Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.
they had to be 'pro' because of that pricetag. I'm a VR guy and an Apple guy and even I wouldn't move for that price. They need to come up with a way to halve that price. Remove the front screen, it's cute but not required. Maybe a version that doesn't have all the onboard compute, one that needs to be slaved to a mac generally, if they can make it work with an ipad for compute (or iphone?) all the better.
>It makes no sense for xAI to make their own chips.
The initial investment in chip fabs is so big it can't be justified when the established players already make enough to satisfy demand, but right now they don't so there's an opportunity.
It's still risky for sure but it makes some sense that it happens now. Hyperscalers spend 100s of billions yearly, at some point the amount given to TSMC gets larger than starting your own fab.
If success was guaranteed (it's not, as AMD and several others have learned) I think many more co's would start their own fabs in the current market.
As for why xAI, well why not - many of the others who can afford a fabbing attempt can't risk getting on TSMC's bad side even for a year or two.
The Chinese will be the one slipping in because of this opportunity. The question is is whether or not you still want to be dependent on outside memory when the Chinese takeover a larger part of the worldwide market?
Operating a FAB requires employing PhDs that are willing to work 8 hours shifts with no breaks (each removal of a bunnysuit is an expensive exercise), and there’s no reason to believe SpaceX is capable of hiring such people.
There was a point made recently by Musk that the whole clean room idea is outdated if you can just ensure the path the silicon takes from wafer to lidding is clean. Seems solvable to me, but leaves me wondering why it hasn’t been done before. I assume there is no human handling of raw/etched silicon now anyway, so why does the whole room need to be clean?
The semiconductor fab process changes dynamically to manage yield. It is not a static environment, automating with robotics is fine when things are static like a automotive assembly line, but high end semiconductor fabs are a different beast (The analogy I heard was repairing a plane while in flight).
Robots are not purely clean as well they shed contaminates as well, which must be managed too. Entropy is the reason why we still need humans in the loop.
You could probably apply that logic to any innovation in any industry no?
Reusable rockets likely got the same ridicule, as did fast satellite internet, self driving and fully electric vehicles.
I can understand that Musk does not have the most palatable personality, but floating ideas and at least attempting innovation regardless of outcome over a long time is a net positive for society and should not be discouraged.
Reusable rockets likely got the same ridicule, as did fast satellite internet, self driving and fully electric vehicles.
In those areas, Musk successfully leveraged government largesse to compete with fat, lazy incumbents who had either coasted for decades (rockets and satellite Internet) or who didn't bother to show up to the game (EVs, self-driving and otherwise.)
That does not describe the semiconductor industry.
Musk has never beaten anybody who actually put up a fight, as far as I'm aware. I guess Blue Origin technically counts, but again that's not exactly TSMC.
So what? Maybe a hand full of full bunnies per shift, and another dozen or two half-bunnies. There aren't more. This can be seen/validated by some older yt-videos, where something went wrong in the fab, for instance a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOUP ejecting a wafer in wrong ways into a machine, then being ejected by that onto the floor, and shattering. Causing all systems to stop, and all the warning lights beginning to blink in an expanding cascade. At about 4:30AM. Maybe 20 seconds later two half bunnies with face masks appear, another 10 seconds later a full bunnie. Some gesticulating ensues, full bunnie opens his suit, gets his flip phone, half bunnies downing their masks. All looking very concerned and exasperated. Having a really bad day. No more bunnies appear over several minutes. Video ends.
FWIW, I would not trust LG here to actually do nothing even after turning all the elements off, their GUI is especially "web"-like. Just leave it disconnected.
I don't understand why people can't just get a secondary device for accessing live streaming programs. There's numerous devices you can buy that do it.
TVs should not be connected to the internet. The incentive structures are just too bad against the user.
They'll probably start making them with sim card and modem at some point. I can picture it now on a future ebay listing: faraday cage for your tv - only 99.99!
@dang does nothing, he is unlikely to see it. If you actually want to reach the mods, email them. There's a Contact link at the bottom of almost every page here on HN.
EDIT: Parent commenter edited out the @dang from their comment making mine appear to be responding to something not in their comment.
Weird. I've shifted more and more of my social media use to X. Especially the last few weeks have been great with Artemis and an algorithmic accident that X's auto translation feature has been enabling tons of positive cross cultural communication with people from Japan. It's more fun than I've ever had on social media. Reddit on the other hand has been completely dying.
This has more to do with the UK government than a "for-profit company". Apple has been one of the biggest forces pushing back against this kind of thing forever, at least in the US where companies still have rights.
No it doesn't. The UK government instituted age checks for social media, Apple didn't like the UK government and enabled age checks for the OS, wanting to blame the government for it. It's done this sort of thing before.
Google practically never shows explicit images to anyone anymore anyway. Even bing doesn't anymore. I feel like we've returned to a more prude society, at least on the mainstream internet.
Your comment has basically no connection to the comment you replied to. (Which itself had a weak connection to the article, but that's a separate issue.)
Even duckduckgo started censoring their results! Although very subtly. My friend (really) showed me an explicit search query with the safe search turned off that I then compared with yandex, and was really surprised how different they were. Nothing explicit on DDG, even though it included the word "hentai".
(I am aware this is not really related to the article. I think this is a cool discussion to be had)
The GP comment is in compliance with the guideline:
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
"You should really read the article" is semantically the same as "The article mentions that". It's not a question.
I want to nitpick you here but a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
That specific aspect is NOT true in space because there's nothing stopping thermal radiation.
Now you're correct that you can't remove heat by conduction or convection in space, but it's not that hard to radiate away energy in space. In fact rocket engine nozzle extensions of rocket upper stages depend on thermal radiation to avoid melting. They glow cherry red and emit a lot of energy.
By Stefan–Boltzmann law, thermal radiation goes up with temperature to the 4th power. If you use a coolant that lets your radiator glow you can conduct heat away very efficiently. This is generally problematic to do on Earth because of the danger of such a thing and also because such heat would cause significant chemical reactions of the radiator with our corrosive oxygen atmosphere.
Even without making them super hot, there's already significant energy density on SpaceX's satellites. They're at around 75 kW of energy generation that needs to be radiated away.
And on your final statement, hyperloop was not used as a "distraction" as he never even funded it. He had been talking about it for years and years until fanboys on twitter finally talked him into releasing that hastily put together white paper. The various hyperloop companies out there never had any investment from him.
> a thermos is specifically good at insulating because not only does it have a vacuum gap, it's also got two layers of metal (inner and outer) to absorb and reflect thermal radiation.
It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
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