I fondly remember programming my Amstrad CPC 464, my first computer, in 1984 in Malta when I was ~11 years old. It booted straight into Locomotive Basic. Still remember my excitement at getting it to draw a circle on the screen for the first time. Good times.
I Love the Computer
161–167 of 167 posts
Re: I Love the Computer
#162I loved (past tense) the computer. Many of us here can wax nostalgic on our first memories of a computer in our home. And when we look at the current slab now in front of us with a little less wonder, it's easy to dismiss this as us having grown up with the machines, having become older, perhaps even a little jaded. That spark is gone? It's also possible though that the machines now just aren't the same as the ones w…
Back then the whole system was designed to do stuff for us. Now, so much of it is designed to work against us. Monstrous towers of complexity for the sole purpose of stopping you getting a high definition output without copy protection, or download a permanent copy of a video you are watching, or learning how your video card works without a million dollars and an NDA. And there was so much less of it. There's huge swathes of unexecuted code just for rendering text backwards in case I wake up Arabic tomorrow, etc.
Re: I Love the Computer
#163The computer is awesome, and so helpful. However, what some people, companies, governments, organizations have done with the computer are NOT so awesome.
Re: I Love the Computer
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most. There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or incr…
This is not correct. Prices will adjuts when the crash comes. At worst, the market and prices will just open peoples eyes up to the reality that 99% of the daily software we use, runs perfectly fine on a 5 years old computer. The idea that you _must_ have 128 GB RAM and 1 TB ssd in your computer is juts absurd. Remember... we reached the moon with the compute power of a pocket calculator, and there is no eternal law…
> The idea that you _must_ have 128 GB RAM and 1 TB ssd in your computer is juts absurd.
I don't think anyone thinks that? Unless you are trying to do local inference with bigger models, which isn't everyone's cup of tea but I do think is an important capability.
Outside of that use case though, prices are still ridiculous. 32GB of DDR5 will run you close to $500 right now vs. $80 before the AI build out, and 32GB is what I'd consider comfortable so long as everything keeps being electron and web wrappers (assuming Windows & macOS here for the general population, obviously you can get by with less on a Linux desktop for the most part).
Personally, I'd love to see more software do more with less, and go back to performant native apps but in reality I just don't see that happening, except maybe over here in Apple/macOS land which has always had a decent culture of native apps. For now, the incentives aren't there (for commercial software).
I hope you are right on prices, but I don't share the optimism. We've seen time and time again that once prices go up, they don't always go back down even when the supply crunch is eliminated. Manufacturers realize people adapt to whatever "new normal" prices are at and refuse to lower them. Same thing happened post-COVID supply shocks. Companies have zero incentive to start a price war, even after supply shocks are over.
I think we are stuck with ~$500 RAM for a long time.
Re: I Love the Computer
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do In my opinion you should interpret the usage of "AI" here to mean "the entire business/management/financial/bubble ecosystem surrounding LLMs". The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized rather than a specific technical assessment (although that often is an issue too)
> The snake oil is much more how LLMs are being weaponized and utilized Calling something "snake oil" implies that the product only, at best, has a placebo effect (amplified, no doubt, by the sales presentation). LLMs seem to be much more useful than a placebo.
I think you just simply repeated the mistake that the comment responding to you was pointing out, i.e. conflating “LLM” the technology with “AI” the hysterical product hype bubble phenomenon.
Re: I Love the Computer
#166I loved (past tense) the computer. Many of us here can wax nostalgic on our first memories of a computer in our home. And when we look at the current slab now in front of us with a little less wonder, it's easy to dismiss this as us having grown up with the machines, having become older, perhaps even a little jaded. That spark is gone? It's also possible though that the machines now just aren't the same as the ones w…
What a story. I never had a chance to play with System 6.0, my first one was Mac OSX Maverick...before DOS/W95-98/XP and Debian/Ubuntu...what was it like?
You can play with it in an emulator. There was no internet then so all your tools were local, not web-based, not cloud-based. (Given that, the idea of a subscription-based app was ludicrous.)
It's not that the OS itself was magical. (In fact there are a lot of things that I realize I miss when I go back—lack of sticky menus gets me every time). It was just: no passwords, everything local, no worrying about spam/ads/security, etc.
We just worried about backups and head crashes…
Re: I Love the Computer
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The comparison suggests that the thing doesn't do what it's marketed to do. Because it doesn't. What AI is being sold as is incredibly different than what it actually does. I love AI. I spent years in grad school researching it because I loved it so much (it was never about the money to me). But what it is and what it can do is so different from what it is being sold as. Snake Oil is an apt comparison because it is…
And why was AI seen as a red flag?
Basically if you go back a few years ago "AI" was basically marketing speak only. Engineers and researchers said "ML" almost exclusively. So it was a good litmus test to identify people who actually knew what they were talking about vs hype people
Then AI entered the public lexicon with GPT becoming popular. So people shifted to saying AI because everyone was confused when saying ML. Still "ML" is used commonly in researcher to researcher conversations (depending on the niche, but I think the flag is still a good indicator here)