All the crypto stuff already felt like it was doing a big push to move computing power away from general consumers, though may have been unintended.
Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.
Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.
> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.
Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.
It looks like we're nearing the end of the personal computing era. Looks like they will get their way. Whether we're regulated out or priced out, it doesn't matter, the result is the same.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs since I was a kid and the clipper chip was floated. I even had a commentary published in FidoNews about it, though I was like 15 and it was fairly incoherent. I don't know that anyone really is listening to me, but I'm with you. I tell myself that every time I spend 5 minutes haranguing to someone about the dangers of "trusted computing" (for lack of a better term) I haven't yet harangued to might buy us all one more voice in this obnoxious ceaseless war.
> To most people, "general purpose computing" just means their computer (or more likely their phone, these days) can run any app they want it to run.
That's the same definition as the one where developers have control over their devices, because that's necessary for those apps to exist and be used even if you're not the author of them.
Consider what most phone apps these day are. The vast majority are just a front end to a web endpoint and the app itself could just as well have been a browser. Nobody actually needs those to be apps.
Meanwhile the apps people would actually want are things like "ad blocker that blocks the ads in other apps" which are precisely what the war on general purpose computing has deprived people of. Because the scummy ad-laden app approved by the platform has to be "protected" from the "untrusted" open source ad blocker.
Likewise apps that back up the data in other apps or otherwise create competition for the platform's cloud services, competing browser engines that could properly support PWAs so that the "should have been a web page" apps can actually be a web page, etc.
Megacorps that want to lead ordinary people down the garden path may convince some of them that this is "for their own good", but convincing unsophisticated people that something is in their own interest is hardly the same as that thing actually being in their own interest.
This is kind of obvious but, definitely something that should be on people's minds as things keep getting weirder.
It was bad enough when mobile phones were not forced to be dealt with as "general purpose computers", and instead were allowed to remain proprietary hardware/software combinations controlled by the tech oligarchy.
But now that RAM is not financially viable to deliver to consumers due to the obscene appetite of the LLM crowd, and fabs are developing custom silicon for the dumbest things of all "training LLMs", we are seeing at least the beginning of what it mean for "personal computers" to become emaciated to the point where chip companies can no longer justify making them for such measly profit and how difficult they will be to sell at such high prices if they incorporate high cost components.
We arent fully there yet but we are heading in that direction. The laptop Im typing this on cost 1600 dollars 8 months ago and now retails for 4 thousand dollars. In 6 more months it will either not be available or retail for 8 thousand.
Given that LLMs are convincing less experienced coders that code is a waste of time to write, the generational/knowledge gap that will create over time in the industry, software engineering could in essence become a niche reserved only for elites (if it will even be allowed) and end user software/hardware knowledge will be discouraged and considered threatening to the establishment.
Although there is a large knowledge base on the Internet (right now) the Internet is now under relentless and growing assault from AI bot farms referred to as agents, which are simultaneously making it less and less practical to maintain web sites and internet infrastructure due to increased costs, which could create a "lights out" situation for online documentation as the internet is choked off and dies in favor of MCP clients and servers which hide functionality behind obscure interfaces and website content ceases to be economically sustainable.
This will usher in a human "dark age", where the cost of information will be zero but the truth of anything if it existed previously will become unavailable to all but the very wealthy especially if it contradicts LLM sources. Otherwise, non AI sources of information will be stomped out and authoritarianism will rule over all government and peoples, unleashing perpetual war, famine and genocide.
All of this seems quite shaky anywhere given humanity's reliance on Taiwan remaining politically stable and secure, which is far from a given. That so much of what's necessarily for the basic building blocks of what runs modern society is concentrated in one place with a ticking timebomb nearby is quite reckless.
I think China's waiting until the US is so broke it can't raise the money to rescue Taiwan. Based on the 40T debt, 2T deficit (not counting the 1.3T mid-term election bribe) and recent bond market jitters, that could be quite soon.
The problem China has is that as long as they depend on exports, they depend on the US consumer. If the US consumer stops spending, there is nobody else to pick up the slack.
But the US consumer is also quite self-centered. They will happily torch alliances and neighborly relations over perceived personal benefits. I doubt the US consumer would lift a finger for Taiwan. It will be a combination of weakness and indifference.
The US already depleted its missile stockpile, these missiles cannot be replaced because the US needs Rare Earths. China doesn't have to wait, the US defeated itself already
To be honest, aside from medicine and whatnot, what real benefit is AI bringing?
I use it to accelerate my development and it’s great, but as far as this is concerned, how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society? And for the quality of information it’s a junkyard overflowing.
I built a strategy agent and ran through a bunch of ideas, positioning them etc. even though the AI has a good sense of that, and for a moment I believed it to have good direction, man I was mislead. I took a step back and realized this thing has NO FKING IDEA. It almost derailed me and what I need to be doing. It was very convincing and took introspection to get back on track.
Its creative writing skills are idiotic and it’s emotional intelligence garbage.
