Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@inthehands Yeah, and tbh often it can just be both. If they act in-line with the people's interest, it's encouragement. If they don't, it's foreshadowing what the protesters will angry at them over.

@inthehands Yeah, public pressure is important if you want a representative democracy to actually function. Both from the 'shows public support' side, but also (and often more importantly) shows the risk of strikes, protests, riots, civil unrest, etc. disruptin the economy, and the risk of being voted out (or dragged out of their home at night as a traitor) if it's ignored.
So... functions as both encouragement if they agree, and implicit threat otherwise.

@inthehands Seems like a reference to the FDR "Make me do it" anecdote that floats around, in the same vein. (I think Obama referenced it too, at one point - it certainly came into wider public consciousness under obama at least - though the original story is, afaik a myth).
Which... often doesn't work out quite like it's framed. It's all well and good when the politician agrees, but, more often than not they get frustrated by it - eg. FDR, being usually pissed off at unions forcing his hand.

@glyph @astraluma but then damn near an entire generation died in a war, and shortly after did it again, so it's a bit less clear in that period what was "We ran out of new big things" and what was "We ran out of able bodied men to use the new things." until you get into the more contemporary period...

@glyph @astraluma Twice, arguably - in the mid 19th century slowdown, and the late 19th/early 20th century slowdown. (The industrial revolution had a couple waves, where new technologies got picked up, dramatically changed some industry/industries, then growth slowed down once they had become widespread, with
things like steam engines, trains, and telegraphs, early on, mass steel production, electricity, and standardized parts & assembly lines in the later wave)

@glyph @xgranade On the plus side, the 'extremely qualified yes' genre of post is at least a good sanity check on my side of it, I'm not nearly as qualified and have shifted focus more into philosophy and the humanities since dropping out of my math/physics major in uni .

@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 Fair, though being a hype bubble and being a "Next Big Thing" are, I think, still very different sorts of interest [and not mutually exclusive, as the dotcom bubble and subsequent internetification of all things demonstrated...]
Perpetually 5 years away sounds about right, though.

@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.

@xgranade @glyph Yeah that's about where we seemed to be last time I looked. Theoretically possible, practically a clusterfuck, and actual utility still an unknown.

@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 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 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.

@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)

@glyph Complete with ELIZA effect....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

This just feels like one of the dumbest 'those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it' situations I've been alive for.

@glyph Oh, yeah, LLMs are ... idk, this hype wave jsut makes me think of ELIZA (1966 simulated therapist), really.
With about the same chance of achieving sapience.

@glyph Worth noting - these machines also depend on some rather recent physics to even be plausible. So, there's also a layer of physics, material science, etc. academics at mostly universities, scattered across the world, mostly funded by public spending on sciences, to even get to the point the engineers could try to build something that works at all on this scale.