Science

5 posts in this domain.

• Why fiber-optic beat copper for long distances Copper carries electrons; fiber carries photons. The reasons one wins over kilometers come down to physics — attenuation, dispersion, and the fact that light doesn't care about your neighbor's microwave. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
• Why GPUs ended up running AI even though they were built for graphics GPUs were designed to shade pixels. Then the same hardware turned out to be the best general-purpose neural-net engine on the planet. The reason isn't an accident — graphics and deep learning happen to need the same thing. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
• Why AI accelerators are wrapped in stacks of HBM Open any photo of a modern AI GPU and you'll see the giant compute die in the middle, ringed by short, fat towers of memory soldered millimeters away. Those towers are HBM, and they exist because regular DRAM physically cannot feed a matrix engine fast enough. Apr 29, 2026 · intermediate
• Why leap seconds exist (and why they're being abolished) The Earth doesn't spin on a schedule, but our clocks do. Leap seconds tried to bridge the two — and broke the internet doing it. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
• Why CPU clock speeds stopped climbing Around the mid-2000s, GHz numbers on CPUs flatlined while core counts started growing. The reason isn't engineering laziness — it's that switching a transistor costs energy, and energy turns into heat you can't get rid of fast enough. Apr 29, 2026 · intro