I don't think there are many fabs capable of producing HBM
My hope is on Huawei, which has recently developed a stacked chip architecture that reminds me of HBM, and I'm wondering if that's step 1 of China entering HBM production.
I don't know enough about hardware, so I might be saying absolute nonsense, happy to be corrected so I can learn where I'm wrong
I've heard multiple times Americans complaining about being on the bus.
Genuine question, what's up with being on the bus?
I lived in Vancouver BC, I can't see anything wrong with their bus. Not perfect, but yeah... It's a bus, goes from stop to stop. Anything special about bay area buses?
Service quality is just abysmal, extremely crowded at basically all times, delayed or skips your stop when your standing there, when it isn't crowded there's all sorts of other issues with the service, and this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't really take you where you want to go without transfers.
Truthfully, whenever I'm in the bay area I just find myself walking. There's a reason why e-scooters first found major adoption there.
Yeah. I took the bus in NY and SF and I’m also not sure why the complained. Maybe because I’m a tourist but especially in SF I had always nice interactions with the driver. Mind you I took the Bus in the City Centers. Is it that much worse in the outskirts or is it just the concept of taking a Bus with multiple other people the problem?
The buses in SF and NYC suck because of this bipartisan belief of public transit as social welfare rather than a means for the bulk of society to get to their destination. This leads to things like far too many bus stops because granny complained, lack of fare enforcement, high staffing costs, etc. To make the bus as nice as Vancouver, these cities would need to cut stops and do a draconian fare enforcement campaign. For some reason, Canadian bus riders are not ungovernable barbarians like Americans, despite being poorer on average and more diverse.
In SF it really depends on which line you're on, and a bit of luck. In my experience the 9 was the worst. I didn't ride that one often, but almost every time I encountered something ridiculous. One time a guy rolled a blunt and started smoking it on the bus. Another time a guy in a wheelchair spilled a bottle of booze that then ran up and down the floor of the bus. I got off early several times when an obviously crazy homeless person got on and started silently staring me down.
But even popular commuter routes like the 38 can get pretty dicey. One time a guy was blasting music out of a bluetooth speaker. He had headphones sitting on his neck, so I asked him to use his headphones instead. His response was to get in my face and start yelling, threatening to beat me up. Everyone around us stepped away and ignored us. Apparently the next stop was his, so he got off while threatening to jump me if he ever saw me again.
If you take public transit in the bay area regularly, you are almost guaranteed to have some very unpleasant experiences.
I don't think so. American buses are ridiculously outdated, while having to compete with some of the most well-equipped cars in the world. If Europe had such buses, they wouldn't be popular either.
Europe isn't the richest place. Some of the western cities surely have nice buses, but there are plenty of old shabby buses there too and people still ride them. Might be that the routing and timing sucks, or the general cultural individualism.
The shitty metro buses in my 3rd rate "city" have air conditioning, wifi, live location tracking to your phone, wheel chair lifts, tap to pay, tap with app to pay, and run on propane because they are old enough to have "features" left over from the last oil crisis.
Can you tell me what a "Not outdated" bus looks like to you?
We were discussing riding the bus to a place that depending on traffic is a 20 minute car ride from SF, or a 2 hour car ride in the worst case scenario traffic.
There are a few bridges that connect SF to other places across large bodies of water, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. These bridges do not provide a dedicated lane for the buses. These bridges act as a choke point for traffic. As a result, the buses are not reliably on time, because the traffic is hard to predict and it depends on whether or not people have a car accident that evening.
As I mentioned in another comment, these buses do not have bathrooms inside. So you are spending an unpredictable amount of time standing at an unsheltered bus stop, often with no bench to rest on, followed by an unknown amount of time on the bus.
The buses come infrequently enough that if you go find a restroom after waiting a while at the stop, and the bus comes while you are gone, it will be a decent chunk of your life spent waiting for the next bus to come as well.
This might be fine if you're on vacation and you just wanted to explore the Bay Area, but if you live here and work here, this is just too much time!
If you have a car, there is essentially no upside to taking the bus in this situation, which means if you are greedy and choose to drive instead you contribute to traffic by taking up more space on the road.
