I think it’s typically a different species (Coffea canephora). So theoretically drinking bean tea of a different plant could have different health impacts.
Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?
Apple uses off the shelf LPDDR modules. They have nothing whatsoever special about them.
Apple gets high bandwidth out of these modules not with high bus speeds, but with a very, very wide bus. This is expensive on the SoC side (requires a large die, which is why others don't necessarily do this), but allows for commodity memory modules.
That's what HBM is actually. The memory dies are directly next to the GPU die, on the same substrate. The main difference between Apple SoC and GPUs is the former use regular LPDDR while GPUs use HBM.
One of the key points of HBM is that dies are stacked up with many, MANY, more signals and channels. That's how NVIDIA has a memory bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than M4: 550GB/s for the M4 Max, 4.6TB/s for H200. And yes, that's bytes per second, not bits per second.
some GPUs use HBM. Most use GDDR. AMD and Nvidia still extract huge bandwidth from GDDR via high bus speeds + wide buses (like the 1.79 TB/s on the 5090)
Indeed! I implied "AI GPUs" since that’s where HBM is commonly used (despite AMD pioneering it on some consumer cards). And yeah, thousand-bit wide busses get close in performance.
shorter traces than soldered DIMM allow higher MT/s, this is fixed by CUDIMM/CAMM2, the other part of this is # of memory channels on the board, not sure why, but most consumer DDR5 boards have been 2 memory channels, you need to go to threadripper to get 4 or 8, It's unclear to me if this will still be an issue with future platforms.
You're not paying enough attention to the performance and cost impact of connectors and sockets. CAMM2/LPCAMM and CUDIMM have yet to be demonstrated operating at speeds that speeds that match the fastest soldered LPDDR, let alone GDDR; there's still a clear advantage for soldering memory.
CPU sockets with more than two memory channels are also far more expensive; the higher pin count usually increases the number of layers the motherboard needs, and the larger size of the socket requires more metal for stiffening (and EPYC CPUs still have issues with imperfect mounting leading to some IO lanes not working).
Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges.
> Using BGA soldering for both the processor and the memory sidesteps a bunch of engineering challenges.
by trading them with longevity challenges.
Even though 2 decades have past after the "usual suspect" lead-free solder, gpu or vram chips needing a reball is still a common occurrence from a cursory look at YouTube channels of professional electronics repairmen.
I have a hotel software startup and if you are interested in showing me how good your agents are you can look us up at rook like the chess piece, hotel dot com
$50 says this is some nation state trying to sow seeds of discord into the Signal user base. Signal is actually becoming so well adopted most of my friends are on it now. Trying to convince them all to use yet another app is going to be pretty tough, especially since there isn’t really any decent evidence that Signal is insecure.
Why should we be trusting this centralized service? I regret getting my family onto Signal as I would love to get there somewhere where we control our data & aren’t reliant on US-based service. When you look at the EU’s Chat Control law that’s trying to be pushed, the easiest target is going to be big, centralized services in jurisdictions friendly to the EU—it’s gonna be real hard doing this with a decentralized protocol. Signal deserves just as much criticism as any other thing operating out of California.
- Signal is built in such a way that you do not need to trust the server. They’ve invented several novel encryption protocols beyond the messaging protocol that protects group membership and privacy.
- they’re open source and people like me regularly read parts of their code and in some cases use their code elsewhere. Also several undergraduates and PhD’s have written research papers on the signal protocol. It’s also the subject of a lot of security research (there was a good talk at defcon this year that found some minor privacy issues with signal notifications)
- no one has built a decentralized e2ee messaging app that’s actually secure and has privacy anything like the bar Signal sets. Matrix are getting close, they’ve recently made some encouraging changes, but it will take some time to verify.
- Moxie the founder of Signal gave a talk about the challenges of building something like signal in a decentralized environment -
https://youtu.be/1W5fuqySBnE
- Signal is a nonprofit. They have stated repeatedly they will shutdown the app in regions or countries that make backdoors required by law.
* Do you not trust the Signal Organisation? They've aren't able to subvert their encryption on the servers, and have publicly stated that they will leave a region before integrating client-side scanning. I for one believe them, since it's their raison d'être.
Signal has always seen some controversy, usually centered around centralization. Also the MOB cryptocurrency, the use of phone numbers, contact discovery,... It has led to the promotion of alternatives such as Matrix and third party applications such as Molly.
But these alternatives are all niches compared to Signal. Which is to say something considering that Signal itself is a niche compared to Whatsapp.
>the radioactive isotopes emitting that radiation won't be disposed of in any way by the fungus. They don't eat those, and even if they did it wouldn't get rid of them
Please excuse the novice question but I am confused, where does the energy come from then?