It’s a bubble everyone and save for medical advancements, the rest is a mirage. Even if companies accelerate some temporary economic advantage, the real tangible value to humanity seems to be few and far between.
But it’s cool and everyone is masterfully debating the next big model advancement.
They invented self-healing concrete far superior to anything we use today and it took us 2000 years to realize we’re really smart morons. Romans built things to last, we build it to crumble.
> how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society
well I had AI program three things for me yesterday:
1. custom CSS for a website I read a lot so it conforms with readability research
2. crawl a Tumblr account of a comic book artist, download their comics, and assemble them into a PDF I can print and bind into a book myself
3. pull the code of a charity fundraiser website that is terribly written, refactor it, centralize the theme, and update it for the next fundraising campaign, and deploy it
About an hour of my weekend to do this. Each of these projects was a weekend before that.
1. There are more open-source hardware devices available today than ever before. Your demand to legally "force" your pov is just authoritarian.
2. LLMs are obviously useful- it's not dumb to train them.
3. Coding is now democratized- it is now easier than ever for anyone to write a program
And while compute likely is being overinvested in now (i.e., the price is artificially inflated, supply is being dramatically increased, etc.), the likelihood that this is a temporary shortage and, in the event of 'hype' deflating, an impending surplus -- I don't think we yet have to fear the inability for one to personally compute.
>"((1012.5)) So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits". And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea -- just a program that does one specialized task -- after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance.
We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want.
In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.
All the crypto stuff already felt like it was doing a big push to move computing power away from general consumers, though may have been unintended.
Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.
Monero is the opposite. Everyone can mine on their CPU and just like most cryptocurrencies, it makes you your own bank.
Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.
Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
Or do you mean higher block rewards? Don't worry, the value of the coin automatically adjusts to nullify that.
> Like Monero but easy to mine is Monero. A Monero mining ASIC is called a CPU, by design.
That is the "does nothing" argument. But compared to Bitcoin, having a general-purpose [0] ASIC seems like it'd make the network less secure - if someone wants to run something like a 51% attack against Bitcoin they first have to buy a ridiculous amount of specialist Bitcoin-only hardware that will potentially lose all its value after a successful attack. Also probably be a lot easier to track who did it.
Monero the equilibriums are less obvious. Does that matter? No, I don't think so, I still own a certain amount. But it isn't a helpful axis to experiment on and I don't see where the upside is meant to come from vs just going with sha.
[0] Edited, was special-purpose.
What do you mean compared to Bitcoin? Bitcoin has special-purpose ASICs and Monero does not.
Oh yes, sorry. General purpose. I edited the comment.
In theory, in practice it caused shortages of GPUs for other uses and the production never caught up to old consumer prices.
Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
It looks like we're nearing the end of the personal computing era. Looks like they will get their way. Whether we're regulated out or priced out, it doesn't matter, the result is the same.
Profoundly sad.
I had much better access to personal computing as a teenager with multiple clunky desktops, that I do today I feel.
The only way to a sure loss is to not fight.
Keep on fighting.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs since I was a kid and the clipper chip was floated. I even had a commentary published in FidoNews about it, though I was like 15 and it was fairly incoherent. I don't know that anyone really is listening to me, but I'm with you. I tell myself that every time I spend 5 minutes haranguing to someone about the dangers of "trusted computing" (for lack of a better term) I haven't yet harangued to might buy us all one more voice in this obnoxious ceaseless war.
Yeah. Until the end.
My take on this is the same as when an article by Doc Searls that references this speech by Doctorow came up on HN in 2019:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862580
> To most people, "general purpose computing" just means their computer (or more likely their phone, these days) can run any app they want it to run.
That's the same definition as the one where developers have control over their devices, because that's necessary for those apps to exist and be used even if you're not the author of them.
Consider what most phone apps these day are. The vast majority are just a front end to a web endpoint and the app itself could just as well have been a browser. Nobody actually needs those to be apps.
Meanwhile the apps people would actually want are things like "ad blocker that blocks the ads in other apps" which are precisely what the war on general purpose computing has deprived people of. Because the scummy ad-laden app approved by the platform has to be "protected" from the "untrusted" open source ad blocker.
Likewise apps that back up the data in other apps or otherwise create competition for the platform's cloud services, competing browser engines that could properly support PWAs so that the "should have been a web page" apps can actually be a web page, etc.
Megacorps that want to lead ordinary people down the garden path may convince some of them that this is "for their own good", but convincing unsophisticated people that something is in their own interest is hardly the same as that thing actually being in their own interest.
Don’t forget “computers that can do everything but run scary unregulated LLMs”
This is kind of obvious but, definitely something that should be on people's minds as things keep getting weirder.
It was bad enough when mobile phones were not forced to be dealt with as "general purpose computers", and instead were allowed to remain proprietary hardware/software combinations controlled by the tech oligarchy.
