this was being talked about in the late 90s. i had a housemate in 2000 who was an engineer working on pure-optical switching devices, pretty sure they are now the norm, so if you follow the thread likely they are getting closer to fully optical circuits. i always imagined it would be fascinating to have computing devices that just need some light, sense touch with light, display with light, whole thing is just a complex solid silicaceous object passively powered by ambient light.

IMO, it can't come soon enough. electromagnetic devices have all kinds of potential health impacts from the EMF, light is both more efficient and emits nothing that is anything like the harm being caused by a 5g network device sitting in your pocket. after a year using an OLED monitor i'm no longer a fan of the technology either. i'm pretty sure it emits a lot of high frequency and UV light - there is pure single spectrum LEDs, green, red, blue, maybe yellow, but these do produce a more spiky spectrum. quantum dots are a nanomaterial that behaves similarly to common phosphors like the green and blue - they emit light when stimulated by ultraviolet, and behind most LED phosphors now are UV LEDs and that's definitely not good for you, it's not ionizing like UV-C, usually it's just UVA like those woods glass or whatever they are, the dark purple ones, but it's still a spectrum you can't see and the endocrine system reacts to it.

also, not sure if you heard of the memory tech that google has been developing for LLMs, it has the ability to program the memory retrieval process and pick up blocks of memory randomly much faster than DRAM can.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

i heard about spintronics but again its based on magnetic fields but will be a RAM can save memory even if device turns off or booted again. MRAM !!! Well light and how can they power up the dwvice i think is fundamental challenge. Photonics cant solve this and we need some sort of transformation.

yeah, that's the thing, pretty much needs either electrostatic or magnetic effects to do the switching. both have serious issues in the event of a high ambient EMF spike.

It would be amazing to have light-powered hardware, but I'm not sure if there are any new paradigms for fully replacing electric circuits. Do you think it's possible? As far as I know, there are optocouplers, and of course fiber optics, and other switches/transistors based on light, but the question is, can they work without any electrical power? Or is not about replacing electricity and more about combining them?

And yes, I've heard about Google's TPUs. It seems that this is the new way for businesses in the AI industry. I've seen other AI companies, like OAI, show interest in that market as well

yeah, i don't think that it's possible to use light alone, at least not visible light, to actuate optical switches, possibly IR or UV would enable this, so such a passively powered device would need prismatic splitting and anyway this would allow a lot of signal multiplexing and other refractive switches could do other things too.

if they are making memory with light then that means they are getting close to being able to do this pure light based switching at least in the memory system.

being dependent on electric current and EMF in general is a big vulnerability during a magnetic reversal/collapse like is happening now. all the transformers must be well shielded and the shield earthed to prevent atmospheric electricity inducing overload, and probably shielded again with cosmic ray blocking plastic materials, which will penetrate the shield but not plastic, they need to scale down the grid size so long runs with high tension lines are eliminated, and put all cabling under a foot or so of dirt so it's not getting zapped by x/cosmic/gamma.

anyone who is reading the research going on involving space weather knows they are trying to cover up the fact they know this is happening. a week of no power in all the large cities across most of a hemisphere will pretty much lead to mass casualties that make Stalin look like a pussycat, and they are NOT giving it the priority, in fact they are writing all these cover stories and fake science to hide it, usually with the old "human caused" canard, which is entirely false, beyond the scale of maybe max 100m from where we live, far from touching where the actual weather happens in the troposphere and above.

this is also why i'm planning to build an earth-covered space for electrical systems and devices, i'm pretty sure next solar max is going to be worse. there is not enough being done, and widespread loss of this tech will destroy industry.

the memory google uses with TPUs is called "systolic array" which means that it batch-fetches data internally instead of needing to constantly talk to the CPU, systolic as in like blood flow. i think obviously this has broader applications since graphics and even regular memory fetching is heavily bottlenecked by the von neuman architecture

Thanks for sharing all of this

i can't tell if that's a dig or serious, but yeah, it is for real serious tho.

serious and very interesting topics, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to articulate a better response. Time to fall down some rabbit holes xD

yeah, i'm taking it quite seriously. gonna be learning how to raise sheep and chickens and the whole farming/hunting/trapping stuff. planning to eventually move to somewhere on the carpathian mountain range because it's the prime high ground area of europe, also very pretty, i have only seen parts of it, serbian carpathians, a bit of the transylvanian alps. yeah the swiss alps also, but very little in the way of caves and very inhospitable in current climate (it will be subtropical if the 90 degree change happens as the magnetic anomalies and historical markers indicate, found mainly in permanent magnetic alignments in volcanic eruptions.

there is some contention about the timing of some of them, and whether they were global or localised anomalies, but i'm of the opinion it's no coincidence that the milky way spins a full circle every 25000 years, thus the precession of the equinoxes - roughly 15' every 2000 years.

what's more compelling than anything else is this tho:

if you note the acceleration, it's heading towards siberia now, if that continues, it will be OVER siberian taiga in the north within 10-15 years