Granting the premise, the fungus gets energy (but not mass) from the natural decay of radioactive particles. It doesn't accelerate that decay, the decay happens at the same pace it would have without the fungus. Just like planting more plants doesn't make the sun burn out any faster. The fungus itself is made of carbon and all the other usual stuff life is made from.
What if the fungus accumulated radioactive particles in vesicles? Might they create chained reactions and thus deplete the radioactivity faster than spatially separated particles? Might that be plausible?
Theoretically yes, as long as the isotopes are themselves fissile and susceptible to chain reactions. E.g. U-235 is (obviously, since it's fission reactor fuel) but, say, Iodine-131 undergoes beta decay. That electron can't get into another I-131 atom and cause another decay there like neutrons do in U-325. So piling up I-131 won't get it going faster.
In principle if fungi could somehow concentrate enough fissionable material (say uranium), you could get something like the Oklo reactor going, but it would have to be a truly gigantic, probably unphysical amount of fungi to have access to that much environmental uranium in the first place and it would then have to be concentrated very strongly to get any measurable effect. You won't see anything at all if you just move a few atoms a few mm, so it would need to have very long range hyphae. You also need it to be basically one huge organism in order to collect the uranium to one place - billions of small fungi just doing a few square inches each won't work. It's unlikely the fungus could survive to become so huge on only the promise of fractionally higher future radiation, so it would need to eat something else too.
And then it would decay into daughter isotopes that don't further benefit from the concentration so it might not help a lot anyway if you're looking for cleanup. Plus you've covered your cleanup site in, presumably, millions of tonnes of fungus which might or might not be an improvement.
Not really. You're talking about a fungus creating essentially a nuclear reactor inside of its cells, and creating it out of fuel that's not good enough to make a nuclear reactor in the first place (it at one time was, but now it's a mess of decay products and nonsense).
Reactors also take a certain amount of mass. You can't just squish two tiny microgram particles together and hope to get anything going.
Technically I guess I can't prove it wouldn't work if you make it dense/hot/covered-in-reflectors enough, but I'm pretty sure it's _well_ beyond the limits of what a fungus could even conceivably do.
Note that the only numbers on that page have various critical masses in kg. That's a bigass fungus.
And that's still not getting into: the "fuel" here is real shit. It's gotta be beyond its useful life even if you ignore that the thing melted down and corroded and blew up.
Is there a reason we have not yet explored it directly with a rover? Aren’t there multiple rovers on mars? Surely taking samples from this ice is more important than examining rocks??
Because launching a robot is a multi billion dollar affair and the robots we have launched are very far from the south pole. This is a whole planet after all, and they move on the scale of meters per second for maybe a few hours / day.
> Because launching a robot is a multi billion dollar affair
They don't have to be though. Spirit and Opportunity entire project budget (including design, building, launching, and operating for 90 days) was 820M. Even with the mission extensions the total cost is < 1B. And a lot of things have changed since then. Launches are cheaper, tech has improved and some recent missions have proven that even CotS hardware can exceed expectations (see the helicopter).
I would love to see NASA do something like the CLPS but for Mars. They could pay for launch services (which are way cheaper now with F9 / NG), and help with EDL (using the same parachute + airbags thing that has worked before), and leave the rover parts to 3rd parties.
We could have universities join the competition, building the rovers, exploring CotS stuff, autonomous driving and so on. Lower stakes than the decadal big rovers (Curiosity & Perseverance), but also cool and useful to train the next generations of students. Hell, I bet even companies could enter the race, with Toyota / Tesla / whoever else supporting this effort.
What I'd like to see is a stationary lab / communication relay that processes samples that are brought to it by a variety of rovers that can be launched with the lab or in other missions.
It would be neat to see different companies, schools, or nations come up with variations on the rovers that only need to support the common interface of passing materials to the lab for analysis.
You could even drop more labs and build a network of them and expanding the range of your little rover nodes.
Once you have a decent rover design sorted out you can work on mass producing it and achieving economies of scale.
> They could pay for launch services (which are way cheaper now with F9 / NG)
Are either of the rockets mentioned capable of launching a payload to Mars? The Tesla was launched on a Heavy which is 3 F9s. While maybe cheaper than a Shuttle launch, it's still at least 3x the F9 you're suggesting
Yes. F9 has a catalog payload to mars of 4020 kg [1] and Spirit and Opportunity had a total mass of 1,063 kg [2] each. So an F9 launch could easily launch 3 similar missions on a single rocket (the MERs were launched separately on Delta II rockets). Squeeze out some weight (material advances, fuel optimisations, better transfer windows, etc) and you could probably get 4.
