it turns out that, with Blue-ray discs, we're already approaching the optics limit of what visible light (easily) gets us, and they're already cheating with multi-layer storage for the 100GB option. Thus youd need a complicated EUV or electron beam setup for smaller feature sizes.
Say i want my 1PB disk in cd format. A cd has r=6cm. Thus A~=100cm^2. A/1PB= 1.25e-18m^2= 1.25 nm^2, or about 5x5 atoms per bit :/
I guess we're better off by just scaling up flash production and stacking those elements vertically.
Edit: Turns out we need volumetric storage. By using a material that is transparent to the laser wavelength, by intersecting two precisely focussed beams, the local intensity suffices to absorb two photons at once (stops being transparent) allowing you to select a volumetric point to interact with. This allows a couple hundred of layers until refraction breaks our resolution.