In contrast, if you choose to take the train, you know exactly how long the trip is going to be, because there's no variable traffic disrupting the schedules. It's predictable. It's convenient. Sometimes the train might get stopped for one reason or another, but the trains come so frequently that this is rarely an issue.
Before your trip, you're also inside a train station, which is sheltered, has seating, and even often has bathrooms.
There's a sign telling you clearly how long until the next train arrives, you don't have to count on something on your phone to find out.
My understanding of the initial commend “But then you are on a bus” was a negative one to buses and or public transport in general.
I know the geology of SF and drove both bridges a few times myself but was always lucky to not end up in traffic. I would also always prefer the train over the bus. But currently where I live this also is put to the question. I live in Berlin and we have a great public transport network which at the moment struggles a bit on multiple fronts. This happens every few years at least in my experience.
I like to try out the public transport situation in different cities for my own comparison. Funny enough one of the best times I had was driving the metro in D.C. Met a very energetic metro employee who explained the machines and the system :).
American busses are infrequent and often don't follow the schedule. This means any trip where you have to be at certain time (work meeting? class? personal meeting? some event? etc...), you have to add 30-60 minutes buffer, and that's on top of bus being already slower than the car.
Buses are widely perceived as signaling low socioeconomic status in the US, to the extent that it's become a self-reinforcing negative spiral. (As soon as a system loses its higher income riders due to real or perceived dangers or inconveniences, political support for tax subsidies and infrastructure investments (bus lanes etc.) tanks, quality then actually declines, rinse and repeat.)
I've taken buses in the Bay Area and New York a bunch of times and personally haven't had negative experiences (at least not compared to rail-based US transit), other than that the comfort of the buses was generally a few decades behind those in Europe. On the other hand, many of them even have Wi-Fi!
Where I am, buses are heavily subsidised; cost is about $3 per passenger mile. Fares are much cheaper (so cheap nobody ever really thinks about it, other than worrying if they have quarters for exact change).
They are often empty or have 1 or 2 riders.
They are slow, often show up to a stop late, so you have to plan everything an hour early.
They don’t have amenities like bathrooms and are uncomfortable for long trips, even though that’s the only sensible way to use them.
Due to political pressures, they have many, many stops and few express buses, so they are much slower than a car. The stops usually have nobody at them but the driver still has to slow down and check (sometimes they will just skip a stop they know is almost always empty).
The bus depots are not particularly safe or pleasant after dark and have trouble with attracting antisocial people.
Meanwhile, it would be cheaper to just pay for Ubers for anyone who wants them, and just make the Uber show up randomly late to replicate the experience.
There is a market emerging here often branded as “hood Uber”, “Alicia’s Uber” etc of people who will drive you for $1 a mile (cheaper than Uber) negotiated by text message and paid via CashApp etc. It’s completely unregulated. Some are now offering regular service in a minivan on a fixed route taking people to/from employers every day.
I would be extremely surprised if US labs weren't aggressively trying to optimise their stacks in exactly the same way. Any gain in performance or efficiency directly affects the bottom line as well as research speed.
One thing at a time, it looks like implementing a rendering engine from scratch is already enough work for 20 years. First make it work, then make it better.
I'm skeptical too, but there's a parallel market where people re-sell accounts and access tokens. This would make tokens much cheaper.
There's also an argument to be made that paying the token full price may be cheaper than going through your one RLHF or whatever other techniques that costs money.
A 10x reduction in pre-training means a 10x faster feedback loop. I'm pretty sure any lab would sign up for that. You can start experimenting on different approaches much more aggressively.
It's useful though, as I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the gases generally used in HVAC tends to have much worse warming effect than co2 per volume.
We do need heat pumps deployed at large scale, but sometimes I worry we don't understand they need to be handled with care at the end of their life
Yes, that dangerous effect is indexed as GWP - global warming potential.
CO2 has a GWP of 1 in this context, while other refrigerants are worse - for example, R32 has a GWP of 675 (so 675x worse if it escapes), not sure about R290 (Propane), which I believe is either about 40 or 14…
Regarding EoL: At least around here, household appliances such as fridges are brought to a recycling yard and are properly taken care of in that regard… and as for heatpumps - those are only to be installed by certified professionals, for this very reason.
The global warming potential of hydrocarbons as such is generally overblown, since they oxidize into CO₂ in the atmosphere with a half-life of a decade or two.
