64 points | by wjSgoWPm5bWAhXB 2 days ago ago
11 comments
Alternative link from Cornell's website: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...
I have always thought that digital killed analogue prematurely and unnecessarily. I hope this works out.
The potential of fully miniature vacuum tubes was never realized
Seems to be the press release for this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01422-1
Anyone know where I can read it?
You can read it from that link if you're accessing from an institution subscribed to Nature or have Nature+.
Don't you just love how marketing has to slap a "AI" paragraph in there?
The bigger deal is 200mW for 30Ghz. Which incidentally... Is probably never going to be nice for modern AI.
Surely mechanical clocks are digital in the sense that time is quantized into ticks by the escapement. The various gears do not rotate continuously.
“Discrete” does not mean “digital”.
Digital logic is the system of gates and switches that we use as an abstraction layer over analog circuits. AND, OR, XOR, etc.
You certainly could build logic gates out of gears, and this would be a digital mechanical computer. But it’s not often done.
It seems it will still use some digital process to encode and decode whatever is transmitted or received, I could be misreading it.
Long live analog!
Link is not loading, probably due to DNS ad-blocking being blocked. Can someone save it to archive?
Here is an alt link: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...
Alternative link from Cornell's website: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...
I have always thought that digital killed analogue prematurely and unnecessarily. I hope this works out.
The potential of fully miniature vacuum tubes was never realized
Seems to be the press release for this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01422-1
Anyone know where I can read it?
You can read it from that link if you're accessing from an institution subscribed to Nature or have Nature+.
Don't you just love how marketing has to slap a "AI" paragraph in there?
The bigger deal is 200mW for 30Ghz. Which incidentally... Is probably never going to be nice for modern AI.
Surely mechanical clocks are digital in the sense that time is quantized into ticks by the escapement. The various gears do not rotate continuously.
“Discrete” does not mean “digital”.
Digital logic is the system of gates and switches that we use as an abstraction layer over analog circuits. AND, OR, XOR, etc.
You certainly could build logic gates out of gears, and this would be a digital mechanical computer. But it’s not often done.
It seems it will still use some digital process to encode and decode whatever is transmitted or received, I could be misreading it.
Long live analog!
Link is not loading, probably due to DNS ad-blocking being blocked. Can someone save it to archive?
Here is an alt link: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-f...