Thanks for a really interesting read. I wonder if it’s worth thinking more about the FLOP/$ as a follow-up. If a performance limit is reached, presumably the next frontier would be bringing down the price of compute. What are the current bottlenecks on reducing costs?
fylo
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Thanks for really interesting discussion and summary of the state of play. I’m curious what you think of Ben Thompson’s point that China could have an advantage at the “trailing edge”(28-45nm, and 45+) if TSMC were taken off the board?
https://stratechery.com/2022/chips-and-china/
Maybe the play is to focus on the trailing edge, which is easier to take control of, but still v important in the short-term at least, and temporarily let go of the cutting edge?
Hi all,
Does anyone know why US cases and deaths tend to be lower on Sundays and (especially) Mondays, compared to other days of the week? Is it something with the timing of how the data are processed?
I put up some quick plots here:
https://twitter.com/Nick_Lutsko/status/1254067996990959616
Apologies if this has been explained before and I missed it.
Thanks for the response!
It’s interesting to see what your concerns are. There’s probably less research on these kinds of feedback loops/tail risks then there should be. Part of the problem is just how uncertain they are—a combination of the difficulty of measuring things like methane releases and the problem of not being able to resolve these processes in models. Our best guide is probably paleoclimate observations, but I’m not an expert on these.
In terms of blogs, Real Climate is the best place to start. They can get combative, and they aren’t always the most rigorous researchers, but they at least give you a sense of what’s going on. Isaac Held is a giant in climate science and had a very widely-read blog for a few years, but he’s mostly gone quiet since the Trump administration took over (he’s a federal scientist). Going through his posts is a great way of getting caught up on the field. I put up notes here occasionally. And for someone with more of a “denier” bent, Judith Curry is worth checking out (though she clearly wants to push the discussion in specific directions). Finally, if you have access to it, Nature Climate Change publishes a lot of good stuff (with the caveat that it wants to publish high profile work), including summaries and perspectives which give overviews of specific subfields and questions. Any important work on tipping points and feedback loops will be in a Nature journal.
Hi, I’m a postdoc in climate science, just made an account. I’ve been reading SSC off and on for about two years, then started exploring LW more recently and wanted to join the discussion.
I’m curious what questions you have about climate science, and what resources you think are needed to make it more accessible? More blogs? More easily accessible review papers?
Thanks. Another naive question: how do power and cooling requirements scale with transistor and GPU sizes? Could these be barriers to how large supercomputers can be built in practice?