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Do you have anything on those TRW floating point chips that used to titillate junior engineers in trade mag advertisements before that?

For example, an adder's total delay depends on a carry chain. If you have N 4-bit slices, the last slice has to wait for the carry to propagate through all N-1 previous slices.

But if you duplicate all your slices, you can have the results for both carry = 0 and carry = 1 inputs. Then just switch which one is correct - total time 1 add plus N-1 switches.

Just for double (and change) the hardware. Cheap.


> pedestrian cars.

That's an interesting turn of phrase ...


Thanks. As the owner of a 14-year-old Honda that is equipped in the most lavish of trim options, I found great pleasure in selecting that particular subperlative.

Now you've made me think of the Mac Portable, aka Boat Anchor.

("Am I chopped liver?!" yells the shade of the Osborne 1)


> "Human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities"

That should be a hard line no one is allowed to cross. If you do, no logic will keep you from ending up in a very bad place.

For instance, I'm a big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, where his humorous and compassionate tales comment on much of human experience. It's a fantasy world with wizards, trolls, dwarfs, vampires, etc.

In one book he goes into ghouls - obscure, despised and persecuted almost to extinction, but in the story it is found they secretly make beautiful ethereal music. So a concert is arranged to present the music, and all is well, the end. Except for my doubts - I mean, if they didn't make nice music, then it would be alright to dispose of them?

Benthamite utility has a particularly ugly underside to it, and it is easily converted into "disposal of negative value" of the nastiest kind. Which can only be stopped by a moral hard line, as stated.


> superpower

That's an anachronism, from the 19th to mid-20th century there were just "great powers", not perfectly matched but considered to be in the same class. The Ottoman empire falling off the league ("sick old man") was a bit of a shocker.


> bringing refuse facilities into the home

Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"


> [0]

Ahah, China going Adam Smith on the EU.

Peacefully, so far. Let's hope they don't go "opium war" on free trade.


That's already happening with synthetic drugs [0] and the Ukraine War [1].

[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/30/china-traf...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russians-...


> while French President Emmanuel Macron even suggested following US-style measures akin to the "Section 301" tariffs.

> A major source of this latest wave of the so-called "China shock" narrative is the claim that the EU's trade deficit with China reached 360 billion euros in 2025.

These are the same people whose collective knickers are getting in a twist over Trump, mind you.


I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...


It's Hawthorne effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.


Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.


I was never convinced by the "vision only" approach - I don't see the point of throwing out or refusing to have additional data from other sensors.

I suppose that with modern ML they can just toss it in the blender and reap the benefits ...


I'm not talking about vision (cameras) vs lidar etc, just the Tesla FSD architecture that separates the "vision" component (turning camera/sensor inputs into symbolic road/sign/vehicle/pedestrian/etc data), and the driving component which takes the vision data, plus current location and destination, and uses that to actually drive the car - switch lanes, make turns, avoid obstacles etc etc.


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