>“Our strategy is to combine AI and
Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s
largest codebases,” he added. “Our
North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month,
1 million lines of code.’”
its a research project by some engineer at MS to see if its possible to do it. its unlikely they will actually do it ,maybe come up with a plan for it if they think its feasible.
>BP in February announced plans to
sell off $20bn (£15bn) worth of assets in a bid to focus on its core
crude oil and gas business and
strengthen its balance sheet.
Following today's deal and
previous announcements, the
company says its over half way to meeting that target.
It is also shifting its strategy away
from investment in green energy
and renewing its focus on oil and
gas following pressure from some
investors who were frustrated that its profits and share price had
lagged behind rivals.
>Today's Windows Task Manager
executable occupies 6 MB of disk
space. It demands almost 70 MB
before it will show a user just how
much of a memory hog Chrome is these days. The original weighs in
at 85 KB on disk. Its successor is
not orders of magnitude more
functional.
I saw an article here that pointed out that there are keyboards today that have more computing power then the original Apple computer.
“The 8049 has 2 KB of masked ROM (the 8748 and 8749 had EPROM) that can be replaced with a 4 KB external ROM, as well as 128 bytes of RAM and 27 I/O ports. The microcontroller's oscillator block divides the clock input frequency by three and then further divides the result into five machine states. Using the 11 MHz maximum crystal frequency will produce 0.73 MIPS of single-cycle instructions. Some 70% of instructions are single byte and single cycle ones, but 30% need two cycles or two bytes, so its typical performance would be closer to 0.5 MIPS.“
The Apple 1 had more RAM, but I think that, compute-wise, that’s already is fairly close to the performance of the 1MHz Apple 1.
and:
“The original IBM PC keyboard and the keyboard for its precursor the IBM System/23 Datamaster used an 8048 as its internal microcontroller”*
That Wikipedia page isn’t explicit about the difference between 8048 and 8049, but it could only be that the 8049 had twice the ROM and RAM (2k, respectively 128 bytes). If so, the PC keyboard already had a CPU with about the same computing power (but again: not the memory) as an Apple I in 1981.
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.
If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Only true for our current computers and not true with reversible computing.
With reversible computing you can use electricity to perform a calculation and then "push" that electricity back into a battery or a capacitor instead of dumping it to the environment.
It's still a huge challenge, but there is a recent promising attempt:
"British reversible computing startup Vaire has demonstrated an adiabatic reversible computing system with net energy recovery"
Actually pretty cool - I was about to comment “nice perpetual motion machine” but looked into a bit more and it’s much more interesting than that (well, a real perpetual motion machine would be interesting but…)
This kind of stuff could trigger the next revolution in computing, as the theoretical energy consumption of computing is pretty insignificant. Imagine if we could make computers with near-zero energy dissipation! A "solid 3D" computer would then become possible, and Moore's law may keep going until we exhaust the new dimension ;)
I read it as the inefficient part isn't the compute efficiency, the inefficient part is dumping all the resulting heat into the environment without capturing it and using it in some way to generate electricity or do work.
On a related/side note, when there's talk about seti and dyson spheres, and detecting them via infrared waste heat, I also don't understand that. Such an alien civilization is seemingly capable of building massive space structures/projects, but then lets the waste heat just pour out into the universe in such insane quantities that we could see it tens/hundreds of light years away? What a waste. Why wouldn't they recover that heat and make use of it instead? And repeat the recovering until the final waste output is too small to bother recovering, at which point we would no longer be able to detect it.
For example, why couldn't you use the waste heat like a power plant? Use it to boil water, to turn turbines, to generate electricity, which gets sent and consumed elsewhere? Adding to the heat wherever the electricity is finally consumed. (Ignoring various losses along the way).
“Elsewhere” is still somewhere on the Dyson sphere.
Or if you magically beam 100% of the captured energy somewhere else, now that place gets to deal with shedding the heat from however many 1e26W+ of power were consumed. God help the poor planet you aim that ray of death at.
There is no other alternative! If I build a perfect Dyson sphere and capture the energy output of a star, all of that energy will become heat. The average surface temperature of my Dyson sphere will be (IIRC) the ratio of the surface area of the sphere to that of the contained star, multiplied by the star's effective surface temperature.
"Recovering heat and making use of it" requires a heat differential. You need a cold side and a hot side to use energy. Using that energy causes the cold side to heat and the hot side to cool, until they reach equilibrium. The further the difference, the more usable work you can do. The closer the two sides are, the less work you can do.
Someone else here said it best: waste heat is the graveyard of energy. Once you have used energy, it will become high-entropy, low-grade, diffuse heat which is difficult-to-impossible to extract further work from.
