Andreesen and other broligarchs are horrible, mediocre, insecure people with no redeeming human qualities who don't get the respect they feel they're due. So they try to force us instead.
Wonderful article and written with surgical precision.
'It’s not the technology that’s the problem: it’s the horrible, horrible assholes who own it.' With few exceptions this is the norm. The billionaires are made rich by 'farms' of programmers. The bigger the 'farm' the more programming and development can occur. Andreesen reaps the benefits of the work of his programmers. He didn't and never will inherit their intelligence.
Thank you for this. What a great systematic and methodical take down. It always baffles me how people with a lot of money or fame see themselves as geniuses who have some special insight into how things work and what the future of humanity should and will be. They are also supremely unaware of the things that got them to where they are. Thank you also for teachin me about the original concept of a free market.
"As an additional observation, the 22nm NTV vector permute unit and the 32nm variable precision FPU papers were partially funded by a grant from the US government. This suggests that the two techniques are aimed at a single larger goal. Presumably, this grant is related to research programs on energy efficient computing, or perhaps the Exascale program.
& "There is no question that a higher performance design would be able to sustain higher prices and pay for the additional die area. Perhaps most telling, US government grants typically focus on areas of national interest. Graphics simply is not vital to the country, whereas HPC is a critical tool for the Departments of Defense, Energy, and any number of intelligence agencies."
The author concludes,
""Moreover, the optimal operating point for NTV designs tends to be quite low. The 32nm Pentium core increased efficiency by about 5×, by running at slightly under 100MHz. The maximum frequency was 915MHz, so the absolute performance decreased by about an order of magnitude. That is a tremendous sacrifice to achieve energy efficiency; one that may not be feasible for many applications."
"The trade-offs associated with near-threshold voltage techniques strongly suggest certain applications. General purpose CPUs for client systems are unlikely to benefit from NTV. While energy efficiency is important, sacrificing frequency is inconsistent with the overall design targets."
The article, written in 2012, got its first reply in over 10 years, in December of 2024, where I stated that the "unlikely to benefit" isn't true:
It fits a pattern that Intel is happy to receive government money to work on something, but isn't really compelled to market it further for as Steve Jobs once said "for the rest of us."
And while people today look at Job's quote as cynical, because Apple products are expensive and out of reach for many, it really did require getting the computers out of the large organizations' labs (the top 0.1%) into the hands of the top 10% before the other "rest of us" (bottom 90%) Though, there's still probably 10% or more without computers or internet.
Thank you Dougald for doing all this useful parsing for us. Much appreciated.
I do have a small quibble with a point you made and you didn't take to the finish line:
" It’s not a function of nature - it’s a function of the way rules have been written for a society where a tiny fraction of the population own for a living, because everyone is paying them monopoly rents, and this concentration of wealth keeps growing because the people with the wealth use it to rewrite the rules to their benefit, buy governments, and payoff politicians, police, and judges so the law doesn’t apply to them."
We know that this is not how it works, that some just write some laws and then everyone, willy-nilly, obeys, as if the laws were handed down by God(s). Nah, especially for protecting private property of some, untold millions, throught written and unwritten human history, have been and are presently being killed, tortured, enslaved, relocated, deprived of liberty, etc.
Force has beeing used and is used. People were deported to Australia for 7 years for stealing a handkerchief, for God sake.
Yes, rules have been written, but in blood, rivers and seas of blood and no amount of Dreamcatchers that were ever in existance can save us from the nightmares and terror inflicted to enforce these laws.
Well, no. There are just laws and there are unjust laws, and just as there is conflict there is also cooperation, and there are degrees of corruption. These are all human systems and human institutions, and they can be set up to be exploitive or not, and there are laws and policies that have reflect justice and mercy.
Wonderful article and written with surgical precision.
