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Cake day: August 25th, 2023

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  • China dominated the Top500 list by 2017, with 202 machines compared to 143 from the U.S. Then the U.S. restricted Chinese access to Intel processors and other U.S. hardware in 2015, followed by broader export restrictions under the Trump administration in 2019, which have been tightened further by the Biden administration in 2022. As a result, Chinese participation in the Top500 list dwindled, to some degree because access of Chinese entities to the latest hardware got harder and to some degree because Chinese scientists no longer want to share details about their machines with anyone.

    Why is anyone surprised that the country with the highest research output, that has historically dominated the Top500 list, has the fastest supercomputers?






  • Like you said, there’s plenty of external forces affecting the entropy of a closed “earth” system, and so the notion of a closed system seems a bit meaningless to me. I probably have some more reading to do on this tbh. I tend to take the view that everything is a single closed system (i.e. universal wavefunction) and so talking about smaller subsystems is helpful but never exact.

    I think i might be a bit more optimistic on how well we can use these “entropy gradients” to our advantage. I study computational nanotechnology for a living, so ofc i’m a lil bullish on it, but generally i think that our current high technology regime can get us far enough past scarcity, it’s mainly the sociopolitical implications of doing so that i worry would stop us first.



  • This was a pretty cool read, I hadn’t thought much about the entropy of a non-isolated system. I’m still not sure it has much physical meaning - the idea that entropy always increases only applies to isolated systems, but it made me think more about where the entropy gain would have to be to achieve a lower entropy mineral/energy world.



  • If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.

    That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.


  • I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.