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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Your claim that they would advertise it is speculation. What would be the purpose of that?

    To advertise that they can? In return what would be the purpose to hide it?

    They do seem to make their advancements at least somewhat public, e.g. with their recent progress with a EUV light source.

    I am probably on the pessimistic side and you maybe on the optimistic, so the reality will likely end up being somewhere in between (but only time will tell).

    China will do this because they have massive talent mass and ressources, and because they have to.

    Well it also was developed in the west by a large amount of talent and resources and still took a lot of time. But you are absolutely right that their hand is being forced.

    Restricting exports like this imo was a huge mistake, imo especially in regard to duv. In the end it might have achieved some damage in the short/medium term, but that wasn’t anything the us could capitalize on and it also directly hurt ASMLs profits (meaning less resources to advance). And regardless how the timeline ends up looking on the end (be it closer to your or my prediction), physics are the same everywhere so that can’t be restricted and they will eventually be able to figure it out.


  • GAA is the next evolution of transistor architecture from FinFET, but as far as I know has no direct link to smaller process nodes. In that (to my understanding) it doesn’t require small nodes and could be used just as easily in larger ones. It’s just that it is more difficult so until now there were other easier ways to make progress. However with new nodes getting more expensive and giving less scaling gaa and other things like backside power delivery are being pursued.

    We will have to see if the process is actually good, but I have little doubt that China will become competitive in EUV within 5 years. But if they have it already next year, that will be very fast.

    So not only do you expect China to have a working domestically produced EUV machine within 5 years, but a competitive one? Or possibly even next year?

    Next year is just pure fantasy that I don’t think even the most optimistic would assume. If they were anywhere close to that we would already know. They’d have shown a working prototype by now.

    Euv is crazy difficult and you not only the result of a single company ASML, but many highly specialized companies that are leaders in their respective fields and all over the world like e.g. Zeiss for for the lenses. So for China to replicate it domestically they’d need to copy the whole supply chain. Which is orders of magnitude more difficult than what they’ve done in other industries like electric vehicles or solar panels.

    Imo if they have a working prototype of a complete EUV machine within this decade it would already be impressive. But that would still be far off from mass production or wherever the industry is by then (Intel is currently trialing high na EUV). Also for reference Wikipedia says ASML had their first prototype in 2006 and we know how long it took to being that to mass production. China as a second mover might have an edge that speed things up, but just knowing how it works in theory isn’t enough and there are o shortcuts.

    But maybe they also pursue another technique such as nano imprint (like canon) to achieve smaller nodes. Maybe that would be easier to replicate without existing global supply chains.


  • Well there are claims that Huawei is aiming for 3nm with GAA with tape out next year See Here.

    I think we shouldn’t forget that the nm numbers really are just that: Numbers. They don’t correspond to any specific measurements and can be chosen more or less arbitrarily. So 6nm for example might just be a slightly refined 7nm node.

    Another thing is power efficiency and yields. If they get 4060 performance at terrible yields and with massive power draw then it is very different to getting there at similar parameters as Nvidia.

    If China does end up cracking EUV by themselves it would indeed be massive. It’s arguably one of the most complex things mankind has ever done. But there are so many factors to get right that tbh I don’t see it happening any time soon.




  • Considering her future job as queen will involve a lot of diplomatic and ceremonial functions it does kind of make sense to me that you’d want her to gain some international experience.

    Also on a personal level i’d imagine it is much easier to have some resemblance of a private life in a foreign country, especially at a prestigious institution where plenty of others share notable backgrounds, compared to going to a local university where everyone knows who you are. In a small country like Belgium you probably don’t even have much choices as to which university even offers a good program in your chosen field.

    Edit:

    Elisabeth initially studied at St John Berchmans College in Marollen, Brussels from September 2004 until August 2018. This marked a significant change in Belgian royal tradition, being the first time that a future Belgian monarch’s education has begun in Dutch

    In May 2020, the Belgian Royal Court announced that Elisabeth would undertake military training. On 31 August 2020, Elisabeth entered the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, studying social and military sciences

    - wikipedia

    Really seems like the worst candidate to make this accuse against



  • There’s currently a Kickstarter going on for a watch that aims to be modular and repairable. It’s called UNA Watch.

