Conduct electricity with zero resistance. This has been possible at cryogenic temperatures (powers supermagnets, MRI etc) but running at room temperature _and pressure_ means in theory that you don’t need expensive support machinery. Has been the holy grail for the field.
If true, this specific case is only low current, but demonstrates such a thing is possible - almost certainly winning an instant Nobel Prize.
Computers would still get hot, because the main cause of heat is not resistance in wires, it's that when a transistor switches with charge in the gate, you need to dump that charge, and when you do this it turns to heat.
They would get less hot, because there are plenty of transmission losses too.
I was one of the people who said power is wasted in wires.
When the charged stored inside a chip needs to change (like go from high to low), that energy associated with the charge needs to go somewhere. Currently most of the charge is dissipated in the wire and some of it within the transistor.
If the wires have no resistance, the transistor will be the one dissipating the energy, not the energy simply disappears.
So technically both options are right, but my position is the “technically right, but practically wrong” position lol
That said if the interconnects are less resistive, the switching process becomes more efficient and less power will be wasted than the bare minimum required.
I wanted to add but my morning poop time was over so never had a chance to write this.
If you have two capacitors, say C1 and C2, and say their capacitance is both C.
Say C1 is charged up to 2V. The energy stored in that cap is 1/2 CV^2 = 2C.
Say C2 is not charged up.
The charge on C1 is Q = CV = 2C. The charge on C2 is 0.
Say suddenly you connect C1 to C2 via a lossless wire.
The charge on C1 and C2 must be equal before and after the connection since charge cannot be destroyed.
After the connection, the voltage on both caps will be equal, and the charge on them will therefore be equal.
Charge on each cap is 1C; voltage is therefore Q/C = V, V = 1V on both caps..
Now let's look at the energy on either cap. 1/2 CV^2 = 0.5C.
The combined energy on both caps are 1C. Where'd the energy go? We just said we connected the capacitors with a lossless wire, so it can't be dissipated there, and capacitors by definition cannot dissipate power.
The answer is that lossless wires cannot exist, and if you do the math more carefully, this time with real resistance and take the limit as R->0, you will see that the power-time integral of the wire (dissipated energy) will approach 1C.
The same argument can be made for integrated circuits; as your resistance drops, more and more of the portion of loss will be dissipated in the "other" sources of loss.
edit: superconductors are lossy at AC (but not as much as regular conductors get lossy at AC), and the capacitor connection is an AC phenomena so even with superconductors there will be a teeny loss even with superconducting wires. The rest of the loss will happen in other ways (EM radiation, dielectric loss, loss from capacitor resistance, etc)
One of the biggest use cases (for superconductors that meet their requirements) would be long distance power transmission, where as much as 30% of the power is lost over long distances.
Essentially, (and very top level) you could produce 30% more power, without adding any more production capactity.
It is my understanding that computers would still need to somehow dissipate energy when they perform irreversible computations, and that will turn into heat. E.g. when you compute the AND of two bits, then the result is only one bit and you have to dispose of the remaining bit either as heat or as a garbage output signal.
That's a thermodynamic limit, but we're not even close to hitting that yet.
RTP superconductors still aren't going to magically make computers emit zero heat, though; there are other sources besides resistive losses. I was under the impression that other factors dominated, though a couple people responded yesterday to tell me that resistance is the primary source of heat. Not an expert in that area, would love for someone who does chipset design to clarify.
Portable MRI would be a huge deal. We'd also see superconducting motors in electric vehicles, along with marked efficiency gains in every part of EV systems.
We could have a superconducting power grid with solar panels distributed across the planet. Superconducting batteries could give us grid level storage. It also reduces the cost of hypothetical fusion reactors, their magnets can be cooled with unpressurized water instead of liquid helium.
Calling this the most revolutionary discovery of the last hundred years isn't an overstatement. This will affect almost every industry and in ways that we can't even imagine yet. If this material is what they claim, it's going to be a new era for our species.
Those won't happen with the current magnetic field limitations. Ironically, this is the thing that makes me believe them more rather than less: it is plausible that if you find a material that is superconducting at room temperature that it isn't right away going to be ideal in every other respect, and it would have been very easy to fake that one too.
There are all sorts of neat things that you can do with superconductors now (toroidal inductor batteries, basically anything that would benefit from super strong coils like motors and magnets, novel electronics...) with the caveat that they are hilariously expensive to fabricate, and need a hilariously expensive cryogenic system built around them.
The cherry on top is that the materials and fabrication for this material seem relatively cheap.
People like to list technologies it would improve, like power transmission or MRIs, but I think it will be hard to predict what technologies are completely enabled by this, such as potentially fusion or quantum computing or things I don't even know about yet.
I asked a similar question and got the answer that we could technically put a ton of solar panels in the Sahara and use this new material to transmit that power to anywhere in the world (without losing any power). Currently you couldn't do that since transmission lines lose power over distance.
Similar topic, but after having COVID and losing my taste and smell for a few weeks, all carbonated sodas "taste off" for me. I've talked to a few people who have had similar experiences and after a year later, all of my regular Cokes still taste off :/
I was thinking about this yesterday when reading that some people with
long covid experience the smell of meat as that of decaying dead flesh, which
none of us wants to hear but is not technically wrong. Could it be
that whereas we're socialized toward certain perceptions, a disorderly
shutdown of the senses causes something like a reboot to factory
settings?
