gas

June 18, 2011 by yorksranter 0 comments

MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the Week

Swinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny’s of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine’s thesis here that China’s emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world. It’s surely time we started calling the…

August 18, 2008 by yorksranter 7 comments

The Harrowell Plan (Or, No Christmas Card from Dsquared)

I’m about to propose something to make Daniel Davies cry. Specifically, it’s a solution to a problem we currently deal with by a cash transfer through the tax and benefit system. But I think I’ve made a good case that trying to deal with high energy prices by paying the poor to burn more energy…

August 2, 2008 by yorksranter 0 comments

Civilisation is common defence and waste disposal

Jamie Zawinski links to a campaign to have a Californian sewage works renamed after George W. Bush. I disagree, strongly. Who on earth would associate something as civic, egalitarian, and useful as sewage treatment with the Commander Guy? Not just that, but it’s a publicly-owned sewage plant, part of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.…

December 23, 2006 by yorksranter 0 comments

Electricity – let it wash all over me! Or not

James Glanz of the NYT reports at great length on the electrical siege of Baghdad, with detail, network maps, and more. Great. Obviously, this being a blog, the primary meaning of this is an excuse to moan about the press. Why didn’t Glanz (or anyone else at the NYT) report on this back in 2004,…

First-time buyers face toughest test for 70 years, lenders say - BBC News
the most common living arrangement for an adult aged between 18 and 34 in 1997 was being in a couple with children, but now it was living with your parents.
Super Micro plunges ahead of third-quarter earnings later this month
Super Micro Computer, one of the vendors that build Nvidia-based servers, saw shares drop 23% Friday after the company broke from its recent pattern of providing preliminary results, and announced it would report earnings later this month. In January, Super Micro increased its sales and earnings guidance 11 days before announcing second-quarter financials. The company […]
Samsung doubles AP developers, introduces Google's Gemini Nano 2 into Galaxy S25
Before the Galaxy S24, earlier flagship Galaxy models did not come with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). However, Samsung aims to provide AI services through software updates by enabling the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform functions similar to an NPU // this is wrong; some of the Exy ones […]
With robots seen as the next big thing, Taiwanese manufacturers target highly-priced key component
The reducer is one of the most crucial components of robots, as it increases torque by reducing rotational speed, thus improving robots' precision on repetitive actions. It's also one of the most expensive components, accounting for over one-third of a robot's total cost. Analysts pointed out that traditional six-axis joint robots typically pair two harmonic […]
TSMC's earnings call points to AI HPC as sole driver
IC design companies note that their end customers have begun downgrading their annual sales forecasts for low-end and mid-range smartphones and PCs. With weak demand in the low- and mid-range, they can only hope that they will see some growth by hitching on the AI bandwagon. More concerning is TSMC's gloomy forecast for automotive chips
Strong AI demand drives TSMC US site development
The first wafer fab has made excellent progress. It started engineering wafer manufacturing with 4nm process technology in April and expects to start mass production in the first half of 2025. The second fab's plans have been updated to include 2nm process production to meet increasing AI demand, in addition to the previously disclosed 3nm […]
Samsung's mobile AP market share falls behind Apple and MediaTek
In the global mobile AP chip market in the fourth quarter of 2023, MediaTek secured the top spot with a market share of 36% when based on shipment volume. MediaTek was followed by Qualcomm (23%), Apple (20%), UNISOC (13%), and Samsung (5%). Analysis believes that as the demand for system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for 5G and […]
TSMC lowers 2024 semiconductor, foundry outlook
The company anticipates stable growth in the second quarter and full year, but surprised people by revising downward its full-year outlook for the semiconductor (excluding memory) industry...revenue from AI server processors will more than double in 2024 and account for a low-teens percentage of TSMC's 2024 revenue. In the next five years, AI server processors […]
Beat Nvidia with RISC-V? Samsung expands its AI chip unit in Silicon Valley
Getting into RISC-V and grinding an inference ASIC. I wonder if the ASIC is using their NPU from mobile, as there was a major security issue with that which caused them to block third-party access to the API
AI giants wrestle with data drought amid LLM race
He speculates future models like GPT-5 may require even more data, ranging from 60 to 100 trillion tokens. Villalobos indicates that despite utilizing all available high-quality textual and visual data, future AI models may still face a gap of 10 to 20 trillion tokens in data // as Naveen Rao says, data efficiency is *the* […]