'It’s not the technology that’s the problem: it’s the horrible, horrible assholes who own it.' With few exceptions this is the norm. The billionaires are made rich by 'farms' of programmers. The bigger the 'farm' the more programming and development can occur. Andreesen reaps the benefits of the work of his programmers. He didn't and never will inherit their intelligence.
Yep. Good Read and Rational Argument.
Thank you for this. What a great systematic and methodical take down. It always baffles me how people with a lot of money or fame see themselves as geniuses who have some special insight into how things work and what the future of humanity should and will be. They are also supremely unaware of the things that got them to where they are. Thank you also for teachin me about the original concept of a free market.
In 2011, Intel received government grants for a technology I was interested in:
https://www.realworldtech.com/near-threshold-voltage/
"As an additional observation, the 22nm NTV vector permute unit and the 32nm variable precision FPU papers were partially funded by a grant from the US government. This suggests that the two techniques are aimed at a single larger goal. Presumably, this grant is related to research programs on energy efficient computing, or perhaps the Exascale program.
& "There is no question that a higher performance design would be able to sustain higher prices and pay for the additional die area. Perhaps most telling, US government grants typically focus on areas of national interest. Graphics simply is not vital to the country, whereas HPC is a critical tool for the Departments of Defense, Energy, and any number of intelligence agencies."
The author concludes,
""Moreover, the optimal operating point for NTV designs tends to be quite low. The 32nm Pentium core increased efficiency by about 5×, by running at slightly under 100MHz. The maximum frequency was 915MHz, so the absolute performance decreased by about an order of magnitude. That is a tremendous sacrifice to achieve energy efficiency; one that may not be feasible for many applications."
"The trade-offs associated with near-threshold voltage techniques strongly suggest certain applications. General purpose CPUs for client systems are unlikely to benefit from NTV. While energy efficiency is important, sacrificing frequency is inconsistent with the overall design targets."
The article, written in 2012, got its first reply in over 10 years, in December of 2024, where I stated that the "unlikely to benefit" isn't true:
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=125646&curpostid=222111
It fits a pattern that Intel is happy to receive government money to work on something, but isn't really compelled to market it further for as Steve Jobs once said "for the rest of us."
And while people today look at Job's quote as cynical, because Apple products are expensive and out of reach for many, it really did require getting the computers out of the large organizations' labs (the top 0.1%) into the hands of the top 10% before the other "rest of us" (bottom 90%) Though, there's still probably 10% or more without computers or internet.
https://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/isscc/2012/pdfs/ISSCC-IL-Press-Overview.pdf
https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc24/HC24-6-Tech-Scalability/HC24.29.625-IA-23-Wide-Ruhl-Intel_2012_NTV_iA.pdf
Thank you Dougald for doing all this useful parsing for us. Much appreciated.
I do have a small quibble with a point you made and you didn't take to the finish line:
" It’s not a function of nature - it’s a function of the way rules have been written for a society where a tiny fraction of the population own for a living, because everyone is paying them monopoly rents, and this concentration of wealth keeps growing because the people with the wealth use it to rewrite the rules to their benefit, buy governments, and payoff politicians, police, and judges so the law doesn’t apply to them."
We know that this is not how it works, that some just write some laws and then everyone, willy-nilly, obeys, as if the laws were handed down by God(s). Nah, especially for protecting private property of some, untold millions, throught written and unwritten human history, have been and are presently being killed, tortured, enslaved, relocated, deprived of liberty, etc.
Force has beeing used and is used. People were deported to Australia for 7 years for stealing a handkerchief, for God sake.
Yes, rules have been written, but in blood, rivers and seas of blood and no amount of Dreamcatchers that were ever in existance can save us from the nightmares and terror inflicted to enforce these laws.
And it bears repeating, over, and over, and over.
Well, no. There are just laws and there are unjust laws, and just as there is conflict there is also cooperation, and there are degrees of corruption. These are all human systems and human institutions, and they can be set up to be exploitive or not, and there are laws and policies that have reflect justice and mercy.
Yeah, in the afterlife...