@glyph Did you quote post something?
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@miss_rodent @glyph (Sorry... I tend to infodump on demand about quantum computing.)
@miss_rodent @glyph I guess the last thing I should add is that there's a lot of problems where we know a priori that there *isn't* a quantum advantage — if someone spends most of their CPU time now on one of those problems, then they're not likely to be a huge QC customer, making it harder for VCs to sell quantum computing as the Next Big Thing.
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@xgranade @glyph I tend to infodump too, so, very much no need to apologize/I appreciate the input, it's a field I have looked into a little bit but not very deeply or very recently, just kinda looked into it as something tangential to the residual math/physicist nerdery that lingered after I dropped out of Uni.
And yeah, it seems unlikely to be a thing corporate and finance types would be that interested in, or if it will be does not seem like it will be anytime soon.
@miss_rodent @glyph I mean, there have been at least two or three big waves where corporate and finance types were very *very* interested in quantum computing. I think, and again to @glyph's point, there's a large degree to which that can be explained by zero or negative interest rates.
Each time, there's a concrete event that sets off the hype wave, and it dies down when people realize that QC is *always* five years away.
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@bitprophet you're the first one to catch that (I guarantee it hurt more to write than it does to read :))
@glyph the rest of the post is good too btw!
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@miss_rodent @glyph I mean, there have been at least two or three big waves where corporate and finance types were very *very* interested in quantum computing. I think, and again to @glyph's point, there's a large degree to which that can be explained by zero or negative interest rates.
Each time, there's a concrete event that sets off the hype wave, and it dies down when people realize that QC is *always* five years away.
@miss_rodent @glyph Like, one time wound up being a coincidence between the timing of a complicated bit of tax... er... well, not *fraud* exactly, as it was all perfectly legal, so I'll call it tax shenanigans... around the F-35 project and the Volkwagen emissions fraud that indirectly created a gigantic hype wave. That was weird.
Another time, it was the failure of an NLP-based "AI" product that created a hype wave.
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@miss_rodent @glyph Like, one time wound up being a coincidence between the timing of a complicated bit of tax... er... well, not *fraud* exactly, as it was all perfectly legal, so I'll call it tax shenanigans... around the F-35 project and the Volkwagen emissions fraud that indirectly created a gigantic hype wave. That was weird.
Another time, it was the failure of an NLP-based "AI" product that created a hype wave.
@miss_rodent @glyph I'm being intentionally vague here in public, but I promise those are both fully accurate descriptions even if a bit cryptic.
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@miss_rodent @glyph I'm being intentionally vague here in public, but I promise those are both fully accurate descriptions even if a bit cryptic.
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@miss_rodent @glyph Yeah, no, fair. It's a weird one in that I think there's a lot more there there to QC than AI, by a long shot, but also it's not the line-go-up kind of thing VCs seem to hope it will be, and definitely not on the timescales they seem to think that it will happen on.
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@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)
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@glyph I've aspired to "lunch-scale projects" for several years now. Intentionally meaningless—semantic choice in opposition to the differently meaningless "Web scale"—but generally:
- not for crowds (used by one person at a time, maybe a small group)
- bite-sized projects with a smaller scope
- the kind of work where I could fix the average bug before lunchtime
These ideals *have* made it hard to be persuasive in dev job interviews, alas.
All this to say I agree with the thoughts and CTA.
@randomgeek Clearly I have similar aspirations :). Thanks!
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@miss_rodent @glyph Yeah, no, fair. It's a weird one in that I think there's a lot more there there to QC than AI, by a long shot, but also it's not the line-go-up kind of thing VCs seem to hope it will be, and definitely not on the timescales they seem to think that it will happen on.
@xgranade @glyph Yeah, I think there is a lot more potential to QC than there is to LLMs, and likely to AI, overall, though machine learning and stuff, more generally, have some very actually-useful applications in various fields. Trying to make a chatbot into a new work-eliminating machine god seems like a pretty obviously hopeless endeavor though.
I don't think the useful parts of either are going to earn the trillions that could salvage this sort of datacenter money-burning craze though. -
@xgranade @glyph Yeah, I think there is a lot more potential to QC than there is to LLMs, and likely to AI, overall, though machine learning and stuff, more generally, have some very actually-useful applications in various fields. Trying to make a chatbot into a new work-eliminating machine god seems like a pretty obviously hopeless endeavor though.
