There's a guy who makes them in his garage. They're not really conceptually hard to make as such, they're just fiddly, delicate, labour-intensive and mostly replaced by astoundingly cheaper and often better (outside of a few niches) solid state options.
If there were some kind of interdiction on silicon (an evil genie or some kind of Butlerian Jihad perhaps?), the market would remember and/or rediscover the thermoelectric effect and throw money/postapocalyptic bartered goods at glassblowers pretty sharpish.
If that status continued, I'm sure we'd see developments in that space in terms of miniaturisation, robustness, efficiency, performance, etc., that would seem as improbable to us as a modern CPU would seem to someone in the no-silicon timeline. You may never get to "most of a teraflops in your pocket, runs all day on 4000mAh and costs three figures" but you could still do a meaningfully large amount of computation with valves.
Savant-tier, obsessive, dedicates his life to it "guy" does it in his garage over a period of how many years, and has succeeded to what point yet? Has he managed even a single little 8-bit or even 4-bit cpu? I'm cheering that guy on, you know, but he's hardly cranking out the next-gen GPUs.
>the market would remember
Markets don't remember squat. The market might try to re-discover, but this shit's path dependent. Re-discovery isn't guaranteed, and it's even less likely when a civilization that is desperate to have previously-manufacturable technology can't afford to dump trillions of dollars of research into it because it's also a poor civilization due to its inability to manufacture these things.
You don't need trillions of dollars to start making tubes again. And it wouldn't be that one guy doing it for funsies, would it? If the question was "can one hobbyist bootstrap everything on his own" then I would agree. Maybe you completely lose even the insight that a small electric current can be used to switch or modulate a larger one. But if you're also losing mid-high-school physics knowledge, that's a different issue.
As I said, you probably won't ever get to where we are now with the technology, but then again probably 99.999% of computing power is wasted on gimmicks and inefficiency. Probably more these days. You could certainly run a vaguely modern society on only electromechanical and thermionic gear - you have power switching with things like thyrotrons, obviously radios, and there were computers made that way, such as the Harwell Witch in 1952.
Maybe you don't get 4K AI video generation or petabyte-scale advertising analytics but you could have quite a lot.
Looking at the Ryzen 7 9800X running at 5.2 GHz, if you chopped off 99.999% of that, you'd get a 52 kHz CPU, with 6.6 megaflops vs the original 6.6 gigaflops.
For reference, the original 4004 Intel CPU from 1971 ran at 740 kHz, so 52 kHz isn't even enough computing to do a secure TLS web connection without an excessively long wait. The 4004 did not do floating point, however, and it wouldn't be until between the 486 (1989) and the Pentium (1993) that we see 5-10 MFLOPS of performance.
Hmm... I think 9800X should be able to do at least 32 FLOPS per cycle per core. So 1.3 TFLOPS is the ceiling for the CPU. 1/100000 leaves you... 12 MFLOPS.
99.999 may be an ass-pull of a figure, but I was thinking more in terms of having whole datacentres screaming along doing crypto, billions of cat videos, Big Data on "this guy bought a dishwasher, give him more dishwasher adverts", spinning up a whole virtual server to compile a million line codebase on every change, and AI services for pictures of a chipmunk wearing sunglasses. There's a good chunk of computation that we as a society could just go without. I know of embedded systems that run at hundreds of MHz and could replaced by no CPU at all and still fulfill the main task to some extent. Because early models indeed used no CPU. Many fewer functions, but they still fundamentally worked.
Many things we now take for granted would indeed be impossible. I suppose the good news is that in some electropunk timeline where everyone had to use tubes, your TLS connection might not be practical, but the NSA datacentre would be even less practical. On the other hand, there'd be huge pressure on efficiency in code and hardware use. Just before transistorisation, amazing things were done with tubes or electromechanically, and if that had been at the forefront of research for the last 70 years, who knows what the state of the at would look like. Strowger switches would look like Duplo.
Probably there would still be a lot of physical paperwork, though!
Comparisons to old technology is just something I do for fun, don't read too much into it. :)
Fun fact: A usb-C to HDMI dongle for has more computing power than the computer that took us to the moon.
As far as the NSA being even less practical, they're among the few who have the staff that could eke every last cycle of performance out of what remained. Maybe the Utah datacenter wouldn't work, but Room 641A long predates that.
