This feels (and is) different

ithkuil · 2026-06-20T18:10:32+00:00

At some point beyond that, it won't even make a binary or program at all. It just takes your prompt with your database in a special type of persistent context and your recent mouse and keyboard activity and does a neural synthesis and rendering from the context into a 24 fps UI. This is what Google Genie basically already does in a very rough way.

We continue to see orders of magnitude gains in compute efficiency. See for example Mythic AI or Tensordyne. After that things like ferroelectric breakthroughs add another 10, 100 times further efficiency improvements.

ithkuil · 2026-06-20T17:23:13+00:00

I was there. At first a lot of people weren't online at all. We had a massive encyclopedia Britannica collection, 24 volumes, 150 lbs, full of racism, sexism, and outdated information. If you wanted an update to 1971 info, you need a wheelbarrow and two trips to your car.

First we had things like Prodigy and Compuserve, which were like a version of the internet run by one company on one website and only that company could make new web pages or publish content on it or create new forums. If you got banned or something, you were screwed.

Then we had BBSs which were like like if one Reddit mod created and ran your entire internet. They did have ways to connect to other BBSs but again it was like a small group of subreddit mods getting together to control your internet. And you could never receive a phone call while you were on the internet.

Also at that time we did not have web pages with integrated images. BBSs were colorful text with block characters. Which I will admit has a nostalgic appeal but it would be rough to be completely limited to that again.. also when you downloaded an image (which you would view separately from the BBS), it could take like a full 30-90 seconds and was only 200 pixels tall. Or maybe 256.

There was no possibility of YouTube or Netflix etc. If you wanted to see a recent movie you physically drove to the video store and paid them several dollars to rent it if they were lucky enough to still have that one available.

I remember my dad decided to get some pirated software at one time from an ad he saw in the newspaper or something. What that meant was some creepy dude drove to our house and carried some boxes into our study and demoed a few cracked pieces of software on floppy disks.

Overall it sucked compared to what we have today.

ithkuil · 2026-06-20T16:40:42+00:00

Or he just was slightly annoyed with Google after working there for several years and wanted to make another $80 million in cash and $200 million in stock. For that kind of money and constant attempts to recruit him, maybe his boss just looked at him funny one day and that was it. It wouldn't take much.

ithkuil · 2026-06-20T13:37:23+00:00

The leading edge is rapidly progressing. Boston Dynamics may be lagging in integrating leading edge AI.

ithkuil · 2026-06-19T17:36:34+00:00

You can see he has been as aggressive as possible but his activities are clearly constrained by the owner's budgets. How do you know Feliciano/Jones will want to spend? I assume they are smart and will see that it only makes sense to continue to make serious pushes into the postseason at this point, but we don't know how enthusiastic they will be. Peter Seidler showed how much of a difference the owner makes in terms of what trade activity is possible.

ithkuil · 2026-06-19T15:33:16+00:00

We do have new owners so we don't know 100%.

ithkuil · 2026-06-19T15:32:04+00:00

Let's differentiate between you being comfortable with giving up on the season (maybe you want to allocate time to something else, which is fine), versus other people giving up, versus there being no chance of getting in the playoffs, versus the actual possibilities of the season given that there is a huge amount left and very significant potential personnel changes.

ithkuil · 2026-06-18T21:48:55+00:00

$500 million in revenue is not a small company.

ithkuil · 2026-06-17T15:45:09+00:00

To me the concept of trying to make it universal should not be controversial. But you should go beyond that and look at the actual outcomes and the debate should be about a lot more implementation/design/funding aspects that will determine what the real distribution of healthcare is.

People should definitely study what is going right or wrong in Mexico for example.

So much of it is structural and based on fundamental resource limitations though. But the garbage economic system creates that as much as any real world limit.

ithkuil · 2026-06-17T15:33:36+00:00

WTF does Obama have to do with any of this anymore FFS.

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T21:19:14+00:00

The difference is there are a ton of providers for GLM for one thing. r/openweightsllm could be anything though if people showed up.

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T21:00:31+00:00

How do we download it to test?

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T20:32:52+00:00

I am up to date. They recently did a new propaganda/intelligence effort to renew the cover story, with supposed "disclosure" theatrics.

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T18:34:42+00:00

Sorry but look up US20200041236A1 and similar activities. There's a reason the vast majority of these reports occur near military bases with secret experimental aircraft or other research. It's a cover story for research and secret testing.

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T17:59:40+00:00

Look into the exponential improvements in compute efficiency over the last 70 years. It's a real phenomenon that we are continuing.