I don't think the useful parts of either are going to earn the trillions that could salvage this sort of datacenter money-burning craze though.@miss_rodent @glyph I spent about 10 years on classical ML tools for building QCs and another few on using QCs for doing ML, with a bonus serving of "using small QCs and novel ML algorithms to build larger QCs." Needless to say, I agree about there being some useful stuff under the moniker of machine learning.
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@miss_rodent @glyph I spent about 10 years on classical ML tools for building QCs and another few on using QCs for doing ML, with a bonus serving of "using small QCs and novel ML algorithms to build larger QCs." Needless to say, I agree about there being some useful stuff under the moniker of machine learning.
@xgranade @miss_rodent love the genre of mastodon post which is "as [literally the most qualified person in the world on this specific topic], 'yes'"
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@glyph I wonder if the industrial revolution was like this--a few years of wild continuous change and then settling down into a stable form.
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@glyph I wonder if the industrial revolution was like this--a few years of wild continuous change and then settling down into a stable form.
@astraluma I don't think any of it narrativizes quite that precisely and neatly, and it depends exactly where you were and what you were doing at the time, but, in general, I think, "yes"
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@xgranade @miss_rodent love the genre of mastodon post which is "as [literally the most qualified person in the world on this specific topic], 'yes'"
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@glyph thinking about how this has played out in my lifetime, I can think of three key ingredients that probably repeat throughout history and produce "Big Thing" effects: presumption, speculation, and coercion.
You need the presumption to start thinking about a technology in terms of large scale adoption - a "computer on every desktop" kind of statement has to be collectively believed enough for an investment market to exist. Everything SV pushes is an attempt to rewrite history and develop new idols; startups resemble cults because their employees have to believe in something radical that is often unpopular when related in its full consequence - e.g. spreading computers means you've invented computer illiteracy as a social penalty. "But computers are cool so whatever," we say looking from the inside.
The investment has to be speculative because the new presumption has to counter a previous one, like "there is a world market for maybe five computers". One challenges the other in the marketplace. If it's an executive change then there's no power struggle to make the thing "big".
And the market has to be supportive of gangster dynamics in some fashion, where the speculative entities coerce each other and other industries into consolidated forms - in kinetic confrontation on a battlefield, in courtrooms and contracts, through marketing and manipulation of common vocabulary and idioms. If the change occurs without a coercive push then it doesn't manifest big opportunities to grab wealth.
Right now, the first is the one that is failing the most frequently. There is investment and coercion but it's not towards believable ends, which redirects the resulting activity towards "loot and plunder." Rises in authoritarian thinking signal that the prevailing dynamic of the powermonger and how they engage in the economy has shifted from "own relatively less of more" towards "own relatively more of less". So they kick the legs out from underneath a lot of older presumptions to try to get something going for themselves and we get a nihilistic sentiment from the top.
In this period I believe artists and philosophers may hold a position of cultural strength because training towards "different ways of seeing and thinking" also develops novel belief systems. When the culture is being stuffed with a battle for Big Things, nobody has time for it - they are trying to stay in line and take the easy opportunities, socially speaking, so they praise the incumbent winners or the managed competition of celebrities, sports, and political parties, and we get a monocultural dynamic. But right now, monoculture is dead - or maybe it's just sleeping.
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@glyph The enrichment of the 1% or 0.1% is effectively inflation. What’s actually going on is that managent of people living in poverty is becoming cheaper and cheaper..
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@glyph “Front-loading a massive amount of conceptual complexity to accommodate the problems of hyper-scalers is a common mistake.” 🥳
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@bitprophet you're the first one to catch that (I guarantee it hurt more to write than it does to read :))
@glyph @bitprophet yet we are only 24% into the century
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@glyph It's a great blog post, but I think we often recognize "big" things in retrospect rather than as they are coming. Nobody really considered the Internet "big" when it was first being put together. Nobody considered Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to be "big" either.
The behavior of VCs is based on this evidence. And I don't think they're wrong for it either.
Maybe this is it for "big things", maybe not. Who knows? Just enjoy the ride for the next century, I guess. 😄
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@eniko Then 🎂 !
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@j_bertolotti i think so yeah
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@eniko At least are you happy about completing thing?
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@ozzelot thing is good
or at least, i sure hope it is
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@thevhswizard very good reply thank u
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@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place
I wanna know about thing tho
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@eniko yay! thing!
unless thing is bad. then nay! thing! boo!
