This and other such news read as if those people were, in their own sense, similar to LLMs. Doing something on this buzzword or that.

What do they mean by quantum technology? There is already quantum technology all around us, it’s laser sights, optical media, lidars, optical cables and what not. There are also nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

They mean post-quantum cryptography? Well, very nice, but of what I’ve read, it’s a ready solution for a problem that might be 50 years away, despite promises of quantum computers to break encryption the very next year being common.

And then - what can they do to help anything vital, what the hell does a senator know about industry needs?

You should consider effects of scale.

With the size of China it’s simply easier to do “targeted investments”.

They are almost big enough for autarky with modern technologies and conveniences.

Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to … and evade sanctions?

So, if you are born with an unfortunate citizenship and location, you do need these things exactly. Bitcoin is one tech-bro thing I worship. It fulfills a purpose. The world would be worse without it.

I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

That’s because you live in a first world country and think, apparently, that everyone does or that those who don’t have only themselves to blame.

Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers’ fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.

Same, except mid-00s.

I like minidiscs, even if I’m too young to remember any popularity of them, I remember discs for Sony PSP which are similar in idea, an optical medium with protection like of diskettes.

And optical discs are not such a common good to think a protection case is too expensive or something. They get scratches.

But there’s another moment - optical discs also degrade with time faster than one would think when they were common. Mostly. Some are good.

About cryptocurrencies … I don’t believe that actually. That is, I believe many of them are scams. Or, one can say, very weird fundraising schemes for their creators. But there are uses, as one can easily feel when being in a sanctioned country.

SteamDeck 2 will still have an ARM.

Of what little I know, ARM core designs should be relatively easy to repurpose for RISC-V ISA, once the set of extensions normally used becomes certain. Most of the work being in decoders.

So it just comes down to a still new and not entirely stable ISA. Like with network protocols.

I was going to write something hateful. But you are right here.

While reading this comment, I’ve realized that like 15 years ago I was dreaming of such a world of cheap devices, partially paid off by their users creating entropy for some deus-ex-machina big data thing that everyone needs. Those dreams had such a retrofuturistic flavor.

I mean, were this done in a way preventing personalized spying, could be nice.

There’s an effort combination here - to buy things that just work, you need not only demand, but their sufficient production and companies choosing that niche to concentrate, because they don’t have an option of something with “AI”.

It’s like negotiation, of what to produce. There’s elasticity of demand based on niche similar to that of demand by price. If you need a fridge and there are only AI fridges offered, you’ll buy an AI fridge.

So you won’t be able to buy something that just works when all companies with sufficient power to design and produce fridges want AI.

There’s also some stickiness there, like a hysteresis, and the current combined effort at AI promotion, even if not at equilibrium of said AI’s attractiveness for said elasticity, will hold. Unless there will be another combined effort at killing it with fire.

That is similar to 4:3 display ratio, ergonomic user interfaces, or perhaps home appliances that came with schematics, but not anymore.

Widespread interest in a plattform is probably a far more important factor.

That. Plenty of very good games were made for PS2.

At some point on the Web (in my childhood, in the Russian-speaking parts - around 2002-2004) anything requiring registration was treated as some sort of closed club, and that was about just registration. Though people exposed their ICQ UINs and email addresses, so that you could chat with them (that’s the old way you’d DM a person whose post you liked).

I’m not sure about all these rules of what websites should and shouldn’t do. Perhaps websites should be always treated as some untrusted alien space that can possibly do anything. If you want to do something where such a leak is really bad, or anything worse than a pocket theft of 20$ - then perhaps such a system shouldn’t rely upon untrusted centralized service having everything.

I like the social model that existed then, though. It was somewhat global, now we have modern Web services (even if in Fediverse) that expose everything over the Web, posts, DMs and so on. Back then forums were websites, DMs were in ICQ\XMPP\Skype, email as its own thing, feeds as RSS.

Eh. Good I never had premium then.

