IrritableOcelot
@IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org
- Comment on China freezes chip chemistry to slash defects by 99 per cent 4 days ago:
My god the headline of the Fudzilla article is misleading.
Yes, they froze the samples of polymer, but the actual change to the technique is to increase the post-emulsion bake!
- Comment on Space is beautiful 1 week ago:
Oops, that’s right!
- Comment on Space is beautiful 1 week ago:
Only after 20 years. Light will take 10y to make it from earth to the mirror, and 10y to travel back.
- Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU 1 week ago:
Well, first of all China does make lithography equipment (for instance, Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment, who are currently at 28 nm). There are a couple of others iirc, and they typically got started by licensing lithography technology from Japanese companies and then building on it.
The issue is mostly one of economics – fabs want higher-resolution lithography as soon as possible, and they only buy it once, which means that the first company to develop new litho technologies takes the lions share of the revenue. If you’re second to the technology, or are more than half a dozen nodes behind like SMEE is, theres not a lot of demand because there are fabs full of litho machines from when that node was new, and theres not as much demand for them anymore.
The issue with a new company making leading edge nodes is the incredible R&D and development cost involved. Nikon, Canon, and ASML shared the market when they all started developing EUV tech, and it took ASML 15+ years to develop it! Canon and Nikon teamed up, spent tens of billions of dollars on R&D, and dropped out once they realized they couldn’t beat ASML to market because there wouldn’t be enough market left for them to make their money back.
If you want to learn more about the history of the semiconductor industry, I recommend the Asianometry YouTube channel!
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 week ago:
Knowing how to write a good study is a matter of experience more than intelligence.
- Comment on Halo community lead wears PlayStation t-shirt to announce: ‘Halo is on PlayStation going forward’ [VGC] 1 week ago:
Yup, and the price of the Xbox Ally is ridiculous, as expected!
- Comment on Halo community lead wears PlayStation t-shirt to announce: ‘Halo is on PlayStation going forward’ [VGC] 1 week ago:
Openness is great, but there’s no financial reason to make specialized hardware to operate an open platform.
Historically, consoles have been sold near cost, and profits have been made on game sales after the fact. If you can just buy your games from Steam on console, the price of the console will go up. At some point, it no longer makes sense to buy the specialized hardware.
But we’ll get to see how that goes! It’s looking more and more like the next Xbox is going to run Windows.
- Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU 1 week ago:
If you are truly starting from scratch, shooting for Raspberry Pi performance isn’t starting small, thats a huge goal. It’s a complex chip built on a fairly modern process node (28 nm for the 4B) using the second-best-established architecture.
The reasonable goal to shoot for would be an 8086-like chip, then perhaps something like a K3-II or early Pentium, then slowly work your way up from there.
- Comment on Bootstrapping Your Own CPU 1 week ago:
There are a couple of further questions to be able to answer this best. First, when you say using only tech that is in the open, nothing proprietary, how strictly do you mean that? Historically, what Chinese foundries have done is buy a fab line far enough from the leading edge to not be questioned, then use that as a starting point for working towards smaller nodes. If thats allowed, it would be fairly trivial, 40 nm doesnt perform that badly.
If you want the equivalent of “open-source” fab equipment, as far as I know that has never existed. In better news, if you go back to DUV/immersion lithography, its not just ASML manufacturing lithography, Nikon and Canon were still in the game, so power was less centralized.
Second, what is the actual goal? If it’s just compute, no big deal. As long as you can write a C compiler for your architecture (or use RISC-V as other folks have mentioned) getting the Linux kernel running shouldn’t be too hard. However, you’re going to have to deal with manually modifying the firmware of any peripherals you want to run – PCIe devices, USB, I2C, etc. Not a firmware engineer, so I have no idea how hard it would be, but this is one of the things that’s been holding back Linux on Arm over the years.
All in all, depending on how strict you want to be, it could be anywhere between slightly difficult and effectively impossible.
- Comment on Halo community lead wears PlayStation t-shirt to announce: ‘Halo is on PlayStation going forward’ [VGC] 1 week ago:
Given the state of that trailer, its a shame it’s anywhere. We hate to see an IP being milked so hard.
- Comment on More than 60% of US game players only buy two games or fewer per year, survey finds | VGC 4 weeks ago:
Yes, I’m also surprised it’s so low, if only because during sales you can get like 3-5 older indie games for $15. Those games are often shorter and have more controlled scope as well, meaning more folks would actually have time to play them.
On the other hand, it means folks are only buying games they’ll actually play, which is good.
- Comment on when ur higher than sagan 2 months ago:
Yup, he was eating sodium bromide instead of sodium chloride. Any significant amount of bromide is not good for ya.
- Comment on Zotero is still better. 2 months ago:
🎶Living in a JabRef woooorrrrld🎶
- Comment on Nintendo survey seeks feedback on controversial game-key cards, physical and digital purchases | VGC 2 months ago:
My understanding is that they offer them all, but publishers havent been able to reliably get 8 or 16gb cards. Whether thats Nintendo being shady or some legitimate supply issue, I don’t know.
