The scientific study of multitasking over the past few decades has revealed important principles about the operations, and processing limitations, of our minds and brains. One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.
Fair enough, so it's a misnomer. Let's call it task switching then, since we don't actually do tasks at the same time, but switch from one to the other. A Claude Code session helpfully prints a small tldr summary of the ongoing session, so that one can quickly onboard again to the task at hand. I do not find that draining, personally.
When it comes to servers its even more true as you're buying the platform as well as the CPU, the CPU is important to be sure but the platform features are even more so for running the hardware at scale.
A simple example, for a long time you couldn't PXE boot a server from a 10Gb NIC while using AMD chipsets. So every AMD system needed a 1Gb NIC cabled and maintained just to build the server vs a single 10Gb NIC on an Intel platform. That scales out for hundreds of servers now you need a 1Gb fabric and the associated switches etc just to allow you to build your systems.
I think that he meant that the workload still required the 10Gb link, so the AMD servers ended up with two NICs and two sets of cables (a 10 Gb connection and a 1 Gb connection). This leads to higher resource requirements, as they need effectively double the # of switches.
I'm not familiar with the problem at all, that is just how I interpreted his statements.
Also from the complaint something that really stood out me:
"34. In a March 21, 2014 TED interview with journalist Charlie Rose regarding Project
Loon, Google co-founder Larry Page claimed that Google had been thinking of the idea of
launching balloons for “five years or more.” During the course of the interview, Mr. Rose asked
“But are you at the mercy of the wind?” to which Mr. Page responded: “Yeah, but it turns out, that
we did some weather simulations which probably hadn’t really been done before, and if you
control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them or other ways, you
can actually control roughly where they go, and so we think we can build a worldwide mesh of
these balloons over the whole planet.”
35. As set forth above, however, Space Data had reduced this theory and simulations to
actual practice and had conducted over 15,000 flights and accrued over 100,000 flight hours of
such constellations in order to understand the wind patterns by the time Larry Page and other
individuals from Google had visited Space Data. This concept of “if you control the altitude you
can actually control roughly where they go” was something Space Data demonstrated in February
2008 to Larry Page personally with over a dozen balloons in the sky which were actively flying at
Space Data’s network control center."
The comment from Page seems a little disingenuous if the statement from Space Data is true, of course it's a complaint so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt but if it's true that seems pretty damning.
if we cannot manage to guide our balloon, we must, at least, try to keep it in favorable aerial currents. In proportion as we ascend, the latter become much more uniform and flow more constantly in one direction. They are no longer disturbed by the mountains and valleys that traverse the surface of the globe, and these, you know, are the chief cause of the variations of the wind and the inequality of their force. Therefore, these zones having been once determined, the balloon will merely have to be placed in the currents best adapted to its destination."
Thank you for this. People's thinking on idea ownership and exclusivity is maddening. Thousands - millions, even - of ideas got us here, and they want exclusivity on the 1,000,001st.
>This concept of “if you control the altitude you can actually control roughly where they go” was something Space Data demonstrated in February 2008 to Larry Page personally with over a dozen balloons in the sky which were actively flying at Space Data’s network control center."
for just this reason. The "concept" is, and has been for 300 years, the realization that allowed balloonists to steer their craft.
I suspect they have a point, though, even if it's not well made. If they've done enough experimentation to prove they can maintain the position of their balloons at all times (or nearly so) well enough to create a reliable network, that probably qualifies as a trade secret. Knowing that something is possible gets you halfway to copying it.
Space Data themselves made a public presentation[1] of their network of balloon with transceivers (called SkySite) years before Google started their project, so the proof that it was possible was already public information.
It's not clear to me exactly what has Google allegedly infringed upon.
As far as I can tell $35 is approximately £26 ex VAT which is then 20% additional cost for UK customers i.e the £30 prices your seeing at most UK resellers, aimed at UK customers.
The scientific study of multitasking over the past few decades has revealed important principles about the operations, and processing limitations, of our minds and brains. One critical finding to emerge is that we inflate our perceived ability to multitask: there is little correlation with our actual ability. In fact, multitasking is almost always a misnomer, as the human mind and brain lack the architecture to perform two or more tasks simultaneously. By architecture, we mean the cognitive and neural building blocks and systems that give rise to mental functioning. We have a hard time multitasking because of the ways that our building blocks of attention and executive control inherently work. To this end, when we attempt to multitask, we are usually switching between one task and another. The human brain has evolved to single task.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/
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