    Look interesting, but imo with these things it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, where the upgradeability/repairability only has value, if it is actually provided in the future (and economically viable). Something that can only be proven in time, but requires people to trust it before.

    I’m not in the market for a new watch right now, since I just repaired the screen on my Garmin, but am keeping an eye on it, since sadly Garmin seems to have entered the early stages of enshittification.



  • Sadly I think Airbus is already busy as is. As far as I understand it, they were already supply constrainted before this and have their order books filled for years. Otherwise Boeing’s most recent quality and safety issues would have had a larger effect.

    I don’t know if they could increase capacities even if they wanted to, or if a volatile situation like this would allow for the investments that would be necessary to do so.

    Imo this just accelerates China’s own ambitions to build up their own rival with Comac. This development makes the transition less gradual and they’ll have to eat some losses, but that’s something their system is capable of.

    On the other hand it’s actually worse for the US, because they’ll miss out on those sales and might not be able to sell them somewhere else. With Boeing already struggling and this being a key industry, this will mean that it might require more subsidies in the future to keep them going or succeed in the turnaround.


  • As i understand it most of the money they are investing goes into new datacenters. So when a model gets outdone by a new one they still have those, unlike e.g. OpenAI that use other companies resources (i think microsoft and oracle mostly?). In a way companies that use those external clouds to train their own models are financing the investments needed for the big players.

    AWS, GCP and Azure are all growing 30%+ yoy, are profitable and if anything supply constraint in that they can’t build more capacity fast enough to meet demand. So it seems to me that to some degree they are already recouping some of those investments. I don’t see a drop in demand for compute, and even if using/training ai would become less resource intensive, Jevons paradox would just lead to more demand.

    Of course they also burn a lot of money as anytime a new model gets trained and beats the older ones, it kind of renders the resources spend on the previous one worthless. But to me that seems like the cost of doing business.

    The current investments they can afford. What would actually lead to shedding huge amounts of marketcap is, if they’d let a rival establish themselves. Similar to how the movie studios didn’t get into streaming early (mostly to not hurt their cable business) and gave Netflix enough time to establish themselves.


    To comment on something you mentioned in another reply below:

    I just don’t see a world where most people are coughing up more than $10 a month for AI.

    I think the big money will be in the business world, where salaries for actual people are high enough that saving a person even a few hours/week or replacing a single employee saves so much money that even expensive subscriptions would easily be worth it.

    On the consumer side as you say running smaller models locally will likely be the norm. But that means it would be free for both the likes of Deepseek and Google. And then it’ll just come down to who has access to personal information and is better embedded, which would be likely be whoever also controls other aspects of a users life, such as Goole with Android, gmail etc. Money here will be made just as it is done with other free services.



  • I am more surprised xAI investors approved. Especially for such a high price.

    Twitter actually imo had (and still has) quite a bit of value, but that is only to further Elons ideological goals. As a business it is on a downward trend and was never a cash cow to begin with. Comparatively little room for speculation. It’s a stagnating or declining business and doesn’t generate large profits if any.

    xAI on the other hand is pretty much in the same spot as most other ai companies. It has yet to prove to be a highly profitable business, but there is plenty of room for speculation. So as long as the bubble doesn’t burst, it has a high valuation.

    Which is all that would matter for any Twitter investor that wants to unload his shares. Although I doubt it would be via ipo, but rather in private funding rounds.




  • If you don’t mind Meta/Facebook, then the oculus quest headsets are also very affordable hardware and deliver a good experience. I think the issue lies with content.

    Smartphones or handhelds like the steam deck with flat screens could use plenty of already existing content made for screens. With VR you want different content that is made specifically for it. There is a decent amount of games (but still much fewer than for other devices), but honestly not that much more.

    Additionally it also can only really be used at home, where most already have other devices.

    It’s a chicken and egg problem. But imo if there were more genuine unique productivity tasks and experiences available through VR, we would see more adoption.








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