The OP is imagining a device with a “hollow core” of atmospheric pressure helium surrounded by a solid and continuous membrane.

Since this hollow core would be much larger than the crystalline structures in a metal would this not therefore be a very weak comparison?

This relates to the difference between how a real gas and how an ideal gas behave in this scenario.

The difference in this situation will be very small in my opinion, broadly because the gas molecules in the atmosphere still have comparatively high mean free paths and therefore won’t interact with the “escaping” helium molecules.

I work for an acquired startup that tried to solve this problem.

It’s been around 8 years and we’re up to 50 or so people. I’d say we are okay at it.

We haven’t gotten fundamentally better over time recently, it’s more like there is some asymptote of how much you can really tell with a certain amount of insight into the systems between source and destination.

The only real progress we’ve made has been integrating with more and more sources of information about the state of the network.

Can you share the name of the company or more product details? Curious to know more about what solutions in this space look like

How are you arriving at that number?

60 seconds per minute 60 minutes per hour 24 hours per day 30 days per month ~2.59 million seconds per month

One billion requests into 2.59 million seconds is 386 requests per second.

Or 386K requests per seconds, depending on where these billions are coming from :-)

ho it's billion, my bad ahah

Very pedantic but I’d want to know. A watt is a unit of power, which means gigawatts per day is a rate of change of power.

If you want a unit of energy you need power multiplied by time not divided, so “gigawatt days” not “gigawatts per day”.

Maybe they meant "gigawatt-hours per day"

Gigawatt hours per day is just gigawatt hours per 24 hours, so just gigawatts but divided.

Which gives you power again, not work. "gigawatt-hours per day" = gigawatt/24

If you consider that watt hours is just a convenience unit for (3600) joules, then “1 gigawatt hour each day” correctly should be “3600 GJ/day” which works.

Which is a reasonable metric.

Expressed in an unreasonable way.

To compare apartheid to being asked to follow scientifically validated an internationally agreed protocols to not spread a disease to those around you, geesh.

I disagree with this comment. I don’t want to start a debate, just to give my experience and perspective.

I am a South African, I am white, just for transparency.

In my experience:

White people are still in a position of economic and social power such that the (unjust) assumptions made by an average person during apartheid are still mostly the same.

White people are stereotypically more educated, have more money, connections and are more trustworthy etc.

To say that white people are the subject of reverse racism while making any comparison to apartheid, where people where abducted, tortured, disappeared, forcefully relocated and removed from their land, is simply ignorant.

I make this post not to try and change your mind, but simply to give some representation to an alternate view point.

One reason that these nets are not there yet, is that they are sticking to the 'firing' analogue of natural brains. They are using binary output over time that averages out, a technique that has so far been much slower than neural networks with continuous output.

I imagine they meant kw, and that 20w is close enough to 1kw. (btw, I thought the human brain uses a lot more than 20w, maybe 20w in chemical signals, but a lot more in heat?)

The human body is about 100W-120W, which is about 2000-2500 kcal/day. 20W sounds right.

While you are correct that the count of neurons is not the only thing the synthetic brain has to boast, merely saying 'wired like a rat brain' is not really much extra.

It does not speak to the complexity of the network. I interpreted that line as 'connected in the same topology' but immediately thought, yeah right, they definitely don't have the same 'branching factor' as a real rat brain. (not sure of the correct words here, but some real neurons have many thousands to millions of connections).