The SSD would cost $10 but only the commissars would be able to buy them because they would always be out of stock everywhere else.

When the AI bubble bursts, the government will run a "Cash for Clankers" program where they buy all the old AI hardware and crush it so it can't wreck the market for new parts.

I remember years ago reading a post on some Microsoft techie's blog where he answered a question about why Windows did something in a weird way and it was apparently because it would break otherwise if you tried to do that thing on a system where the file you were trying to access was on actually a tape drive and had to be retrieved very slowly.

Also those tape drives appear to cost as much as a car. So not really good solution for regular users.

I installed a 28TB hard drive in my gaming PC to back up to. Man is that thing loud when you're used to a quiet PC with SSDs.

I checked prices a few weeks ago and discovered I couldn't even afford to replace that PC if it broke. It would cost as much as a small car.

All so the Internet can create funny cat videos.

I remember when I could buy 8TB SSDs for $499 (Canadian). It wasn't that long ago.

Now an 8TB hard drive costs almost that much.

That is true. So I guess that's another way to try to beat Moore's Law (or the lack of it).

Though the better the low-end models get, the less need for massive data centres as people can run them locally.

Don't forget Windows 11.

We had to buy two new PCs last year just because Windows 11 refused to run on the existing ones. That extra burst of sales is also over.

The brain is an analog computer. It's literally impossible to know the entire system state or how it will change in the next second.

An LLM is a digital computer. You can store the precise state and precisely determine how it will behave for aeons to come.

> If you see anything non-deterministic, then you just missed some variable when describing the input state.

It's epicycles, epicycles, epicycles all the way down.

How can consciousness have any meaning whatsoever if behaviour is deterministic?

As for insects, I would say if we can simulate their brain's neural network on a computer and the behaviour remains the same then they're clearly not conscious.

> So it looks like these AI companies need to stay alive for about seven more years giving away product at a loss, or at least highly oversubscribed, to turn a profit. Hence the low token allowance, the banning of OpenClaw, etc.

You're assuming that tech will continue to improve as fast as it did over the last twenty years... when we're past the end of Moore's Law.

At a minimum that would likely involve moving away from silicon to something we can run at much higher clock speeds, or finding a much more efficient way to run AI models than we're currently using. Possible maybe, but not simple.

There's personal atheism and there's The Cult of Atheism... which quite clearly is a religion.

Dawkins has been a militant atheist in the past. Didn't he help fund buses to drive around with signs saying that God doesn't exist a few years ago?

In Clown World, education makes you stupid.

It takes a great deal of education to believe something that the average guy in a blue-collar bar could tell you is obviously wrong.

C'mon man. That's what physicists have been doing for the last eighty years or so.

Yes. It's surprising how many people haven't noticed that Climate Change is now The Old Thing and The New Thing is full-speed-ahead to build as many power-hungry AI data centres as possible.

Lots of people don't understand that they're just tools for the same oligarchs they love to complain about.