GPU World • Hacker News Board

Re: GPU World

#301

Post by tyg13 » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

voncheese wrote: post #199

_superposition_ wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most notably Paul Krugman Nobel winning economist in 98: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." Predicting the future is hard.

Hadn't seen this quote before, amazing. Also goes to show how hard it is to predict anything that is a massive change - these levels of changes are so infrequent that we can't rely on priors to predict the future.

pretty sure Krugman himself said his prediction was intentionally pessimistic to counter the hyper-optimism of his peers. and in fairness, he wrote that at the height of the dot-com bubble.

actually, thinking about it more, I wonder if we'll see something similar with LLMs where, the bubble will eventually pop, but the technology won't disappear, and we'll see it quietly improve and integrate further into our lives over time. probably not that wild of a prediction to make, but I do wonder still

Re: GPU World

#302

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

DrScientist wrote: post #296

alexashka wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are largely choosing to have less children If the suicide rate rapidly increases, will you also say they are largely choosing to have less life? Nothing to see here, just choices. > So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier. So by definition, given it's a choice, people who commit suicide are happier.

Hmm - childlessness ( note this is different from reduced family size ), almost doubled for women in China between 2010 and 2020, and over a similar period the female suicide rate has halved. How do you explain that? Sure having children is still a protective factor, but the highest risk is amongst those that wanted children but couldn't, rather than those that choose.

[deleted]

Re: GPU World

#303

Post by MrFantastic » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

entropy47 wrote: post #140

david-gpu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? An…

It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways. I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't rea…

I’m remodeling a room in my house and I’ve used Gemini help me troubleshoot problems and it works pretty well. It’s come up with a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. Of course it’s contradicted itself a few times too so you have to think about what you’re doing as well.