But now that RAM is not financially viable to deliver to consumers due to the obscene appetite of the LLM crowd, and fabs are developing custom silicon for the dumbest things of all "training LLMs", we are seeing at least the beginning of what it mean for "personal computers" to become emaciated to the point where chip companies can no longer justify making them for such measly profit and how difficult they will be to sell at such high prices if they incorporate high cost components.
We arent fully there yet but we are heading in that direction. The laptop Im typing this on cost 1600 dollars 8 months ago and now retails for 4 thousand dollars. In 6 more months it will either not be available or retail for 8 thousand.
Given that LLMs are convincing less experienced coders that code is a waste of time to write, the generational/knowledge gap that will create over time in the industry, software engineering could in essence become a niche reserved only for elites (if it will even be allowed) and end user software/hardware knowledge will be discouraged and considered threatening to the establishment.
Although there is a large knowledge base on the Internet (right now) the Internet is now under relentless and growing assault from AI bot farms referred to as agents, which are simultaneously making it less and less practical to maintain web sites and internet infrastructure due to increased costs, which could create a "lights out" situation for online documentation as the internet is choked off and dies in favor of MCP clients and servers which hide functionality behind obscure interfaces and website content ceases to be economically sustainable.
This will usher in a human "dark age", where the cost of information will be zero but the truth of anything if it existed previously will become unavailable to all but the very wealthy especially if it contradicts LLM sources. Otherwise, non AI sources of information will be stomped out and authoritarianism will rule over all government and peoples, unleashing perpetual war, famine and genocide.
But other than that it will be fine.
We can do our general purpose computing in 256MB if we unbloat it. We used to.
All of this seems quite shaky anywhere given humanity's reliance on Taiwan remaining politically stable and secure, which is far from a given. That so much of what's necessarily for the basic building blocks of what runs modern society is concentrated in one place with a ticking timebomb nearby is quite reckless.
I think China's waiting until the US is so broke it can't raise the money to rescue Taiwan. Based on the 40T debt, 2T deficit (not counting the 1.3T mid-term election bribe) and recent bond market jitters, that could be quite soon.
The problem China has is that as long as they depend on exports, they depend on the US consumer. If the US consumer stops spending, there is nobody else to pick up the slack.
But the US consumer is also quite self-centered. They will happily torch alliances and neighborly relations over perceived personal benefits. I doubt the US consumer would lift a finger for Taiwan. It will be a combination of weakness and indifference.
Why can't they just print the same money and destroy the corresponding goods, worst case? What would happen?
The US already depleted its missile stockpile, these missiles cannot be replaced because the US needs Rare Earths. China doesn't have to wait, the US defeated itself already
There’s always the printing press…
To be honest, aside from medicine and whatnot, what real benefit is AI bringing?
I use it to accelerate my development and it’s great, but as far as this is concerned, how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society? And for the quality of information it’s a junkyard overflowing.
I built a strategy agent and ran through a bunch of ideas, positioning them etc. even though the AI has a good sense of that, and for a moment I believed it to have good direction, man I was mislead. I took a step back and realized this thing has NO FKING IDEA. It almost derailed me and what I need to be doing. It was very convincing and took introspection to get back on track.
Its creative writing skills are idiotic and it’s emotional intelligence garbage.
It’s a bubble everyone and save for medical advancements, the rest is a mirage. Even if companies accelerate some temporary economic advantage, the real tangible value to humanity seems to be few and far between.
But it’s cool and everyone is masterfully debating the next big model advancement.
What have the romans ever done for us?
They invented self-healing concrete far superior to anything we use today and it took us 2000 years to realize we’re really smart morons. Romans built things to last, we build it to crumble.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...
> Romans built things to last
and yet, all of it has crumbled despite the copious availability of slave labor at construction time
> how many vibe coded apps do we need as a society
well I had AI program three things for me yesterday:
1. custom CSS for a website I read a lot so it conforms with readability research
2. crawl a Tumblr account of a comic book artist, download their comics, and assemble them into a PDF I can print and bind into a book myself
3. pull the code of a charity fundraiser website that is terribly written, refactor it, centralize the theme, and update it for the next fundraising campaign, and deploy it
About an hour of my weekend to do this. Each of these projects was a weekend before that.
> what real benefit is AI bringing?
You can always ask us questions. Sincerely, the CIA /s
2013 is so long ago.
1. There are more open-source hardware devices available today than ever before. Your demand to legally "force" your pov is just authoritarian. 2. LLMs are obviously useful- it's not dumb to train them. 3. Coding is now democratized- it is now easier than ever for anyone to write a program
And while compute likely is being overinvested in now (i.e., the price is artificially inflated, supply is being dramatically increased, etc.), the likelihood that this is a temporary shortage and, in the event of 'hype' deflating, an impending surplus -- I don't think we yet have to fear the inability for one to personally compute.
>"((1012.5)) So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits". And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea -- just a program that does one specialized task -- after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance.
We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want.
In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.
(audience applauds loudly) Thanks."
Some excellent observations by Cory Doctorow!
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
"A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