How much does the node size matter for dram? My understanding was that it’s been marginal gains on sram since about 7nm TSMC. I would naively expect the capacitor size requirements not to shrink as well as logic, does the smaller transistor make up for the lower capacitance, or do they have to run at higher frequencies and refresh more frequently?

The typical playbook for a VC funded startup is to race to a monopoly where the company can have higher margins. Prices continuing to go down for the consumer over time would require competition to stay high in the long term, and even then it’s not clear if even current prices are profitable.

The current level of AI has plenty of inherent competition from local models. In the long term, most of the profit will probably be from very smart models that run at something closer to datacenter scale over long inference loops - where local inference can't do much and even third-party inference/small neoclouds will be severely challenged. That is a very natural "moat" and has natural cross-efficiencies with AI model training, which requires a similar scale.

By MMIO semantics do you mean explicit load and store instructions? I’ve never felt that pointer reads or writes were lacking descriptiveness here. I would argue the only surprising thing is that they might be optimized out (which is what volatile prevents).

Volatile on a non pointer value is not for MMIO, though, that’s typically for concurrency like with interrupts.

> I’ve never felt that pointer reads or writes were lacking descriptiveness here. I would argue the only surprising thing is that they might be optimized out

The C and C++ languages would be very slow by modern standards if you insist that reading or writing via a pointer must result in immediate fetches or stores to memory.

> Volatile on a non pointer value is not for MMIO, though, that’s typically for concurrency like with interrupts.

You're holding it wrong. Perhaps you've been holding it wrong for so long and so confidently that you've distorted the world around you -- indeed on MSVC on x86 or x86-64 that actually happened -- but, you're still holding it wrong.

> You're holding it wrong. Perhaps you've been holding it wrong for so long and so confidently that you've distorted the world around you -- indeed on MSVC on x86 or x86-64 that actually happened -- but, you're still holding it wrong.

Please explain. How would you make the variable backed by a hardware register region? Is this using some sort of linker trick to change where the value lives in memory?

You said it was for concurrency. The feature you want for that in C (and most languages suitable for this problem) is atomic memory ordering, not the volatile type qualifier.

Microsoft's platform was x86 only for years, and because Intel's design pays for a lot more memory ordering by default than most, on Microsoft's platforms just "volatile" would kinda work even though it was the wrong thing, so Microsoft explicitly grandfathered this for x86 and x86-64 only, you are guaranteed the Acquire-Release ordering even though you didn't ask for it with your volatile type qualifier.

If you were actually thinking of POSIX signals or something similar then yeah, the POSIX requirements say volatile will work, seems like a bad idea to me, but your compiler and other tools are likely also built for POSIX so they've read the same documentation.

The UK also has much stricter training requirements prior to being granted a license, among other differences. I don't think we can pin all the differences on the yearly MOT.

Sounds very similar in its approach to magic or hiding as golang. Also the no libc approach is similar, although I believe go was forced to use libc on the BSDs and maybe osx due to the syscall interface not being a stable public interface on those targets

Yes i believe call codes in assembly do change between some major macOS versions, but that's okay. So far I think it's only using 20 syscalls, and works from iirc v15 up (macOS). For windows we're hitting the stable layer, and I'm not interested in BSD rn - cannot even run standard chrome on bsd, iirc.

Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.

I’m not a fan of Apple’s monopoly, but is there really much innovation left on mobile? I dont seem to find huge innovations on android. What in your opinion is the App Store preventing?

Wouldn’t it be cheaper / less complex to scale vertically (eg a large workstation or medium size bare metal server) instead of using clusters? My understanding is that clusters are primarily useful when you want to share a resource from a pool across unpredictable usage, which becomes a moot point once the cluster is personal.

Scale isn’t the only reason. Sometimes you want resource isolation and self-healing, something that is useful if you want a personal swarm of AI agents.

I get how running in a container or vm would help with that, but why would you want to cluster multiple of them? Are you isolating the agents from one another?

I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.

I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.

yep, that is what I meant by the DMCA, but I should probably have been more clear.

Authoritarian has nothing to do with elections, it has everything to do with the ability of people without positions of power to influence those in power without retribution. Most countries have elections, these days, but there is no lack of authoritarian rulers staying in power for decades and jailing or murdering their opposition.