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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6755 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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you are missing the point. it would add massive amounts of latency at the lowest level of the stack, and this ends up costing maybe a factor of 1000 even in the optimistic case. this is not "only gamers notice." this is "absolutely everything is uselessly slow"

latency is not ~ever picoseconds to start with - a clock cycle is 1/4GHz = 1/4 nanosecond = 250 picoseconds, and nothing is faster than that.

latency is not ~ever picoseconds to start with - a clock cycle is 1/4GHz = 1/4 nanosecond = 250 picoseconds, and nothing is faster than that.

So far. I suppose we'll hit physical limitations in terms of the length of the circuitry divided by C, and I don't know how the math would work out, but considering we're talking about future tech, it seems unwarranted to talk about the limitations of current tech. If we get this down to femtoseconds, even a 1000x slowdown is measured in picoseconds.

it takes about one clock cycle for light to traverse a processor. this doesn't prove you wrong, quite, since there's still the possibility of a processor doing something much more clever with the distance it has than it does today.

i got nerd sniped here real hard, so here's a fundamental physics analysis (from Claude and I). Basically, three constraints (below) -> min latency of an operation is ~1e-13s, a 1e4 speedup from today.

That is far less than the "LLM cost/kernel syscall" ratio today, so current LLMs can never be fast enough. As to future algorithms that are magically better enough to close the gap, my best argument is "ehh I doubt it, definitely not soon."

  1. Margolus–Levitin: with a given energy, you can only switch between two states at a max frequency (min latency)
  2. Landauer: switching between states must dissipate a minimum amount of energy
  3. Thermodynamics 101: energy can only be dissipated so quickly

We're already banging up against speed of light limitations, which is one reason we try to make chips smaller. Light moves at 0.3 microns per femtosecond.

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