@tinker too many devices go to dustbin because of useless bloat.

@tinker 💯 Couldn't agree more.

@tinker

I made a point to add i386 support to the Signet client when I became the maintainer. I even have a computer old enough to test it! 😆

I agree that the AI chat bots and most blockchain projects use more energy than they are worth, but the problem is not limited to them.

Webpages are absolutely absurd to what they could be (and used to be in practice).

Desktop apps and operating systems... pretty much all modern tech unless it's making a specific point to be efficient.

@tinker let people like me take your smaller, more energy efficient products and slap dry ice or ln2 on it, we thrive in TEMPORARY inefficient usage... None of us run insane overclocks on our daily drivers, often we undervolt shit... Companies need to stop shooting for daily overclock records on their products, its excessive and stupid... (Im looking at you rtx 4090, consuming 425w when you could get 5% less performance for 280w)

@tinker Something I think about often is that for most circumstances computing is a solved problem. Sure, there is always room for improvement, but in general, any new PC you buy today is basically good enough to do everything any typical person will ever need to do. The main reason for higher performance systems is because of inefficient and superfluous software (AI being a great example of both). Hardware improvements only have marginal benefits.

/1

@tinker well said. Fuck yes.

@tinker appreciate your take, but I think there is a bit of difference between Blockchain and LLMs.

I think Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem while LLMs are a problem that can be applied to almost any solution.

There are valid uses for both, just not nearly on the scale advertised.

@tinker smaller, faster, lighter will only happen if there is capitalistic cost for not doing so. As long as bigger & more serves capitalism better, there will be incentives for bigger & more.

@tinker 💯 !

@tinker lukewarm take, making the code more efficient might make it bigger (more checks, more paths)

@tinker I agree with you, but here's the thing I can't figure out, and that is how to monetize the "improve the existing software" when selling snake oil offers quick profits.

Sincerely, if we could answer that question we might be able to change some behaviors.

@tinker I thought the Blockchain was looking to solve the problem of illegal activities being trackable and prosecutable.

I thought money laundering was the point of the block chain.

And maybe a pyramid scheme or two, because some tech Bros didn’t have enough money?

@tinker nah, they always just crank up the system requirements for the workstation/tablet/phone/server.

"Sorry, this app require a 16Gb iPhone."

When I started fucking with computers fifty years ago, there wasn't 16Gb of memory in the ENTIRE WORLD.

Now there are shitty little games that use 886 megabytes just to get moving.

@tinker Here are some problems to solve that don't require wasteful technologies: hunger, war, injustice.

@tinker but what will the product managers do?

@tinker I strongly believe that NFTs were a direct reaction to EU 5AMLD, which regulated the auction, sale, and transfer of physical artworks to a similar degree to other methods of wealth transfer. previously, art could be sold or transferred without record, allowing wealth to be hidden from scrutiny and money to be moved around without transparency. 5AMLD requires art transfers over a threshold value to be declared, just like with cash transfers, and NFTs were an attempt to sidestep this.

@tinker you can’t just pick a random point in history and say: that’s it, we don’t need more.

If we listened to people saying this earlier we might not even have computing power at all. We’re incapable of stopping. Someone is always going to push on.

@tinker Yes and the thread is great but I think what you are really getting at is the motives for all this

It's one thing to improve stuff to say feed everyone on Earth... it is another to just make money for a shiny new toy for a CEO to play with 👀

@tinker 2020 really changed some folk, made them terribly afraid of something... death, personal legacies, that wealth cannot protect them from nature. Whatever it is driving them, their little paranoias became our problem and now we have to deal with their brainworms as they try to speedrun the heat death of Earth.

We have reached a solid plateau in processing power, we can push further but we don't need to if we just make code lighter and processors more efficient.

@tinker if blockchain is an "unasked for tech looking for a problem to solve" then why does the entire world use services that purport to solve the issues it solves? Banks, payment processors, social payment platforms, etc.

(Nevermind itt also absolutely does not necessarily use a lot of power--ethereum has been proof of stake for ages now! Get new lines!)

@tinker As a person who somewhat likes both tech but dislikes their current manifestations I totally agree

@tinker

Also, reducing code size also reduces attack surface.

See Microsoft. They know this.

@tinker
I wonder if these LLMs will go the way of self driving cars. Truck loads of money thrown at it and the promises of no traffic and no traffics deaths never coming to fruition.
I wonder if the tech bros can overcome the all the shortcomings of AI to make actually useful. Doesn’t seem worth it.

@tinker AI is contributing to a widening gap between rich and poor and global warming. I thought we were building machines to help all mankind and not just the 1%??? #genAI #climatechange #greed

@tinker AI and blockchain both solve specific problems. When they are well designed and well implemented to the specific problems they are good at, they are *much* better than other alternatives.

They do NOT solve All The Problems.

They DO solve some of the problems.

@tinker Absolutely.

@tinker Also, I'm like 420!!!

@tinker

I've been saying for about two decades now that the next phase "after Moore's Law" must be leveraging parallel processing. Like many threads, many processors, many "boxes."

These are hard problems, but important.

And I believe that we could do it.

But I fear that we are too lazy and shortsighted.

@tinker I only agree with the part of:

“work on making it more efficient. Make the code smaller and faster and lighter.”

@tinker we have such incredible, rich things in our lives now; if we stopped pursuing endless profit we could all just enjoy it instead of half the world living in poverty while 1% burn it to the ground in pursuit of numbers that are already so large as to be meaningless.

@tinker yeah. The quantum computing stuff gaining traction a few years ago was the most exciting thing to me. So much more compute for so much less power. I guess that hasn’t panned out yet?

@tinker why i like the term end stage capitalism, un controlled cancerous growth that is literally killing its host biosphere.

@tinker
While you could make the power use argument with proof of work systems like Bitcoin, it doesn't necessarily apply to all blockchain designs. I staked my ADA to a node that's just a solar powered Raspberry Pi.

@tinker Yes

@tinker if you make things go choo choo faster wouldn’t that immediately used to make more of the stuff that nobody asked for and that consumes way too much energy?

It would definitely help you to land a job in AI or crypto company though ;)

Mostly just pulling your leg

@tinker Isn't the idea though that it's a big up front cost so that it's cheaper over time? We've spent a lot of resources training some huge models but a lot of the newer tech is building off of those foundations e.g. with transfer learning. I think there are certainly a lot of concerns to be had over (mis-)applications of machine learning, but this feels kind of like saying "we can't build a new solar panel every day! it's much more efficient to just burn wood"

@tinker so, how do we make a system that actually evolves towards efficiency?

What we have now certainly does not do that. Software definitely gets worse over time. It makes me ashamed to be a software developer, although I may aspire and work towards efficiency and simplicity, when I say "I am a software developer" I'm associating myself with all software development and that's mostly just making many tiny frustrations, dictating how things work rather than listening to anyone