These days it's not rare to have data center heated buildings. I guess crypto bros are just not thinking about this. But technically if could be done there too.
There was a startup in EU which explicitly sold heat from crypto mining to the local energy provider. IIRC it was also here on hacker news some time ago.
Heat is the graveyard of energy. Everything that uses energy, or is energy, is actually just energy on it's way to the graveyard.
The energy of the universe is a pool of water a top a cliff. Water running off this cliff is used to do stuff (work), and the pool at the bottom is heat.
The "heat death of the universe" is referring to this water fall running dry, and all the energy being in this useless pool of "heat".
Do thermophotovoltaic cells operate on different kind of heat?
Is it impossible to convert heat into other forms of energy without "consuming" materials like in the case of steam, geothermal or even the ones that need a cold body to utilize thermoelectric effect.
TPVs don't rely solely on the temperature of an object being high, they instead rely on two objects on either side having different temperatures. As heat moves[1] from one side to the other some of the energy from that movement is turned in to electricity.
[1]: Technically the movement itself is heat, the objects don't contain heat, rather they contain internal energy, but the two get mixed up more often than not.
Almost none. A long time ago a friend and I did the math for sound, photons (status LEDs), etc and it was a rounding error of 1% or something silly like that.
And that’s ignoring that sound and photon emissions typically hit a wall or other physical surface and get converted back to heat.
It all ends up as heat in the end, just depends on where that heat is dumped and if you need to cool it or not. Most watts end up being even more than the theoretical heat per watt due to said cooling needs.
There is literally no way around the fact that every watt you burn for compute ends up as a watt of waste heat. The only factor you can control is how many units of compute you can achieve with that same watt.
Well, at least until somebody devises a system that transports or projects it so that the heat ends up somewhere not-Earth. It'd still be heating the universe in general, of course, even in the form of sprays of neutrinos.
That reminds me of a sci-fi book, Sundiver by David Brin, where a ship is exploring the sun by firing a "refrigerator laser" to somehow pump-away excess heat and balance on the thrust.
That's not correct. For ordinary computers there is Landauer's principle, which gives a theoretical lower limit for the energy needed for computation [0].
I say "ordinary computers" because other comments mentioned "reversible computers" for which this limit doesn't apply.
According to the linked wikipedia page, this theoretical limit is around a billion times smaller than current computers use for an operation, so you may call me pedantic.
If I use energy to move a block one foot over, I have performed useful work. But 100% of the energy used to perform that work is either already heat or shortly will be.
If I turn my fan on and 100% of the electricity is converted to heat, where does the kinetic energy of moving fan blades come from? Even the Trump administration cannot just repeal the law of conservation of energy.
Even if most of the energy goes into kinetic energy of the air, that air will lose momentum via turbulence and friction with the surrounding air, which will end up as... heat.
While spinning, the blades store a miniscule amount of kinetic energy.
After removing power even that small amount ends up as heat through friction ( both in the bearing but mostly in the air turbulence). And the blades end up in the same zero energy state: sitting still.
Most of that energy gets transfered to the air that's being moved by the blades, and who knows what that air does eventually. And we're not even talking about the plant growing light that might be sitting in my room near my house plants literally creating new life from electricity.
We do know what that air does eventually. Given no further inputs of energy, it swirls around generating friction, raising its temperature (heat!) as the currents slow down to nearly nothing.
There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level.
The minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.
In the book Calculating God, a character notes that this is a common civilization-wide choice. Living in virtual reality, rather than trying to expand into the vast expanses of space, is a common trope as much as it's a logical choice. It neatly explains the Fermi Paradox. In some fiction, like The Matrix, the choice might be forced due to cultural shifts, but the outcome is the same. A relatively sterile low-energy state civilization doing pure processing.
True. But it's not a binary choice. All it takes is to make one sub-optmial choice for the universe to be filled up with von-neuman probes in all star systems
Heat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
How many computer things you got done per unit electricity, and how many mechanical things you do with the temperature gradient between the computer and its heat sync.
For example, kinda wasteful to cook eggs with new electrons when you could use the computer heat to help you denature those proteins. Or just put the heat in human living spaces.
(Putting aside how practical that actually is... Which it isn't)
No its not. It would be waste only if the there is a high temperature gradient, which is minimized in mining operation through proper cooling.
It's that computation requires electricity. And almost all of the heat in bitcoin mining comes from computation, technically changing transistor state.
I think what they mean is that there is not a Carnot engine hooked up between the heat source and sink. Which theoretically something the data center could do about it.
>“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
Some more context https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...
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