- Comment on Philips to Offer Free Downloadable Files to 3D Print Replacement Parts - Core77 5 months ago:
Well, I doubt they’ll release one for my clippers since they’re discontinued, so that inspired me to go ahead and model a variable-depth one for myself. Based on some of the comments here, I thickened the comb blades to make them print more easily.
- Comment on Philips to Offer Free Downloadable Files to 3D Print Replacement Parts - Core77 5 months ago:
They havent released one for the razor I have, but honestly I might try modeling them myself. Doesn’t seem impossible, and I’ve been waning a deeper comb than they sell.
- Comment on kawaiiiiiii 6 months ago:
This gives strong “Lovecraft describing things he doesn’t understand as noneuclidian” vibes.
- Comment on Caption this. 6 months ago:
🎶 Saturday night and we in the spot, don’t believe me just watch 🎶
- Comment on What is this shit? 7 months ago:
While I agree that publishers charging high open access fees is a bad practice, the ACS journals aren’t the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel predatory journals you’re describing. ACS nano in particular is a well respected journal for nanochem, with a generally well-respected editorial board, and any suspicions of editorial misconduct of the type you’re describing would be a three-alarm fire in the community.
I will also note that this article is labelled “free to access” – when the authors have paid an (as you said, exhorbitant) publishing fee to have the paper be open access, the tag used by ACS is “open access”.
Also, the fact that the authors had a little fun with the title doesn’t mean its low-effort slop – this was actually an important critique at the time, because for years people had been adding different modifications to graphene and making a huge deal about how revolutionary their new magic material was.
The point this paper was trying to make is that finding modifications to graphene which make it better for electrocatalysis is not some revolutionary thing, because almost any modification works. It was actually a useful recalibration for expectations, as well as a good laugh.
- Comment on DeepSeek-V3 now runs at 20 tokens per second on Mac Studio, and that’s a nightmare for OpenAI 7 months ago:
Not somebody who knows a lot about this stuff, as I’m a bit of an AI Luddite, but I know just enough to answer this!
“Tokens” are essentially just a unit of work – instead of interacting directly with the user’s input, the model first “tokenizes” the user’s input, simplifying it down into a unit which the actual ML model can process more efficiently. The model then spits out a token or series of tokens as a response, which are then expanded back into text or whatever the output of the model is.
I think tokens are used because most models use them, and use them in a similar way, so they’re the lowest-level common unit of work where you can compare across devices and models.
- Comment on Asking the important questions. 7 months ago:
I think its because while its under water it doesn’t have a chance to diffuse into a larger volume of air – normally farts are pretty dilute by the time it makes it to anyone’s nose.
- Comment on Acetone: A Thread 7 months ago:
My favorite overheard undergrad story:
I was walking past the lecture hall right after an organic chemistry midterm, and there was a cluster of 4-5 students talking about the exam. One asked about question 8b, and another one said “you’re not supposed to mix nitric acid and ethanol, that makes TNT, right?” I had to stifle a chuckle as I walked by.
So close, and yet so far! Nitrated acetone is explosive, and TNT (trinitrotoluene) is also made with nitric acid, but toluene is a much more complex molecule than acetone. If those undergrads could figure out how to turn acetone into TNT efficiently, they’d get a Nobel!
- Comment on GARBAGEOLOGY 8 months ago:
Thats Britain lol, Ireland is on the left edge of the frame.
- Comment on HP to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin' • The Register 8 months ago:
I just came across the lines in the OpenSuse 42 .bashrc in to connect to palm pilots today…what a flashback.
- Comment on 0mg 8 months ago:
More like 0mgMg
- Comment on son, happy birthday 8 months ago:
Came here to say this…
- Comment on Steam Brick: A DIY cut-down Steam Deck, sans input and screen 9 months ago:
Yeah, I think the battery thing OP pointed out makes more sense than the power argument. The Z1 extreme used in other handhelds is based on the 8840HS iirc, anf its at least one generation newer than the basis for the steam decks somewhat custom silicon.
The Deck processor is 4 Zen 2 CPU cores and 8 RDNA 2 GPU CUs, while the 8840HS is 8 Zen 4 CPU cores plus 12 RDNA 3 graphics CUs. It’s going to be wildly more powerful. The 8745H actually has the same CPU and iGPU configuration as the 8840HS – not even close to steam deck specs.
- Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda 10 months ago:
Yeah, kobo does too. I assumed it was a proprietary flavor which was pretty locked down, is that not the case?
- Comment on Chinese ebook reader Boox ditches GPT for state-censored China LLM pushing propaganda 10 months ago:
I vaguely remember there being a FOSS OS you can put on Kobos, can you also do that on Boox?
- Comment on Intel finally notches a GPU win, confirms Arc B580 is selling out after stellar reviews 10 months ago:
I mean they do have a point: the framework that the game is targeting is DX11, so if it looks bad it is (broadly) because of an issue in translating DX11 instructions to Vulkan…
