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1. Embed this notice
   Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 05:02:48 JST Charlie Stross

   This is your reminder that for the past 40 years the price of consumer electronics underwent roughly 10% compound *deflation* year by year.

   An entry level Android or iPhone is every non-shooty-bang-or-transportation James Bond gadget rolled into one for the inflation-adjusted cost of a 35mm film SLR or a Commodore 64 back in 1984.

   It's also much more powerful than every supercomputer on the planet back then, in combination.

   And it's in your pocket.
   https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/113579152811903958

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 05:05:38 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Graydon

     @graydon We're heading towards the buffers at the end of the track wrt. Moore's Law and the rentiers who invested in the VLSI industry still want the rate of profit they've become accustomed to, even though the cost of computation has crashed so low nobody canfigure out anything useful to do with it.

     So we get compute-intensive hype bubbles designed to fleece investors: cryptocurrency, LLMs, VR/AR, quantum computing (the latter is more compute-R&D-intensive, but follows the pattern).

   • Embed this notice
     kurtseifried (he/him) (kurtseifried@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:09:38 JST kurtseifried (he/him)

     in reply to

     • Graydon

     @cstross @graydon yup.

     2023 $150 – $300 (Best Buy and Amazon range)
     2005 $4,000 (Sony)
     1997 $22,900 (Fujitsu’s first 40″ plasma TV)

     Or my fav:

     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1

     CPU
     64-bit processor @ 80 MHz[1]
     Memory
     8.39 Megabytes (up to 1 048 576 words)[1]
     Storage
     303 Megabytes (DD19 Unit)[1]
     FLOPS
     160 MFLOPS

     You can’t actually buy a computer this slow, even system on a chips clobber it, you have to go to what is now a microcontroller like an esp32 to get this slow

     Basically, the cost of the electricity used to run the cray-1 for 10 minutes will buy you a better computer nowadays.

     Charlie Stross repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Graydon (graydon@canada.masto.host)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:33 JST Graydon

     in reply to

     • The Penguin of Evil
     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @etchedpixels @fishidwardrobe @cstross It's at least decently plausible that "intelligence" is "usually correct reflexes about what to ignore as irrelevant".

     Attempting to simulate this is often useful (signal processing is a large and productive field) but it's also really difficult to describe as processing layers start interacting with each other and anybody with any knowledge of biology sighs and expects that it's nothing like that neatly separated into layers in organisms.

   • Embed this notice
     Graydon (graydon@canada.masto.host)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:34 JST Graydon

     in reply to

     • The Penguin of Evil
     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @etchedpixels @fishidwardrobe @cstross We also have a historical tendency to put too much weight on calculation. (That would be "any weight at all.")

     We evolved, so everything we can do is an extension of something some other organism can do, and it had to be not-actively-harmful the whole time, back into the deeps of time. We're not calculators. We are plausibly signal processors. (And for the most recent few tens of thousands of years out of those hundreds of millions, we can math.)

     alcinnz repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:35 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     • Graydon
     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe @cstross @graydon If the law of requisite variety is indeed correct, we may well never truly be able to know how we think because it would require something with more state than us to distinguish all the state we have and understand the relationships.

   • Embed this notice
     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:36 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     • Graydon
     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe @cstross @graydon We are hitting lots of limits - on silicon sizes, on power, on validation (hardware and software), on correctness, on data sets and many more.
     A human brain weighs about 1.5Kg, outperforms an LLM and doesn't require a large power plant so there are clearly better ways of doing some kinds of computation (although humans of course suck at many kinds of computation too so it's an iffy generalisation).

   • Embed this notice
     Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:36 JST Fish Id Wardrobe

     in reply to

     • Graydon
     • The Penguin of Evil

     @etchedpixels @cstross @graydon I'm not sure the human brain is doing "computation" as we know it, and there's a big problem to solve: "as we know it"

   • Embed this notice
     The Penguin of Evil (etchedpixels@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:37 JST The Penguin of Evil

     in reply to

     • Graydon

     @cstross @graydon We've got an enormous list of computation problems that we don't have the resources to compute properly. What we don't have is the ways to build the software systems to do those computations because of their complexity.
     And any chemist can find a reasonable, grant supported manner to use an arbitrary amount of compute 8)

   • Embed this notice
     Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:12:37 JST Fish Id Wardrobe

     in reply to

     • Graydon
     • The Penguin of Evil

     @etchedpixels @cstross @graydon Is it the _resources_ we don't have, though? Or something else? We're seeing the limits of IT as we currently understand it — I think.

     A breakthrough in, say, human-machine interaction, in machines being able to perceive the world and act in it as we do; that's not going to be solved by more computing _power_ but by a breakthrough in techniques. If at all.

   • Embed this notice
     Sean Eric Fagan (kithrup@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 07:35:14 JST Sean Eric Fagan

     in reply to

     @cstross And the current super-computers are beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

   • Embed this notice
     Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@infosec.exchange)'s status on Monday, 02-Dec-2024 17:52:32 JST Steve Bellovin

     in reply to

     • Graydon
     • kurtseifried (he/him)

     @kurtseifried @cstross @graydon I used to tell my students that if cars had dropped in price since 1950 as much as the cost of computation, you wouldn't pay parking tickets, you'd say "keep my car!" Mind you, I was saying this 50 years ago!