@glyph Did you quote post something?

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@Di4na @mcc given that we have to start from present conditions, I assume we also begin from “all crime is legal” and proceed from there.

perhaps another distinction: I don’t think all crime is legal in Canada (yet?)

[di4na@hachyderm.io]

@glyph @mcc then it becomes potentially easier. You would have to source some of the chemicals, which may not be produced in NA anymore but eh. That is probably manageable.

Note that if you Manhattan project it, you may be able to produce a few batch but you will lack the repeatable good yield. That needs experience that need time.

[cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev]

@glyph DUDE Thank you for linking this: https://theoutpost.ai/news-story/major-study-reveals-ai-benchmarks-may-be-misleading-casting-doubt-on-reported-capabilities-21513/

I've been angry about yet another "look, the benchmark says this LLM can do {x} amazing thing!" (with spurrious claims and lots of caveats) for a full day.

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@glyph I really like your point about scaling down. Even when I was in undergrad, there were already pieces about how the long free lunch was finally over, but damned if the strategy of relying on hardware progress for all software improvements isn't entirely unsustainable.

[gedankenstuecke@scholar.social]

@glyph great read, always a delight when people make well-argued claims for not trying to go for unreasonable scales!

[medeavanamonde@beige.party]

@glyph @xgranade

DNA based computing
Now in it’s third decade

[cthos@mastodon.cthos.dev]

@xgranade @glyph We doing an over/under on when the global supply chain breaks down?

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@cthos @xgranade @glyph we've been trying not to think about it (since we've already done the only things we can personally do).... sigh

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@ireneista @cthos @xgranade this isn't exactly a "cheerful" thought, but it's also not horribly grim: I think we already saw it break down in 2020, and we saw both how brittle it is (nobody had enough slack in their supply chain to actually weather the disruption without exposing catastrophic delays to customers) but also its resilience (customers were super mad, alternate pathways DID come online in less than a year)

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@glyph I see a pretty clear parallel to the middle period of, and tail end of the 19th century, where a lot of the "easy" discoveries had been, well... discovered... and the rate of progress in the sciences and inventions slowed until there was some significant breakthrough (the steam engine, in the first part of the century, and then electricity, oil, and oceanic telegraph lines, and later the linotype, breaking the mid-century lul and speeding advances up to WWI again)

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@glyph not to say we'll have another linotype or telegraph; more that I think we're running out of "easy" parts for progress with computers, so unless we get something new through material science, physics, chemistry, something like that, it's likely that all we have left available with current understanding is the hard stuff.

[bitprophet@social.coop]

@glyph maaaaaan I just started reading and I am ALREADY MAD

about your rudely accurate observation we are now ONE QUARTER INTO THE CENTURY

🕸️🧓🏻🪦

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@glyph Maybe quantum computing will unlock a whole new set of easy things (I'm... not confident in that, but, it could do. It's at least a lot faster for certain sorts of things, in the rare cases we can figure out how to actually implement something useful.)
But, there could also just... not be "easy" parts left.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@bitprophet you're the first one to catch that (I guarantee it hurt more to write than it does to read :))

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@miss_rodent the expert I would go to ask about that is @xgranade and I am pretty confident that she would not be bullish on this particular likelihood any time soon

[alwayscurious@infosec.exchange]

@glyph This is really nice!

I hope that open source that individuals can use isn’t a ZIRP. That would be a severe tragedy of the commons situation for sure.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@alwayscurious thank you for saying so!

1. The phenomenon itself isn't a ZIRP, but the way that it was being funded probably was.
2. Tragedy of the commons is fake, c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

[miss_rodent@girlcock.club]

@glyph Fair, was just a suggestion for a potential 'next thing' that might actually work, though last I looked into it (admittedly been a few years) it did... not seem particularly hopeful as a 'next big thing', at least not anytime soon.
As far as I know it still has quite a few limitations and caveats to what it's useful for, and of course the major limitation of all computers, being restricted to, y'know, only things which can be computed or achieved by computation in the first place.

[glyph@mastodon.social]

@miss_rodent I'm pretty sure it will be useful, but probably in some pretty limited verticals. It's definitely not The Way Computers Will Work and the things that it will unlock seem like pretty quiet infrastructural improvements and not significant population-wide stuff. Per my existing thesis I do think it's almost certain that it will, at some point, be A Thing, but it will not be Big

[xgranade@wandering.shop]

@glyph @miss_rodent Yeah, no, I'm not particularly bullish. There's a couple parts to why not... while I'm quite convinced that building a quantum computer is probably possible, and we have some good mathematical evidence to back that up, it's been five years away since 1997. I'm suspicious of any particular claimed timelines, as the problems left to be solved are huge.

The other part, will quantum computers create a new class of easy next big things once built, that's more complex still.