That's true, old school refrigerants like R-12 are awful. The downside of modern replacement refrigerants are high operating pressure (>100 bar for R-744/CO2) or high flammability for natural refrigerants like R-290 (Propane) and R-600a (Isobutane).
But these are solely engineering problems, and I'm happy to know that my R-290 heat pumps at home (Panasonic L & Wolf FHS) and A/C (Midea Xtreme Save Blue) aren't awful to the environment, once they reach EOL.
The neat thing about propane as a refrigerant is that it's a really powerful one, actually rather better than R12 in practical applications.
If you replaced an R134a fill with R290 you'd need about half as much gas and if it got out, it's got a Global Warming Potential of 3, making it three times as bad as carbon dioxide and about 475 times better than the same amount of R134a.
Even in a very large air conditioning system like in my elderly Range Rover, the 500g or so of propane it would need is about the same as the engine sucks up in about four miles.
The effect of that escaping into the atmosphere is about as bad as the amount of petrol you spilled the last time you refilled your lawnmower.
If you're worried about the ZOMG IT IS GAS IT WILL MAKE A GINORMOUS EXPLODISHION aspect like a lot of people are, ask yourself this - how many aerosol cans are in your car right now? Tin of deicer, tin of magic tyre inflater, maybe a tin of air freshener or WD40 or something? You're already carrying more propane around with you, rattling around loose at your feet.
Mostly yes, you need to vacuum it down well and make sure you have compatible oil in the compressor. Some types of plastic tubing aren't particularly compatible but for cars it's okay.
If it is outside you can just use propane as refrigerant. Low warming value and it leaking to outside doesn't matter, not gonna catch on fire.
There are indoor devices using propane but they generally come with caveat "must be installed on room at least this m3", precisely so if it leaks it doesn't get to density that allows explosion
I believe there are propane using split AC systems where propane is used only in the outside unit. The outside unit has a heat exchanger transferring the heat to some glycol-water solution which is what then circulates through the inside unit.
I currently have R410a heat pumps with minisplits, when they're off warranty sometime in the future I might consider putting propane in them. The main question would be whether the oil used with R410a is compatible with propane as a refrigerant.
This is probably a little bit "dangerous" in the sense that I'll have high pressure propane in the line sets and minisplits inside the house, but it's a very small volume of propane and not really any more dangerous from a fire perspective than my propane fired condensing gas boiler.
[edit] a little internet sleuthing indicates that hydrocarbon refrigerants "might be" compatible with basically any oil, so I can probably just continue using whatever oil is in it.
Yeah, ammonia can also be used, it's, IIRC, more efficient to use it and a bit safer because you don't high pressure, buuut enough ammonia in the air will suffocate you.
It's lighter than air so it will go away by itself if allowed to. For a purely exterior instalation it's much better than anything else.
I have a heat pump that uses R290 (propane) (as well as an CO2 one for hot water) and would take that any day of the week over ammonia! The charge of propane is pretty tiny and the safety standards extremely strict, so not really concerning in terms of flammability, ammonia I would consider far, far more dangerous.
The “common” places I’ve seen ammonia refrigeration in use are hockey rinks and cold storage warehouses. I assume it’s used in industrial installations as well for heat rejection.
Because they're sensible heat machines, instead of latent heat machines. In a perfect frictionless vacuum, both of these can achieve the same theoretical efficiency. In practice, not so much. In particular, the isothermal heat exchange of the ideal Stirling cycle requires heat exchangers with no thermal resistance (and therefore no temperature difference). A latent heat pump has a much easier time to very closely approximate isothermal heat exchange because condensation/evaporation temperatures at a given pressure are essentially constant.
Would mandating the use of CO2 as a refrigerant also somehow economically motivate efforts to capture more CO2 out of the atmosphere, in a kind of virtuous cycle? Or would there be a Cobra Effect in there somewhere? I'm not familiar with the industries that refine and bottle the stuff.
No, neither - the amount of CO2 that'd be needed for use as a refrigerant is insignificant. There's already a lot of CO2 produced as a byproduct of industrial chemical processes like petroleum refining. Some of it is captured for reuse (e.g. in drink carbonation); most of it is released to the atmosphere.
Throwing money at a problem was expensive, it's a lot less expensive now
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