• 2 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle







  • Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years

    1. Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
    2. Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
    3. Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade


  • Idk, even before Musk went full meth head things were already heading south pretty fast - they’d completely squandered their first mover advantage and their “move fast and break things” approach was really starting to take a toll on their brand reputation. Teslas were already starting to be known as expensive cars with terrible build quality, then the constant delays and broken promises about self driving did them no favors either.

    A Tesla made sense when they were pretty much the only really viable luxury EV, but when you can get equivalent cars (with better build quality) from established Western manufacturers for ~75% the price or from a Chinese manufacturer for ~60%, what advantage do they have?

    Musk’s cult of personally is/was a big part of it, so they are kinda screwed either way - the stink of Musk won’t instantly vanish if they get rid of him, and taints everything while he stays





  • I find it telling that AGI people seem to assume that AGI will spontaneously appear as a distinct entity with its own agency rather than being a product that will be owned and sold.

    People who have hundreds of billions of dollars can get mid-single-digit percent ROI by making very safe investments with that money, but instead they are pouring it into relatively risky AI investments. What do you think that says about their expectations of returns?


  • At a guess:

    • People with steam accounts and VPNs in countries that steam doesn’t operate in. Steam will block your “foreign” credit card as a fraud risk, but eBay dgaf cos it’s the sellers problem if they get ripped off
    • This is probably a pretty convenient way to send small amounts of money to people in a way that looks pretty legit. Arrange to buy some drugs off someone over telegram, they get you to buy a “steam card” from them, they send an envelope with a blank bit of cardboard and the drugs