> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1].
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
> all the memory chips and energy. And GPUs of course.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
The RAM and GPU use is a whole different category of dominating.
My entire (non American) education career was exam based. The exams were tightly supervised, no books etc. Every thing had to be memorised. Cheating was impossible.
Funny thing is, memorising something is a big help to understanding it.
In that system, AI is a very useful tool. AFAIK, this is how they still do it in many Asian countries.
It worked pretty well. Produced a lot of educated people.
Yes, same. We also had oral exams for particular subjects where you essentially had a discussion with a teacher or panel of teachers on a particular topic. All of that will eventually come back. I don't see how that doesnt come back as a normal thing in schools
Argos in the UK was similar. You would go into the store and look up the product in a catalog. Then go to counter and order it, wait 2-5 minutes and they give you the product. I found it quite convenient.
Screwfix do this too. Just a counter with a handful of staff who go and get your items.
If you pre-order it's waiting at the desk. Very handy for people who can order from the job site on the account and send the lad round to grab it.
And a (relatively) unshittified website too because if jobbing tradies can't use the damn thing because it's too loaded down with ads and bullshit, they just won't.
They're still there. Was surprised to run into one recently when I was in London (they pulled out of Ireland a while back, and I'd assumed they'd just closed totally at that point, because it _does_ feel like an increasingly marginalised business model.)
They still exist. Tend to be pretty competitive on price, although they must be losing out to online shopping in a lot of places since they don't offer any showroom advantage.
In my experience because you're picking up from the Argos you can do an instant return if you realize you ordered wrong (or the item is rubbish). Not perfect but a good way to get your hands on the product with an easy refund option
You raise a good point. No trolling: I wonder what languages they seriously considered? Example: I am sure the analysis included C in the mix. Also, I wonder if they considered compiler extensions. Example: Since C doesn't have destructors, maybe you could add a compiler extension to add the defer keyword to allow people to schedule object destruction. Even when they decided upon C++, I am sure there was a small holy war to decide what features were allowed. When they started the JSF programmed in the 1990s, C++ compilers were pretty terrible!
Ada and C++ were the only realistic options at the time, and Ada developers are difficult to hire.
But honestly, with this sort of programming the language distinctions matter less. As the guide shows you restrict yourself to a subset of the language where distinctions between languages aren't as meaningful. Basically everything runs out of statically allocated global variables and arrays. Don't have to worry about fragmentation and garbage collection if there's no allocation at all. Basically remove any source of variability in execution possible.
So really you could do this in any c style language that gives you control over the memory layout.
My recollection is that traditionally they used Ada for avionics, but per some internet claims they had difficulties to hire enough Ada programmers for such large projects, so switched to C++.
There's a few historical examples here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market
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