They're doing it with cryptocurrency right now.
istewart
joined 11 months ago
Or their cooling design stinks, or they/Nvidia are just telling the fab we don't care about yields, just send us everything that powers on and we'll figure out which ones are good in production
Very true. I think one of the possible low-key outcomes of the bubble is a rise both in open-source driver hacking and manufacture-on-demand PCBs to accommodate what would otherwise be high-dollar e-waste.
Somebody gotta adapt them to boards with actual video outputs tho
Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.
We're going to have to stop paying attention to guys whose main entry on their CV is a website and/or phone app. I mean, we should have already, but now it's just glaringly obvious.
I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for ~~prompt~~ context engineering. Get with the times or get left behind
Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don't want to delve far enough into the concept of "awarenaut" to form an opinion, so we're just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well
For the record, none of these generated clips thus far have featured an appearance by Omega Tom Hanks
You're absolutely right that the computer is still a black box to a lot of people, but throughout the personal computing era, there has at least been a pathway to mastery for the tools it offers. Furthermore, the touchscreen/smartphone era has roped in mechanisms of touch and proprioception that make the devices a more intimate, if deeply imperfect, extension of the self. Up until sometime late last decade, the Steve Jobs "bicycle of the mind" concept was still a driving force in the field.
I still don't think most people grasp what a subtle, but fundamental, break it is that these AI products demand you confront them as a wholly separate entity from yourself. The path to mastery, and the feedback loop that builds that path, is so obscure it may as well not exist. If you wish to retrain a model, you've got to invest huge amounts of time and resources, as well as what remains a specialized (and not well-specified, as Ed highlights) skillset... and since it's a probabilistic process, you're still not going to get consistent results.
I am more and more convinced that one of the damning core flaws of the current crop of AI technologies is that they are designed to incentivize use of centralized computing resources. Their designers are simply asking completely the wrong questions for the people the technologies are being imposed upon. But you can't say that someplace like HN, or even some parts of Bluesky, because so many people's salaries still depend on the rents from centralized computing.
It's like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him
Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the "contempt" framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist "you can do/be anything!" cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (I'm tempted to use Neil Postman's term "technopoly," but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.
Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.
I've seen conspiracy theories that a lot of the ad buys for stuff like this are a new avenue of money laundering, focusing on stuff like pirate sports streaming sites, sketchy torrent sites, etc. But a full scraped, SEOd Wikipedia clone also fits.