Posts by Eugene O'Rourke
One of the first complaints about Archiseek back in 1996 was my spelling of "colour" as "colour" (americans), and that i had more stuff on Monaghan than Cork (indignant Cork people, and i'm from....) #archiseek30
Before the ubiquity of personal computers, a group of teens gathered in a New Jersey barn to learn to code, program, and experiment with the interactive world of the future. @spectrum.ieee.org excerpts "README," a literary history of computers by @patrickmccray.bsky.social:
Starup Orbital Arc has designed a smaller, more efficient thruster for launching satellites. By using nanoscale tips that polarize electrons instead of plasma generation, these thrusters can have a 30-40 percent improvement in power efficiency.
spectrum.ieee.org/ion-thruster
@sandialabs.bsky.social is testing #supercomputers with reconfigurable accelerators, similar to FPGAs, that optimize their hardware for specific computations that are being run. spectrum.ieee.org/reconfigurab...
What do computers and looms have in common? The grandchild of two early computer architects sees a connection reflected in one Irish word.
A dialog box in Platinum Mac OS style. The title is "Age Verification". The body of the dialog has the text "Does you neck hurt?" with Yes and No buttons.
Age verification
Imagine hearing aids that enhance sound by syncing with your brainwaves, reducing mental strain in noisy environments. By tracking brain activity and tiny eye measurements, these hearing aids would measure cognitive load and adjust accordingly. spectrum.ieee.org/hearing-aids...
NASA Shut Down Voyager 1 Science Instrument After Unexpected Power Drop gizmodo.com/nasa-shut-down-voyager-s...
This illustration summarises the almost 14-billion-year long history of our Universe. It shows the main events that occurred between the initial phase of the cosmos, where its properties were almost uniform and punctuated only by tiny fluctuations, to the rich variety of cosmic structure that we observe today: stars and galaxies. The series of panels on the right side of the illustration zooms into the cosmic large-scale structure to reveal first a cluster of galaxies, then a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy, and finally, the Solar System.
Thought for the day:
Earth is 10^30 times as dense as an averaged-out sample of the universe. That is, gravity has amplified the density of our planet by a factor of thousand billion billion billion. Without that amplification, we would not be here. 🧪🔭
Fascinating analysis of modern Ireland by Sinead O'Sullivan (who I know via her space policy work) www.butthistime.com/p/mind-the-gap
Transcript of an online conversation between some AI chud and the president of the Signal foundation: Bill Mitchell :Signal will some sort of LLM integration in it soon. Meredith Whittaker: No <3 Bill Mitchell: They will, likely be timing up with Anthropic's Claude or Perplexity, but its coming. The engineers have already began laying out the ground work for such support. Meredith Whittaker: ...he says to Signal's president
No ❤️
"Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person."
- Sherlock Holmes, fictional UK detective, (1854 - 1914)
Latest news semiengineering.com/chip-industr...
#semiconductor
Comic. [Person and person with white hat facing two boxes stacked with $80 price tag and sale tag on each box.] PERSON 1: They want $80 for this? I could make one myself for $10 in parts, an hour of work, a trip to the hardware store, another $30 in parts, another few hours of work, two more trips to the store for $20 more in parts, another hour of work to redo the first hour of work because I messed up, and $80 to buy this when the one I made breaks.
Make It Myself
xkcd.com/3233/
Time Dilation kind of makes the whole “datacenters in space” idea more fun.
Technically… a GPS Block III CPU runs an extra ~7,000 clock cycles per day compared to the same machine on earth.
Extend to the extreme, and you get the whole subfield of CS+physics called relativistic hypercompuation.
youtu.be/H1dojg6panc?...
Lego layout of a CMOS invertor
80,000,000nm process technology.
Not useful to build a RISC-V
Trinity Unseen...
The Edge Hotel in Whitehaven, Cumbria
If anyone is in the Whitehaven area, could you pop over to the Jawas and ask if they have any secondhand droids for sale, thanks.
Paris' Bull and Dublin start-up Equal1 have entered into a partnership that aims to boost the next generation of hybrid quantum-classical technologies via European solutions.
European chip giant ASML continued to post strong results today, as the AI race leads to surging demand.
The value of goods exported from Ireland has grown dramatically from only €11 billion in 1984 to €224 billion in 2024 - that's an incredible twenty-fold increase. Our trade balance has risen from zero to a €89bn surplus. Wow. 🇮🇪📈
www.cso.ie/en/releasesa...
The cover for this week’s Future Issue is “New Horizons,” by Christoph Niemann. See what’s inside: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Aifa_g
youtu.be/YmUxa_nSKZE?...