91–100 of 151 posts
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> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. Th…
Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
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20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)
Your computer may not feel faster than a 20 year old PC, but CPUs have gotten way, way faster. Compare the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to the AMD A12-9800, you go from 4 cores to 8, and you double the power consumption. But it's not twice as fast. It's 10 times faster. Depending on the exact metric, it could be as little as twice as fast or as much as 1000 times faster, depending on the exact operations. On top of that memor…
Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…
> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. Th…
what you're saying reflects corporation tendencies
take away the propaganda, let people live, see how they react
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Given the 750 tok/sec GPT 5.6 Sol Ultrafast (via Cerebras), the many-1000 tok/sec Chinese models, and the 15000 tok/sec Taalas HC1, I think we're well on the way towards seeing that solved too. Combine the two, and yeah, wild ride incoming. What's especially bewildering to me is that translated back to raw bandwidth, even 15000 tok/sec is just like what, 75 KB/s? Extremely meager amounts of data, moving mountains. It…
One of my projects has an estimate of 3,000+ hours. It seems accurate. It has spent months working on it.
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> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. Th…
these things you are talking about are only true due to the unbelievably LARGE marketing ~propaganda~ spending what you're saying reflects corporation tendencies take away the propaganda, let people live, see how they react
You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.
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You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.
20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)
I don't think I had any in my builds until 2014ish
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Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep... Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
It has been credibly hypothesized that fat people are indeed malnourished. What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed? You would begin to eat more, and more and more, seeking to satisfy those cravings for nutrition. But if nutritional cravings aren't satisfied, you're still reaching for those foods, because they are faking, very accurately, the tastes and feels that you would get from something that's nutritious and good for you.
So, it stands to reason: the more fake nutrition available to someone, the more they will try and eat, and get fatter. On the other hand, if we're eating real food, perhaps those cravings will be easier to satisfy without overindulging?
Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds. That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for…
I think this viewpoint fails to understand what "intelligence" is. The idea must be that intelligence is some special thing that only humans have. So when machines couldn't do jack s... we said "it's the Turing test". When machines blew through the Turing test we said "that was just prediction..not really intelligence, that's different". It's not different. The delusion humans have is that intelligence is special and…
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I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep... Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
> ultimately there are no starving fat people It has been credibly hypothesized that fat people are indeed malnourished. What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed? You would begin to eat more, and more and more, seeking to satisfy those cravings for nutrition. But if nutritional cravings aren't satisfied, you…
When I hit 300 lbs I might suspect there was a flaw in my reasoning.