Will I ever own a zettaflop?

Post by throw0101d » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 10:57 AM UTC

tbrownaw wrote: post #21

popol12 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting, could someone please do the same computation for filling 64 bit storage?

16 million terablocks, or 8 billion terabytes. Or a third of a billion 24 TB drives, which is one of the larger sizes currently available. Some random search results say the global hard drive market is around an eighth of a billion units, but of course much of that will be smaller sizes. So that should be physically realizable today (well, with today's commercial technology), with only a few years of global productio…

Post by sfn42 » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

emaadm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

Post by sfn42 » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:08 PM UTC

PxldLtd wrote: post #70

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 the…

Post by echelon » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #35

echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know if life is rare, but intelligence seems rare given our sky surveys to date. Life started on earth shortly after the solar system formed. It's a quarter the age of the universe that it took for intelligence and civilization to arise. A long, long, looooong time. From a numbers perspective, our minds are all shockingly rare. The universe probably doesn't produce many of us through stellar and then biologi…

> but intelligence seems rare given our sky surveys to date. Most of the universe, by a large percentage (or so I'm told), is further away than 200 light years. What signs of intelligence would we see or detect in our own solar system from a distance of 200 light years should we scan it with all our latest and best tech?

Post by shmeeed » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #50

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.

For one thing, most news websites would have to load at least 10,000x as much useless javascript to achieve the same performance.