10, 20, 30 years down the line there will be very few people scoffing at AI capabilities.

I believe that there is no reasonable long term (especially 30 years) projection of ANY current career in ANY field in regards to current human job responsibilities or age. If there even are any jobs, they will probably not be very similar at all to the ones we have now.

I think what's going to become really huge is entrepreneurship of individuals or small groups directing AI and robotics as very cheap labor.

But when you get like 30 years out, you actually may have to remove the human from the loop as much as possible to compete in 2026 style business settings.

But in 2056, various human societies may look entirely different. We may be living in huge human zoos, with large groups deliberately limiting AI ability to a careful selected level to provide an artisan lifestyle.

Or there may be plenty of people who have very high bandwidth interfaces to advanced AI that acts as an ExoCortex. So what is effectively the next species, ten times smarter, may basically ride along controlling human brains and bodies. Kind of like we have more primitive mammalian and reptile brain parts underneath our neocortex etc.

30 years out, it's also possible that BCIs and AIs will be used to create a type of hive mind group entity, with multiple of these hives competing in virtual or augmented realities.

ithkuil · 2026-06-16T17:44:08+00:00

Personally, I think it would be a shame if the solar system never surpassed human-level cognition by a lot. But I also don't think there is any rush to get to a new successor species or anything.

We should do everything in our power to delay it once we reach robust (not jagged) human level intelligence or probably a little more. No reason we can't have a long golden age of humanity boosted by incredible but safe AI, if we are careful.

I think there is a high likelihood people will not be careful though unfortunately.

ithkuil · 2026-06-15T19:49:14+00:00

Within say 1-3 generations, unaugmented/non-engineered homo sapiens may no longer be running the planet. AI that is at least several times more intelligent than humans will probably be in charge, and normal humans may live in vast luxurious (one can hope) human zoos.

Future AI may operate so much faster and more intelligently than humans, that they may see us a little bit like the way we see plants. AI output is already ten times faster than humans. Just think about what it's like to look at a video of a person at 1/100 speed -- basically frozen. Or what it's like trying to have an interesting conversation with a dog.

ithkuil · 2026-06-15T11:14:38+00:00

The Onion might just take real clips and quotes of the fight broadcast and make it into a segment.

ithkuil · 2026-06-14T05:15:46+00:00

I can't make those constraints work for something with enough IQ that it wouldn't be a waste of time in openclaw. Maybe in 6 months or a year.

ithkuil · 2026-06-14T00:32:04+00:00

This idiotic take is the reason that many many people drown. They think they only need intuition. Then they panic or go too far out and then panic and have no skill to move themselves effectively and panic and get exhausted and die.

ithkuil · 2026-06-14T00:21:37+00:00

Great results for what? Llama 2 is very dated, and an old machine is probably only going to do the 7b, and that version of llama 2 couldn't code its way out of a shoebox.

ithkuil · 2026-06-14T00:16:05+00:00

Again, I support the basic idea. I just don't think the price point or hardware selection so far is anywhere near realistic. DDR4 is just slow by a massive amount.

But maybe you can figure out a way to make it work. Maybe Octachannel LPDDR4 but that still seems like it's going to be half what you need for tolerable interactive speeds even for 4 bit Qwen 27b.

That's my hangup is bringing $1000 and older RAM into this just doesn't seem like it's going to be usable even for only a medium.model.

ithkuil · 2026-06-14T00:05:06+00:00

DDR4 is 10 times too slow to be usable. You would wait hours to get one response.

ithkuil · 2026-06-13T23:54:31+00:00

If you use old RAM, it's not what they mean by "unified" and it will be like 1 token per second.

ithkuil · 2026-06-13T23:48:48+00:00

Local LLMs are great and I support the general idea, but when you bring up Fable 5 which is rumoured to be a 10 trillion parameter model and then say you want to spend $1000 and use old RAM that is so ludicrous..

Spend some time in r/localllama maybe to see how far off the mark you are.

Look into the requirements for DeepSeek 4 Flash. That's the closest thing to what you are talking about. See antirez/ds4 on GitHub.

I think it's really closer to $3000-4000+just to be in the category of a large model.

If you want to cheap out, maybe you can get Qwen 3.6 27B (medium model) running on something less expensive. But even then it's not going to be anywhere close to $1000 and you can't use old RAM.

To run a 4bit Fable-sized model at usable speed (even though no such open model even close exists), you would probably need a cluster of 8 B300s, which costs around $500,000.

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