What was your experimentation process like? I am in bed for 9-10 hours a night but only 3-5% of my sleep is deep. It’s awfully frustrating because of mood swings and inability to focus. I’ve been trying for a couple years now, but can’t nail anything down.
It was a slow, frustrating process. I'd reckon that, for me, 80% of it is nutrition and exercise and the other 20% is sleep hygiene (and I would include some specific supplementation in the hygiene category). I believe that consistency with the major contributing factors is where I found long-term success. The minor factors are there to aid the major ones.
I used to wear sleep trackers to bed and I also had (have?) very poor deep sleep. I've left the sleep trackers out of the equation for a couple of years now, so I can't really comment on where I am today, other than to say that I wake up feeling refreshed. A little groggy, for sure, but I don't feel extreme fatigue like I used to.
I don't like making drive-by, blanket recommendations about this stuff when it starts to wade into medical advice / specific nutrition or supplementation, but... My last sleep study (way back in early 2016) pointed me in the direction of blood work. There was a thought that I may have thyroid dysfunction (I don't, or at least I didn't). I understand that it's fairly common and is a source for sleep troubles for many.
I'd also encourage you to look into ZMA or zinc supplementation if you're an active person. I don't have any specific sources that I can point you to, unfortunately. There's a little controversy here, too, to be aware of, because there is a lot of marketing hype around ZMA, about it being a "testosterone booster" (a zinc deficiency will lower your testosterone, hence supplementing it "boosts" your testosterone) and also in terms of the recommended dosages (zinc has an antagonistic relationship with copper, iron, and magnesium -- you can easily overdo it and create other mineral deficiencies). Having said that, and again just speaking for myself, I think that ZMA or zinc alone, after everything else was in place, is the thing that pushed my sleep quality over the edge from "meets goals" to "exceeds expectations".
I really, really want to make it abundantly clear that I don't think taking ZMA or zinc before bedtime will work for people that don't have these other major factors in place and/or don't have a (training-induced) deficiency to begin with.
In terms of my experimentation process... I didn't keep a notebook but I can sort of walk you down the path that I took.
I started with exercise but for years I was only doing cardio. I was a competitive distance runner from 12 to 18 and then maintained the habit until I was 25. Then I abruptly stopped running. I picked it back up at 32. Distance running specifically because I really knew nothing else. In my late 30s, I picked up strength training. Today, I maintain a clear balance between strength and conditioning. Endurance work is only used to develop or maintain specific physiological adaptations.
Also around that 32 mark, I realized that frequent alcohol consumption wasn't doing me any favors. Of course I already knew this but I wasn't serious about it before this point. Today, I try to strictly limit alcohol intake to Friday / Saturday evenings with limits of no more than 3 drinks per night and no alcohol after ~8:30-9pm. I'd wager that I average 2-4 drinks per week today and I find that this doesn't appreciably impact my sleep.
I also noticed a big difference when I started to tap the brakes on my caffeine intake. Dr. Walker's book on sleep, which also comes with it's own controversy, highlighted something very important to me: The quarter-life on caffeine is ~12 hours. That realization was enough to get me to take rate limiting caffeine seriously.
By the time we had our twins, I was 38. I had dialed in my nutrition and exercise to a healthy place at this point. But my sleep quality was still lacking. I knew that I needed to really focus on it if I was going to survive the first few years of multiple young children. That's when I started to look into hygiene factors.
I run hot. Higher body temperatures can disrupt sleep. I stopped eating after 8pm. We bought "cooling" sheets. I started to sleep with a lightweight comforter. I started wearing cotton boxers and socks to bed. We invested in a fairly expensive mattress. I started to actually feel comfortable in our bed. I also invested in a pillow that didn't leave me waking up with a tight, sore neck. The sheets, comforter, and pillow went through a trial and error process.
One of our twins is highly susceptible to sleep disruptions from light. Once we figured that out, we outfitted our bedroom (they were still sleeping in their cribs in our room at that time) with blackout curtains. That made an immediately noticeable difference. Waking up that following morning, my wife and I both looked at each other and wondered why we'd waited so long. Now every bedroom in our home has blackout shades or curtains.
It's an agonizingly slow process. And I think it's also very subjective, especially the nutrition and exercise pieces. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dr. Andrew Huberman but he has his own podcast, as well as multiple podcast appearances, where he gets into improving sleep / sleep quality. I'd recommend checking those out. Should be easy enough to find on YouTube.
The hosts are managed via chef, the jobs/tasks running on those hosts by something roughly equivalent to k8s.
As for the conflicts, I have to say I loathe the way the more dynamic part of configuration works. It might be the most ill conceived and poorly implemented system I've seen in 30+ years of working in the industry. Granted, it does basically work, but at the cost of wasting thousands of engineers' time every day. The conflicts occur because (a) it abuses source control as its underlying mechanism and (b) it generates the actual configs (what gets shipped to the affected machines) from the user-provided versions in a non-deterministic way which causes spurious differences. All of its goals - auditability, validation, canaries, caching, etc. - could be achieved without such aggravation if the initial design hadn't been so mind-bogglingly stupid.
But I digress. Sorry not sorry. ;) To answer your question, my personal solution is to take advantage of the fact that I'm on the US east coast and commit most of my changes before everybody else gets active.
Do you have any recommendations on sources when I can read more about your viewpoint? I craving some inner peace after a month of almost constant fear and anxiety.
