Technology

This article appeared in my feed just above another article about how China has the world's first operational thorium reactor. Meanwhile, the US is about to fight a civil war over whether vaccination causes measles and stripping away the last of our social programs in order to get our wealthiest people another 2% subsidy.

China scientists

So, Chinese scientists?

Yeah, but endurance. and accuracy. and longevity. How about those?

Link to the actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08839-w

The repro and verification will take time. Months or even years. Don't trust anyone who says it's definitely real or definitely bunk. Time will tell.

By tuning the “Gaussian length” of the channel, the team achieved two‑dimensional super‑injection, which is an effectively limitless charge surge into the storage layer that bypasses the classical injection bottleneck.

Clickbait article with some half truths. A discovery was made, it has little to do with Ai and real world applications will be much, MUCH more limited than what's being talked about here, and will also likely still take years to come out

AI AI AI AI

Yawn

Wake me up if they figure out how to make this cheap enough to put in a normal person's server.

Does flash, like solid state drives, have the same lifespan in terms of write? If so, it feels like this would most certainly not be useful for AI, as that use case would involve doing billions/trillions of writes in a very short span of time.

Edit: It looks like they do: https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/life-expectancy-of-a-drive/

Manufacturers say to expect flash drives to last about 10 years based on average use. But life expectancy can be cut short by defects in the manufacturing process, the quality of the materials used, and how the drive connects to the device, leading to wide variations. Depending on the manufacturing quality, flash memory can withstand between 10,000 and a million [program/erase] cycles.

Too bad the US can't import any of it.

Brother, have you heard of buses? Even INSIDE cpus/socs bus speeds are a limitation. Also i fucking hate how the first thing people mention now is how ai could benefit from a jump in computing power.

Edit: I havent dabbled that much in high speed stuff yet but isnt the picosecond range so fast that the capacitance of simple traces and connectors between chips influence the rising and falling edge of chips?