Awesomes of the Internets

Procedurally generated spaceships: https://github.com/a1studmuffin/SpaceshipGenerator
Pretty cool looking.

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i am here to give a PSA that if you haven’t kept up with xkcd you really should.

it’s a wonderful comic.

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I stalk the unofficial feed on twitter :monkey:

https://twitter.com/xkcdComic

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… Forty-EIGHT cores with 7nm architecture? Way to go AMD! :smiley:

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That can’t be right !! My intuition tells me tunneling is going to be an issue there…I’m no CPU architect but how do they deal with that? Is it software to correct errors?

For example, even with a .01%(warning not real math) chance that’s still 10,000 times a second on average… 7nm is only a 70 angstroms and at that point you’re exponentially approaching significant probabilities as you move those traces closer.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done transmission problems though so I could be way off.

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What application needs lots of processing power, but doesn’t particularly care about absolute accuracy in every single calculation? Robotics. Machine learning. I’m sure there are others. It may even be useful in large scale simulations where they can work in some sanity check code or they have that trait of highly-repetitive processings. One error is simply factored out of the overall trend.

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I almost tagged you because I figured you would have an answer.

That makes sense though, a lot of noise can be filtered out these days just using data analysis. For example getting subpixel resolution for a point on an image. I suppose you could push the hardware way past its limits and just correct for it after the fact in software.

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It sounds like you’re still thinking in terms of getting a 100% ironclad correct final answer. My apologies if I misunderstand.

The point here is that many applications don’t need that ironclad guarantee. It is in their nature to be tolerant of inaccuracies.

If I’m running a simulation where I’m only sure of my input data +/- 1%, then does it matter if the computer is 99.99% accurate? My input data is the weak link, so getting 100% accuracy from inaccurate data isn’t particularly important.

In robotics, if I’m trying to crank out solutions to kinematics equations as fast as possible, then I can either have 100% accurate solutions (well, within the limits of my math) every N milliseconds or I can have 99.99% accurate solutions every N microseconds. Unless I’m doing eye surgery with a robot arm the length of a football field, I can probably live with that modest precision loss and will be thrilled to have a better reaction time. Or be able to handle more complex kinematics problems.

Where the ironclad guarantee is needed, a traditional architecture would be used.

I wonder if these new architectures would allow for every calculations to be run three, five or seven times, with the machine using the most common answer. Or the average. Whatever. Selectable precision. It would be a bit like ray tracing. Keep casting rays until you are happy with the image quality.

Now I’m reminded of unums…

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Not at all. I totally understand that garbage in = garbage out and that any ā€œcorrectionā€ is still has some sort of error. When I spoke of subpixel resolution as an example that is what I had in mind, where we still had ~few % error from the correct answer.

What I was thinking is that while electrons may be lost due to tunneling, statistically if we know we will have the ā€˜right’ answer 98% of the time or whatever it is, we can call that the right answer because it happened 98% of the time. What I was trying to get at is that even though we may lose some data/calculations to tunneling we can still correct for it after the fact. It won’t be a linear improvement due to the time spent averaging and filtering out bad data, but still faster than larger cpu architectures. I know I’m probably not 100% correct(who is?), but as long as I’m on the right line of thinking I’m okay with it.

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The Tesla Model S can swim:

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I love the tweet Elon posted after. Man I wish I could buy a Tesla just for Elon being awesome :smiley:

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Hmmm, seems AMD/ATI are catching up fast.

AMD RX 480 Gaming Benchmarks Leaked, Rivals Fury & 980 – Full Specs & Hands-On Preview Surface

Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-rx-480-gaming-benchmarks-leaked/#ixzz4CQdk52U4

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Well, that was nostalgic. I wonder if someone else remembers the Brackenwood animations of a decade past?

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Respect to the British that the exit from the EU.

Some interesting stuff here

http://longnow.org/clock/

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I think I’ve shared these guys someplace else on here, but have an inspirational promo :slightly_smiling:

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The Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentaries. Still incredible, even if they are old.

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Please no.

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Explain, I do not know what people say in your the country.