Baldur Bjarnason"LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.
I can't emphasise strongly enough how this ISN'T happening with LLMs. They are throwing all their money into building ON the broken tech and next to nothing in developing a replacement that has an actual chance at fulfilling the promise LLMs hint at, because there genuinely aren't any plausible pathways to get there from here
The modern AI Bubble is 100% a "modem speeds were good enough and the dot-com companies only failed because they didn't have enough funding to get them over the hump created by the government's regulatory fight with Microsoft" delusion.
Sara Joy 
@baldur or "hey copper wires are fine let's just keep throwing smaller and smaller square waves down it with more and more pre-distortion to overcome the lossyness and it'll be grand"
But in the end you still end up with a snarled up result at the other end where the 0s and 1s are blurred into each other and the noise floor, with ever more broken packets and errors.
D Ingram@sarajw @baldur Copper wires? Luxury! When I started on the internet we had a 128kb/s satellite connection. For the entire country of New Zealand. When there was severe sunspot activity we'd lose our connection to the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_New_Zealand#cite_ref-64
@sarajw @baldur It was pre web! I had to combine my own browser (Lynx) for Vax in 1994. NCSA Mosaic was around 1994 I think. There's a good write up of NZ internet history here. https://www.nethistory.co.nz/Internet_in_New_Zealand_Timeline/
Satellite went from 14.4k to 64k in 1992, and then to 128k in 1993. The improvement when the link went to fibre was amazing. The lag on telnet was horrible on satellite.
Satellite went from 14.4k to 64k in 1992, and then to 128k in 1993. The improvement when the link went to fibre was amazing. The lag on telnet was horrible on satellite.
Internet in New Zealand Timeline
'Connecting the Clouds - The Internet in New Zealand' is a history of the people, activities and events that contributed to the creation, then growth, of the Internet in New Zealand. Written by author Keith Newman, the book was commissioned by InternetNZ (the Internet Society of New Zealand Inc) and published by Activity Press.
@ingram ha oh gosh I bet!
@sarajw It still is, if you're using a satellite in geo synchronous orbit. Had a flash back about 9y ago when using an Inmarsat modem for remote equipment monitoring. SSH was horrible to use, but streaming speed was "good" at 400k.
It still amazes me that my home internet connection is now 5x faster than the LAN when I was at uni.
@ingram lucky you!
Parts of Germany are in the dark ages re consumer bandwidth. We can't get more than 100Mbps at home.
@sarajw I'm getting 50Mb/s at home. LANs were very slow -- we'd only just started the move from coaxial ethernet to twisted pair. I helped install the first 100Mb/s switch (FDDI) in the country when I had a part time job with the computer centre. It was only for the University backbone but it made a big difference.
@ingram amazing.
Yeah I remember going to Uni and being like wowwwww broadband is amazing!
Then home in the holidays to 56K 💀