(Though I suspect my porn habits were exposed in much detail otherwise via something like personalized state surveillance.)

YOU have to pay the energy company for the extra electricity you put into the grid! Like… What‽‽‽

That might be logical in some situations. Where there’s surplus in the grid and it plays the role of amortizer of what you give it. They can’t just shut you off when they are getting too much load. Or they can but prefer to have a soft curve where you get less and less until you start paying for what you give.

Like water is a resource, but you do pay for water disposal (that is, I live in Russia, and there’s a separate line on the bill for what goes into sewers), or, if someone provides passive cooling service somewhere, you might pay for the heat you give away. Even if that’s energy.

The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.

That just reads mindblowingly stupid for me after only one semester of the “automatic guidance of trains” subject with a few simple methods of numeric optimization. And I wasn’t studying very well, to say the least.

The rest of what you write feels as if you’d missed the whole “digital computer” thing and what it already allows us to do since 1970s and that is being done since 1970s.

Wouldn’t doing anything harder than usual be a flag about you then?

By bypassing all that they won’t immediately know who owned it through whatever machine IDs computers have on them.

There’s probably enough redundancy in such possibilities to track you not to care about this particular thing technically .

It’s just an insult to the user and they are assholes, dealing with assholes is a bad sign similar to black cats crossing your path. Don’t deal with assholes.

No need to explain this technically, you might think it’s better, but you are implicitly supporting the idea that without hard proof it’s fine that they are doing all those weird things. It’s not, you don’t have to prove anything. They are assholes, don’t deal with them, don’t keep taking insults. Simple.

If something is beneficial to the side with more negotiating power and is practical to do, it happens.

It wasn’t plausible when Internet connectivity for accounts on local machines wasn’t a given always everywhere.

And it wasn’t that important for them.

Now both have changed enough.

Also I think all stable continuous changes of mass where single person doesn’t change much are predictable, similarly to Asimov’s Foundation (except there it was presented as something a virtuous genius does to help humanity, not quite how life works).

So expecting Microsoft and others to break their dicks is infantile. I think they’ll succeed fully inside their strategic definition, their model, one can say.

Where anything divergent and interesting can happen is the fringes. Like Reticulum, Briar, hobbyist weak hardware, technologies that will emerge occasionally without mass economic pressure. Toys and jokes.

Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?

There might be a more direct parallel than originally intended in this with the explanation how one person works hard all day and makes less than another person who pushes a few buttons. The latter knows which buttons to push.

This technology is useless for my movie searches, but it might be useful in the same way as radar was for air defense.

BTW, I’m not sure what I’d choose if offered to pay 500 dollars for knowing what that movie is. There’s one girl, if she’d be interested too to find that movie, perhaps I would.

So if such an expensive technology would allow this kind of nuanced search, and more seemingly efficient wouldn’t, then we have a use case.

Or a model allowing to predict actions of other people sufficiently well, based on seemingly not precise enough data. However much it would cost, that would be justified, similarly to high-frequency trading, because it would operate on all existing value, not just what it generates.

I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.

I know, I was making two points, one is that everything is relative (what you’ve just agreed to), another is that it might not at all be a bubble.

Well, one can say then also that US military is a bubble, it also hogs resources far bigger for the same results that poorer nations achieve. There are some things it does that can’t be compared to others because nobody has the need or that much money, but what can be compared is not even factor 10+.

It keeps getting that funding because of the position in the world it occupies.

Or one can say that the Danish kingdom sitting on the Sound relying on custom fees for its budget and then going on adventures with mercenary troops was a bubble. That bubble was inflated and burst a few times before that happened finally (something-something Kiel canal), and for long enough periods of history that just was the reality.

It’s a relative thing if something is sustainable or not. When people are talking about Earth being expected to exist for enough time to be more afraid of global warming and microplastics and such, it means that Earth’s existence itself is usually assumed to be indefinitely sustainable in our frame of evaluation.

So what you said is true, but dotcoms also were a bubble.