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He has a post up: https://terathon.com/blog/radical-pie.html

I'm pretty confident the "stack" is C++ on Win32, with a bunch of hand-rolled libraries and no stdlib.


Hmmm ... the GP says

> I don't actually know many people still doing any of this sort of work on Windows.


I think they meant writing complex equations on windows

Or doing work that regularly involves writing complex equations, which is what I was asking about - what field and what do they use?

LaTeX or its variants on your favorite OS, which is increasingly not Windows.

Most journals don’t want submissions in Word (there are notable exceptions, e.g. Nature), and conferences without massive editorial budgets want their submissions in a format that makes it easy for them to produce proceedings (again, not Word).

I don’t know to what extent Typst is taking off recently.

I personally wrote my thesis in LuaTeX with figures in TikZ. I have no great love for the TeX language [0] or TikZ, but there are three great properties of this stack that Word lacks:

1. It plays well with version control.

2. The output quality can be very high.

3. You can script the generation of figures, including text and equations that match the formatting of the containing document, in a real programming language, without absurd levels of complexity like scripting Word. So I had little Python programs that printed out TikZ.

No, I do not expect the average high school teacher to do this.

[0] In fact, I think both the language and the tooling are miserable to work with.


Hard agree about TeX the language and tooling.

Overleaf has done a pretty good job of removing the tooling pain points, but honestly Typst can't take over soon enough.

> The output quality can be very high.

It can also be very low


Will probably run great in Proton.

> At Bell Labs, Muller and fellow scientist Glen Wilk ’90, who is now vice president of technology at ASM, tried replacing silicon dioxide - the prevailing gate material, which leaked too much current at small scales – with hafnium oxide.

They are naming professors like "Now That's What I Call Music" albums now?

(I genuinely can't find why there's a '90 there, suspect it's a copy/paste error?)


Presumably because he is a Cornell alumnus from 1990. The article is at cornell.edu .

Listing alumni degree year is generally an "insider" thing (noone who isn't also a Cornell alum really cares which year, especially for a bachelor's degree; likewise Cornell doesn't mention the Harvard '95 PhD in Applied Physics, even if it's probably more relevant to the work...)

"insider" thing, you can be certain that an exempliary mind such as his did not get fired up in a vacume, and that 90, was a year and place that likely produced an iteresting mixed bag of characters, or in other times would be refered to as "schools of thought", and then some went off to bell labs which still functions as an intelectual singuarity that leaks concepts through it's event horison ocasionaly, or in this case displays time dialation effects.

I first thought it was supposed to be a comma, and that he's 90 years old.

Ahh makes a lot of sense

University news sources often cite alums of the university with their year of graduation.

Incandescent and fluorescent lights already flicker at your AC power frequency. Just gotta be higher than that

No.

Incandescent lights flicker at twice your AC power frequency -- to a decent approximation, their power is proportional to V^2. But this is input power -- the cooling of the filament is slowish and the modulation depth is low. Most people aren't bothered by this.

Fluorescent lights with old or very crappy "magnetic" ballasts flicker at twice the mains frequency, with deep modulation. The effect on people varies from moderate to extremely unpleasant, and it's extra bad if anything is moving quickly (gyms, etc). There are even studies showing that office workers perform worse under such lighting even if they don't experience personally perceptible symptoms. The effect is so severe that people invented the "electronic ballast", which flickers at much, much higher frequency and avoids low-frequency components. Phew. (The light might still be a nasty color, but the temporal output is okay.)

"Driverless LEDs" are deeply modulated at twice the mains frequency. These are very nasty.

If you actually have a light that flickers at the AC power frequency (certain LED sources in a two-brightness diode-dimmed kitchen appliance fixture will do this, as will driverless LEDs with certain types of failures), then it's extra nasty.

There are plenty of people around who find (depending on the actual waveform) 60Hz flicker intolerable and 120Hz flicker extremely unpleasant. And there are plenty of people who can often perceive flicker under appropriate circumstances up to at least several hundred Hz and even into the low kHz with certain shapes of light sources. You can read up on IEEE 1789 to find a standard based on actual research on what lighting waveforms should look like.

The effect of 120 Hz flicker is bad enough that energy codes in some places (e.g. California) have started to require that LED sources minimize this flicker, but, sadly, it's poorly enforced.


Also, the human eye sees flicker much better at the periphery than in the central area. The Rod receptor cells respond more rapidly than the Cone color-sensitive cells, and the peripheral vision is also more tuned to quick motions (much advantage in having faster detection of peripheral motion, so positive selection evolutionary pressure).

The fluorescent light strobing is why you often see fluorescent tubes in pairs. They will be wired in opposite phase to cancel the strobing.

I think the total light output of each bulb in the pair is the same at all points in time, but the orange-blue gradient is reversed. So when one is orange at one end, the bulb beside it is blue at that end.

IIRC, the end that's negative looks orange, because the electrons emitted from the filament haven't gotten up to speed yet and can't ionize the mercury atoms at that end to the highest states.

If you didn't do this, you'd see 60 Hz strobing when you looked at one end.


Hey thanks for clearing this up. I had no idea that CFLs and fluorescent lights with electronic ballasts now flicker at ~ 20kHz.

phosphors and capacitors are a thing that mask that, so is high frequency switching way above this rate…

Anyway, an old HN submission I still use when buying light bulbs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14023196


Am I crazy, or is Jensen's statement a copy-paste from ChatGPT?

(Could be both)


If AI is so great why should he not use it?

Should work on building the AI Jensen. Maybe it's already the AI Jensen

Would cloud gaming platforms benefit from the interconnect?

Don't think they would. Games aren't nearly as hungry for memory bandwidth as LLMs are. Also, I expect that the VRAM/GPU/CPU balance would be completely out of whack. Something would be twiddling its thumbs waiting for the rest of the hardware.

> you're not running 10,000 agents concurrently or downstream tool calls

Cursor seem to be doing exactly that though


I feel like if I asked the author of this entire article "are you sure?", they might change their mind...

10-50 is quite conservative. The current situation can be directly traced more-or-less directly to the CIA-instigated Mosaddegh coup in 1953.

It's also basically never been about freedom or whatever propaganda people are fed each time.


They absolutely had a DAC. The earlier commercial CD-ROM drives used an internal audio cable connected to a dedicated input on the sound card pcb for cd-audio. It was years before audio players used digital audio streams.

Almost the entire article is about the response to the proposed delivery of his, frankly unhinged, antichrist lectures in Italy.

There's some context at the end about Thiels connections to the Trump administration. This is normal for reputable news agencies line AP, not everybody is as keenly aware of Thiel's influence as hn readers.


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