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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

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171–180 of 328 posts

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#171
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you? As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If s…

If I use a package for crypto stuff, it will generally be listed as part of the project, in an include or similar, so you can see who actually wrote the code. If you get an LLM to create it, it will write some "new original code" for you, with no ability to tell you any of the names of people who's code went into that, and who did not give their consent for it to be mangled into the algorithm. If I copy work from som…

Why is "plagiarism" "bad"?

Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggregate knowledge in the world and added a small bit of their own ideas.

I think it is bad taste to pass another's work as your own, and I believe people should be economically compensated for creating art and generating ideas, but I do not believe people are entitled to claim any "ownership" of ideas. IMHO, it is grossly egoistic.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#172
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Amazon isn't the only shop that delivers to your area

The premise of this news is that prices are going to climb and availability is going to drop. And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore. Walmart sells what appears to be an older version of the drive and I might have to cross my fingers and just get one of those.

> And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore.

Isn't that what you're doing ordering off amazon with their comingled inventory?

Besides, there's a spectrum of sellers between "Amazon" and "anybody", you can even, perhaps, purchase directly from the manufacturer.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#174
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I use a package for crypto stuff, it will generally be listed as part of the project, in an include or similar, so you can see who actually wrote the code. If you get an LLM to create it, it will write some "new original code" for you, with no ability to tell you any of the names of people who's code went into that, and who did not give their consent for it to be mangled into the algorithm. If I copy work from som…

Why is "plagiarism" "bad"? Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggrega…

Sure, you can't claim ownership of ideas, but if you verbatim repeat other people's content as if it is your own, and are unable to attribute it to its original creator, is that not a bit shitty? That's what LLMs are doing

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the HDDs are being used for any intensive loads. They have too much latency for most of that. It's probably just archival storage for their scraped content and generated slop.

For "cold" archival storage you would want to use tape, which is far cheaper per TB at scale.

If demand for hard drives is this high then it sounds like there wouldn't be near enough tape around either.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#176
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised by that too. I thought everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe ? I was toying with getting a 2T HDD for a BSD system I have, I guess not now :)

Everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe. If you're right, that includes manufacturers. HDDs still have advantages over SSDs for specific needs, like more reliable long-term unelectrified storage. It's also possible that the high price of SSDs made HDDs an option again.

Really if you're writing large solid files hard drives aren't that bad. If you can have the system split out one file per drive at a time then you'll avoid a lot of the fragments

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#177
post #168
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. This sounds like economic dogma based on pointing at some future equilibrium. I like the saying that goes something like "life is what is happens when you are waiting for the future". In the same way, it seems to me that equilibrium is increasingly less common for many of us. Markets are dynamic sy…

Yes, this is why the prices of housing has dropped dramatically. The market stepped up and filled the demand needed and now everyone can afford a place to live .....

I can't tell if the comment is above is sarcastic or serious: it could go either way.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#178
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer with a passing control theory background and a breadth of general knowledge, I'd love to explore this space more and find a way to apply my knowledge and share the results. Are there any particular problems you think well-suited to this treatment?

If you have a policy area you like you might start there. From my lens, here are some interesting ways to look at political economy from a broader point of view: economic disruption from AI (could be from energy prices, labor substitution, and lots more), climate modeling and its impacts on economies, conservation and ecosystem stability, and economic growth under different levels of inequality. I would add this to t…

Those are definitely all areas of interest for me as well. Thanks for the pointers. Do you write anywhere?

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#179
post #165
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather prefer that the average Joe has a good entertainment system than our corporate overlords has a good surveillance system.

The growth curve of technology has always pointed at the world becoming tiny and non-private.

Disagree.

Mass surveillance by corporations can be outlawed. Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it must be necessarily so.

I travel a lot for work to different nations. The cultural differences are stark.

In the UK for example, they love their CCTVs. In Switzerland, they’re only allowed where they are deemed necessary.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#180
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that data center buildouts can't overshoot demand but AI and compute is different than fiber buildout. The more compute you have, the smarter the AI. You can use the compute to let the AI think longer (maybe hours/days/weeks) on a solution. You can run multiple AI agents simultaneously and have them work together or check each other's work. You can train and inference better models with more compute. S…

Did you pay attention in computer science classes? There are problems you can't simply brute-force. You can throw all the computing power you want at them, but they won't terminate before the heat-death of the universe. An LLM can only output a convolution of its data set. That's its plateau. It can't solve problems, it can only output an existing solution. Compute power can make it faster to narrow down to that exis…

Not really. You can leverage randomness (and LLMs absolutely do) to generate bespoke solutions and then use known methods to verify them. I'm not saying LLMs are great at this, they are gimped by their inability to "save" what they learn, but we know that any kind of "new idea" is a function of random and deterministic processes mixed together in varying amounts.

Everything is either random, deterministic, or some shade of the two. Human brain "magic" included.

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