The whole of human civilization would need to be completely moribund before every manufacturer stops designing and making new weird industrial/embedded CPUs for little niches.
And because they go into things like dishwashers and cars (and missiles) and stuff that dies for other reasons than chip failure, you always need some supply of them.
Though I guess if we end all wars and make stuff so good that you literally never need a new widget ever and all industry just stops, then I suppose there is such a thing as a perfect design.
Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?
Perhaps for an individual shop right now, in a world where Klarna exists but not universally, yes, there's a benefit to using it to lock in that particular customer right now.
It's less obvious to me, in the long run, that widespread Klarnification results in benefits to any particular shop. As mentioned earlier, having Klarna sapping up to double-digit percentages of the portion of customers' money (it's "zero interest" until it very much isn't, and they're in the "subprime" market) they were spending on possible-Klarnables and a few percent of yours on top as fees is easily a bigger impact that the average losses, if any, from the delta between switch-away and -to.
It's a bit of a prisoners' dilemma: you stand to gain money by defecting (to using Klarna) unilaterally, but if everyone does that, you all, plus the customer, collectively lose money (to Klarna).
> Surely that averages out with people switching the other way during the save-up period?
Maybe? I’m not aware yet of any data that would support that hypothesis one way or the other. But we know that some businesses fail and some succeed so it would lead me to believe that hypothesis probably isn’t correct. As you mention though the availability of these offers isn’t universal, some businesses eschew these options and others don’t, and we will see that play out in the market.
If the businesses that don’t offer these services (cash only businesses as an analog) fail or convert you might have your answer.
I will also say that for many businesses they offer more than one BNPL provider at checkout so there is competitive pressure to offer good terms, have good creditworthiness models, and features to attract customers. Platforms like Shopify allow BNPL providers to create easy to use plugins that appear at checkout and merchants can add a few including Shopify’s home grown solution rather trivially.
In general I think your argument that it’s less obvious that it’s beneficial “in the long run” rests on the same logic that credit cards, 0% for 12 month offers, personal loans, etc. do as to whether there are benefits. Right now businesses add these products and see revenue go up, even if margins go down by 6-8% or so.
> 1GB storage in 2004 to 15GB storage 21 years later
The original marketing was the the storage would grow forever, and you could believe it. Google was riding the an incredible high from smashing out what felt like constant Amazing New Things throughout the noughties. In fact, when they originally made the claim, back when Don't Be Evil was still the motto and they hadn't bought DoubleClick, I'm sure they believed it. By the time the final upgrade (or rather joining, of 5GB photos/Drive to 10GB mail) to 15GB came round in 2013, there was definitely a hint of the horns in the hairline.
It can't be that objective if there are multiple schools of thought. Getting two economists to agree on why what happened yesterday happened is hard enough, let alone getting them to agree on what we should do today to have a specific outcome tomorrow.
Breaking Google's stranglehold on how people access the Internet sounds pretty good.
Firefox would need to find a better deal than being slowly choked out by Google in exchange for the "it's not antitrust if we pay these guys while we do it" money.
Maybe they can finally double down on ad-freedom as their PR rather than keeping it at arm's length and letting Brave take the credit.
No, that's fraud. A scam can be legal. Timeshares, "Winter Wonderlands", many extended warranties, planned obsolescence, weaselly technically-correct advertising (overpromising to investors is sort of this) pretty much everything hidden in ToC screeds, some MLM schemes, basically all cryptocurrency (and a lot of normal finance to be fair), etc etc.
Many graduate into criminality, but it's not required.
Presumably, if you wanted to stick the boot in on Russia, a decent way to do that is to encourage smart, economically productive Russians to incorporate outside Russia and attract as many young capable Russians to come with them as possible.
If there were some kind of interdiction on silicon (an evil genie or some kind of Butlerian Jihad perhaps?), the market would remember and/or rediscover the thermoelectric effect and throw money/postapocalyptic bartered goods at glassblowers pretty sharpish.
If that status continued, I'm sure we'd see developments in that space in terms of miniaturisation, robustness, efficiency, performance, etc., that would seem as improbable to us as a modern CPU would seem to someone in the no-silicon timeline. You may never get to "most of a teraflops in your pocket, runs all day on 4000mAh and costs three figures" but you could still do a meaningfully large amount of computation with valves.
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