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Will I ever own a zettaflop?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#61

Post by anentropic »

emaadm wrote: post #42
mysecretaccount wrote: post #36

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We…

> We are already near the limits of what we can do Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modalit…

I doubt you create that much knowledge

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#62

Post by petesergeant »

danpalmer wrote: post #59
arthurjj wrote: post #14

I just want to thank the submitter. This is the type of internet that I really miss. A very smart person who's a good writer, proud of their interests and obsessions.

Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out. Famously said he'd go to Twitter when Musk bought it and help Musk fix search, because "how hard can it be". Then left in shame 3 months later having achieved nothing except figuring out that It's A Bit More Complicated Than That(tm). Comma does some cool stuff, if relatively entry-level, and this post is good napkin-maths and was a fun read, but there is so mu…

> Geohot is famous for not being as smart as he makes out

That someone isn't as intelligent as they think they are doesn't place an upper bound on their intelligence.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#64

Post by eru »

ehnto wrote: post #55
eru wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the Diamond Age something like post-cyberpunk already? It came out three years after Snow Crash, which already ironically referenced "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel". I agree that Neuromancer wasn't a great novel, though it obviously had vibes that resonated with many people. The novel being otherwise a bit of a dud actually speaks to how strong the vibes were to ove…

I feel that's a bit uncharitable, it wasn't just vibes, it was imaginative world building, with some truly interesting and novel concepts tied into a decent enough story to enjoy the world within. As with much from this thread of cyberpunk writing, the cities and world are the most important characters, and the storyline is just an excuse to wander through their streets.

'Vibes' was probably the wrong word. I agree with you.

Though about the world building: he threw out a lot of neologisms on the page, and later other writers gave them meaning.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#65

Post by limbicsystem »

Nevermark wrote: post #58
throw0101d wrote: post #7

Somewhat related, why the creators of Zettabyte File System (ZFS) decided to make it 128 bits (writing in 2004): > Some customers already have datasets on the order of a petabyte, or 2^50 bytes. Thus the 64-bit capacity limit of 2^64 bytes is only 14 doublings away. Moore's Law for storage predicts that capacity will continue to double every 9-12 months, which means we'll start to hit the 64-bit limit in about a deca…

> In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10^51 operations per second on at most 10^31 bits of information I believe the Bekenstein bound for holographic information on a 1 liter sphere, using space at the Planck scale for encoding, instead of matter, is about 6.7×10^67. I confess I got that number by taking round trips through multiple models to ens…

I think you would very much enjoy this book: https://share.google/boWcVLRiYz0c7EmKh

They talk quite a bit about this sort of thing at the end...

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#66

Post by chuzz »

kombine wrote: post #45
kubb wrote: post #44

Human appetite for more knows no bounds. Imagine what we’d have to do for everyone to have a zettaflop. We won’t have the resources for it. So guys like this one are in competition with normal people who just need a little bit of compute, so that he can feel powerful with a million Claudes. Sad.

Poor mother Earth, this race is unsustainable. In order to satiate guys like geohot we are pillaging the natural resources, destroying ecosystems, fucking up the climate.

who's talking about owning a zettaflop on earth? The second part of sustainable growth is growth after all

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#67

Post by kombine »

ramon156 wrote: post #60
kombine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor mother Earth, this race is unsustainable. In order to satiate guys like geohot we are pillaging the natural resources, destroying ecosystems, fucking up the climate.

I think i know two or three other people who are much, much more to blame... putting it on one dude is weird.

I apologise for not being very clear, it's on all of us - including myself.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#68

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

emaadm wrote: post #42
mysecretaccount wrote: post #36

Fun post, but I find the industry's obsession with compute to be rather vapid, and this is a good example: > One million Claudes. To be able to search every book in history, solve math problems, write novels, read every comment, watch every reel, iterate over and over on a piece of code until it’s perfect – spend a human year in 10 minutes. 50,000 people working for you, all aligned with you, all answering as one. We…

> We are already near the limits of what we can do Hard disagree. If I had a million Claudes worth of compute I'd be livestreaming my entire reality feed to a local server 24/7 and having it organize my observations and thoughts, synthesize new ideas, implement prototypes and discard infeasible ones while I sleep. If you're in the business of knowledge creation, a million Claudes isn't enough. Text is an easy modalit…

I call this the Laurie Anderson fallacy, from a line in one of her songs:

> "Heaven is exactly like where you are right now, but much, much better."

If a million Claudes of compute were accessible, people would not be doing the same things they are now, but more so. They'd be doing very different things we likely can't imagine - in the same way that Alan Turing imagined machines learning from experience, but didn't imagine downstream products like Sora, ad tech, or social media, or their cultural and economic effects.

Re: Will I ever own a zettaflop?

#70

Post by PxldLtd »

jmyeet wrote: post #8

I'm a big believer that humanity's future is in space in a Dyson Swarm. There are simply too many advantages. It's estimated that humanity currently uses ~10^11 Watts of power. About 10^16 Watts of solar energy hits the Earth but the Earth's cross-section is less than a billionth of the Sun's total energy output. A Dyson Swarm would give us access to ~10^25 Watts of power. With our current population that would give…

I very much disagree, there's just too many engineering hurdles for us to surmount for this to be a reasonable solution. When you actually break down the physics, the scale works against you.

You can't have "one giant computer" when the speed of light is a 16-minute ping time from one side of the swarm to the other. Also cooling. Space is a vacuum, you can't just use convection. The inner layers would melt before they could radiate it away.

Even maintenance and power distribution, you're talking about trillions of nodes that need active course correction to avoid a chain-reaction of collisions.

There's so many reasons this is not feasible and more of a whimsical thought experiment. I've barely even touched on most of the issues.

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