Interesting detail on the algorithm but seems to completely miss that if you care about non-streaming performance, there are parallel versions of xz and gzip (pxzip encodes compatible metadata about the breakup points so that while xz can still decompress it, pxzip can use as many cores as you let it have instead.) Great for disk-image OS installers (the reason I was benchmarking it in the first place - but this was about 5 years back, I don't know if those have gotten upstreamed...)

I'm surprised that this shows anything running usefully on my 2021-era thinkpad (with "Iris Xe"'TigerLake graphics) which inspires me to ask - are external GPUs useful for this sort of thing?

Particularly because, although there are smaller "study" versions as he worked up to it, the painting itself is 10 feet wide and most references don't include that context (at least not visually, they often list the numbers.)

Some of their earlier videos go into a lot of detail on the safety interlocks (including that the radiation near the device can be lower than ambient because it's basically a large chunk of shielding :-)

As for pricing, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392896 had some numbers from 5 months ago. It seems like the kind of thing that you'd want as a nearby service, unless you needed to do continuous inspection (they have some automated conveyor sampling products too, it looks like.) My last company had a few 3d-printed components that would have been interesting to spot check after wear testing, but for a lot of things, the competition for the scan is "open it up with a screwdriver" :-)

Presumably he got better in the intervening decades, but part of how we stopped the Morris Worm was that it was badly written (see the various version of With Microscope and Tweezers for detail, particularly about the "am I already running" check that ended up being why it got noticed, "because exponential growth".) Even for "bored 1st year grad student skipping lectures" it should have been better code :-)

(Also, writing a Scheme dialect was a first-semester CS problem set - if you're in a 1980s academic CS environment it was more effort to not accidentally write a lisp interpreter into something, something in the water supply...)