Anyway, in a CLPS type program you could also cover kickstage development, like some of the new companies are proposing. Impulse Space is working in that area, developing intermediary stages that can take payloads from LEO to GEO, TLI and TMI.
A Falcon Heavy launch is about 30% more expensive than a Falcon 9 launch, given the reusable mode. I suppose it's the servicing the launch that costs most, not the fuel or insurance premia.
I like that idea, would you volunteer to convince Musk to personally do a Full Self-Driving demo on Mars? Teslas would sell like hotcakes, tell him that. One can still hope.
The furthest distance a robot on mars has traveled from its landing position isn't even 50km. Over many, many years.
For example, on Nasa's website it says this about Perseverance:
> This map view shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has taken since its February 2021 landing at Jezero Crater to July 2024, when it took its “Cheyava Falls” sample. As of October 2024, the rover has driven over 30 kilometers (18.65 miles), and has collected 24 samples of rock and regolith as well as one air sample.
That's about 8.5km per year.
So I think they would have to land a new one pretty close.
Unfortunately, the roadway infrastructure on Mars hasn’t been updated in decades, so there are lots of rocks and potholes/craters and other obstacles that need to be avoided. You know how those jeeps go out to Moab, Utah and do the 4x4 trails? It’s like that but there’s only one vehicle and no human and 1 hour communication round-trip and if something goes wrong the tow truck is millions of miles and billions of dollars away
The two solar powered ones are decommissioned, both mostly because of diminishing power but one got stuck first. Away from the equator solar power is less effective right? And it's colder, which exacerbates a serious problem: most the energy goes to heating the main components.
The nuclear rovers are doing their assigned missions, and can go about 100m/day IIRC. So, 5000km trek to the pole would take about 50,000 days at 10d/km. Give or take a few thousand km. (It's a whole planet right?)
This is all Wikipedia level research and from memory.
One major issue with transportation in the Martian environment is the extremely abrasive dust and the sharp rocks. Pretty much every rover has had the issue that the wheels deteriorate very quickly and dust gets into every nook and cranny, eventuelly destroying important movement-related mechanisms. As to their movement speed, that's mostly down to the movement being manually commanded and with the light delay of about 20 mins (one-way), you can only command the rover to go so far before involuntarily hitting an object.
I recall reading that a major candidate for any early colony is in lava tubes, dust on the would be one factor, but radiation shielding is another. Either you have to ship materials from Earth and build them, consume whatever is available and useful locally, or make use of whatever Mars-nature provides. If you can get away with lighter materials to build below surface then it seems better compared to more durability/shielding requirements above.
Exactly. There is no wind. All the little solidified impact glass particles, with their razor sharp microscopic edges, have not been smoothed by even the slightest wind erosion.
I think I read somewhere that we have so far stayed away from regions that could support life in order to reduce the risk of contamination? I hope that future missions will be as responsible but there's the danger they won't be.
The Jezero crater where the Perseverance rover has been roaming looks a lot like it was a lake and was expected to tell us whether Mars has held life. It was a good guess because the rover has found clay and organic molecules.
Human habitation on Mars is a pipe dream for oligarchs, most serious space people are more interested in extraterrestrial life and the history of the solar system.
It is noteworthy though that the causality goes the other way: the crazy one pipe dreaming about a city on Mars had this dream first and then became an oligarch to make it reality.
It seems doubtful to me that that was his main motivation. Afaict he didn’t express interest in Mars publicly until around the time of his PayPal exit.
That said, it’s true that belief in fantasies can motivate people in powerful ways. All the old cathedrals in Europe are a testament to that.
>Cars: “The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars.”
This analogy does not feel equivalent. The equivalent analogy here would be that automakers want to sell more cars so they make them as cheap as possible with intent to make them not last long. Which is actually somewhat accurate.
Unfortunately it simply is true. The "same car" in another country is made cheaper. There are a variety of ways to do it and often it's justified as better than the alternative. For instance in India the goal is getting people off of motorcycles as that is a huge cause of driving deaths. To do that they remove various airbag systems, auto braking systems, and etc. which are not required in India... but are required in America or the EU.
Even between the EU and America there are differences in regulation with the EU often getting the stronger regulation first.
I get it, but part of the reason they're on motorcycles is cars are too expensive for them. Would making it safer and costing $20-30k base like it does in America be more or less ethical?
I don't think there is a clear answer. Safer car means owners of the car survive more and more often: which is unequivocally great. Making it cheaper means there are more people in a safer vehicle than before which can reduce their likelihood of getting hurt/dying, but they're not as protected as they could be. This is, on the whole, also really good.
It just so happens car makers pick to make it cheaper. It's good for business and good for those who couldn't afford it before. It is bad for those who encounter the situations where additional protection would have saved them.
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