Code bases have a lot of cross-references as well. Perhaps the most easily described is 'jump to definition'. But that's handled by your IDE/editor together with language specific tooling, and has nothing to do with git.
Why should legal texts be any different as far as git is concerned?
Let's leave github out of the discussion. That's a completely different beast. (And funny enough, github does provide 'go to definition' for some languages.)
So my point was that git is obviously useful for source code of programs.
And as you point out, git does not provide 'go to definition' for source code of programs.
Hence I suggest that the inability of git to provide cross-references in legal text is about as relevant (or rather irrelevant) to the discussion at hand as git's inability to provide cross-references is source code.
GP clarifies "the bullet never rises above the boreline of the gun" which tells me he might have thought that Chuck was saying the bullet literally goes up after coming out then comes down, instead of the boreline being pointed up relative to the pointed-down sightline.
No, we cannot. IBM moved neutral atoms around on an inert surface. No one has demonstrated building covalent structures (or metallic, or ionic for that matter).
My startup is trying to do this, and it is a fiendishly hard problem.
Is this "we" you and your startup or all of humanity? There are a variety of published papers that show simple memories and other structures that are way outside my domain knowledge (qd transistors?).
Why is it hard? You need to be able to position things with sub-angstrom precision from a platform that has ~nm uncertainty in the critical z positioning, and in the case of nc-AFM is oscillating to boot.
And you can’t use existing tools. You need an atomically precise scanning probe tip with very specific reactive chemical structure, but NOT react with the surface while scanning with a voltage bias.
And where do you source feedstock from? Needs to be delivered to the surface in passive form but be activated when needed to switch to being chemically reactive in a specific way to get it on the transfer tool and then onto the part being built.
Oh, and this is without even getting into how many electronic structures are entirely invisible at certain voltages, everything looks like an identical blobish shape, surfaces are reconfiguring themselves constantly, and probes randomly crash due to piezo creep, destroying days or weeks of work.
My startup has solutions to all of these problems. And the payoff at the end is reliable, scalable quantum computers, followed by full-on Drexlarian nanotech. But yeah, it’s a fiendishly hard problem.
The story of technological progress is one of shrinking feature sizes in manufacturing. Not just semiconductors, but everything. The Industrial Revolution is really the story of higher tolerance and more reliable manufacturing pins.
You can explore the physical limits of technology by looking at what happens when we reach perfect atomic precision--every atom where we want, in any configuration permitted by physical law. Across nearly every vertical, this represents a 100x to 1000x improvement. In some cases factors of 10^8 to 10^12 over present-day capabilities.
Developing a process to build structures atom-by-atom (essentially 3D printing diamond or other gemstone materials with atomic precision) would enable skipping to these theoretical limits, with the corresponding step function increase in functionality.
It would also move our technological base off being based on rare metals and alloys, and onto an industrial economy built on carbon (diamond and graphene), and other elements commonly available in the Earth's crust and atmosphere. After 3,000 years we will finally move from the Iron Age to the Diamond Age, and with it bring an eventual end to material scarcity and the economic basis for global conflict. You'd seriously need to go back as far as the invention of agriculture or Bronze Age or early Iron Age metallurgy to find a comparably transformative technological advancement.
Within the VC-fundable horizon of the next couple years, early versions of this manufacturing tech will permit making high-value quantum devices like sensors or qubits, as these can be manufactured by introducing certain defects into a growing crystal, with atomic precision relative to other defects or surface features.
What’s the plan for dealing with cosmic rays? I worry about when your beautiful angstrom-precision qubit networks encounter a relativistic proton or muon.
At near surface level ( 80m above ground in clear dry air ) 42 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation crystal will experience ~ one to two thousand gamma events a second .. most of relatively low energy (and ground sourced).
The fall off from low orbit to surface is substantial in both event numbers and energy level.
The higher energy cosmic sourced events at surface level are down in the hundred or less a second (IIRC).
If there's a plan it'd likely include having 9x redundancy hardware surrounded by water deep in a former salt mine .. that'd take cosmic ray events way down and provide a (best of three) x (tell me three times) "just in case" statistical sharpening.
None of that is needed. You're talking about surface events per square meter (roughly) and we're talking about a device with total dimensions smaller than a single TSMC 2nm transistor. The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable. There are way bigger operational risks to worry about.
At an irrelevant scale. The cross sectional area of these devices will be 18 - 20 orders of magnitude smaller.
> Always a possibility under consideration...
We're talking about the cross section of a macro-scale (visible with the naked eye) chip vs. a cluster of a few dozen atoms. Certainly you can understand the difference of scale? Cosmic ray induced bit flips are extremely infrequent events at the datacenter scale.
What's the frequency at which a single, specific transistor will be struck? Not that a bit flip occurs somewhere in a large datacenter, but the chance of just a specific transistor being hit. Now reduce that 100-fold. That's the base rate we're talking about.
The liklihood of a particular structure being hit is very, very small. Negligible over the operational lifetime of the device.
In the long-term vision of scaled-up nanotechnology, there will of course have to be redundancy and mechanisms for disabling, removing, and recycling (or incinerating) mechanisms destroyed by cosmic rays.
Things don't like to move once they're atomically-stuck together. Getting them to stick is another issue altogether. Doing so in reliable locations repeatedly at scale? Good luck.
We’ll see if they fly again or they are done with space for good. There is no way they’ll publicly complain or acknowledge issues. as it will look unprofessional, but actions will tell.
Wasn't this (or rather, the original short mission) expected to likely be the last mission for them anyways, due to age?
I really hope they'll at some point clearly say either "well, of course we missed our families, but really, getting such an opportunity was AWESOME and Boeing's misfortune was a huge lucky event for us" or "Being up there is awesome, but quite honestly, having to do it unexpectedly really sucked".
And I don't think that it is the slightest bit unprofessional to have feelings about where you spent a year of your life, or to talk about those feelings.
> And I don't think that it is the slightest bit unprofessional to have feelings about where you spent a year of your life, or to talk about those feelings.
I think it’s cultural. Astronauts I think are more disciplined and more professional on average than an average Joe. Even if they hated it they probably wouldn’t mention it publicly. Maybe after they retire from NASA completely.
Conversely, I can't imagine them saying they were happy and lucky beyond their dreams, even if they felt that way, because "being in space is more awesome than having a life" would be a view too controversial to voice, and wouldn't be received well by most of society.
I guess until they retire and leave NASA we may never know. Otherwise it would be quite unprofessional of them to criticize their time there or air out the dirty laundry.
The point is, they are expected to say they enjoyed every minute of it in front of the camera. And if they really didn’t we may not hear about it.
And loved every minute of being up there. They were promised 8 days in space and got 8 months doing awesome science on the ISS. They’re astronauts; they live for this stuff.
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