Rusts memory safety constructs do also impose a (much smaller) runtime performance penalty. Every Arc / Rc is a memory safe abstraction with runtime cost since rust has no way to prove cyclic reference graphs are safe at compile time.
The issue isn't in generating short wavelength light, it's in focusing it accurately enough to print a pattern with trillions of nanoscale features with few defects. We can't really use lenses since every material we could use is opaque to high energy photons so we need to use mirrors, which still absorb a lot of the light energy hitting them. Now this only explains why we need all the crazy stuff that asml puts in it's EUV machines to use near x-ray light, but not why they don't use x-ray or higher energy photons. I believe the answer to this is just that the mirrors they can use for EUV are unacceptably bad for anything higher, but I'm not sure
Photoresist too. XRays are really good at passing through matter, which is a bit of a problem when the whole goal is for them to be absorbed by a 100 nanometer thick film. They tend to ionize stuff, which is actually a mechanism for resist development, but XRay energies are high enough that the reactions become less predictable. They can knock electrons into neighboring resist regions or even knock them out of the material altogether.
Invading Taiwan isn't about chips at all, and in fact chips are actively disincentivizing invasion. Semiconductor fabs and the oodles of atomically precise ultra clean and ultra expensive equipment inside absolutely do not mix well with bombs.
Tangent but while the joint strike fighter program's decision to "save costs" by developing one platform for three branches may arguably have been a bad idea, by all respects except for perhaps long term maintenance costs the f35 is the most effective fighter in the skies.
All semiconductor manufacturing techniques are based upon precisely flat layers of material that can be stacked and/or drilled into to produce a useful design. All vertical irregularities propogate to the layers above and can cause thinner layers when an upper layer is milled flat
I don't think it's stupid to believe that the brain is somehow beyond turing computable considering how easy it is to create a system exactly as capable as a turing machine. I also don't think that anything in philosophy can provide empirical evidence that the brain is categorically special as opposed to emergently special. The sum total of the epistemology I've studied boiled down to people saying "I think human consciousness / the brain works like this" with varying degrees of complexity.
That's the estimated total cost of the joint strike fighter program including research, acquisition, and maintenance, up to its current intended retirement in the 2060s
If the estimated unit cost of ~90-110 million dollars is right, I'd argue it's a pretty big success. The absolute cheapest 4th generation fighter would cost you an order of 20-30 million dollars to import brand-new, whereas 4.5th generation platforms like the Rafale commonly fetch 100m+ a unit to import.
As far as credible 5th generation strike fighters go, that's a pretty cheap per-squadron price tag. My bigger gripe is with the "Big Bomb Diplomacy" tactics that require such a platform, but we'd end up wanting one either way if a fight with China is in the cards.
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