Mastodawn

HYPOTHESIS: while Moore's Law dominated performance in laptops, the rule was "cheap, fast, low power—pick any two".

Moore's Law is coming to an end. The Macbook Neo says "why choose?"

Nobody needs a laptop with a 40 hour battery life. Nor does anybody needs 200 cpu threads and an AI coprocessor and 256Gb of RAM and 8Tb of SSD. So we're finally seeing the sweet spot in the phase diagram drift inexorably towards the corner labelled "cheap".

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Bjoern Michaelsen 1d ago

@cstross
So, which business models are obsoleted now that compute is a commodity?

Is it maybe the folks that scream you need AI in everything, so that more datacenters need to be build? Cant allow people to be happy on decade old hardware because that is dampening demand.

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Charlie Stross

@Sweetshark No, those people are scam artists, nothing more and nothing less. (Aside from the delusional sheep who're following them because they don't understand the basics of CS, much less the cognitive psychology hack that makes the tech-illiterate mistake a "chinese room" for a person.)

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SpeakerToManagers 1d ago

@cstross @Sweetshark
The Chinese Room was debunked 40 years ago, and I still get people quoting it at me. Not to speak of the people who don’t understand that Neural Nets are not anything like biological neurons. I get tired of explaining CogSci 100 (prerequisite for 101).

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Charlie Stross 1d ago

@SpeakerToManagers Chinese Rooms as a procedural system were Searle's attempt at refuting the idea of simulation on philosophical grounds. (He was wrong.) But chatbots with no underlying model of the world aren't conscious either.

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SpeakerToManagers 1d ago

@cstross
True. Searle assumed some godlike being carefully filled in the google or so entries in the lookup tables that controlled the way the little man (or was it a p-zombie? I get confused) inside the room created the translations. I am seriously annoyed by thought experiments that start with incoherent postulates.