Are there any particularily detailed areas? But maybe the humbling reality is just: The closer we look, the more galaxies appear where we thought was black void…
We don’t, and it’s likely that we will never know. Space may be non-Euclidian with a positive curvature, in which case it would correspond topologically to the “surface” of a four-dimensional sphere. One much larger than the observable universe (since the local curvature that we can measure is approximately flat), but nevertheless finite.
An ant on the surface of the Earth might believe that the Earth’s surface (“space”) is infinitely large. But because it can never look beyond the horizon, it can’t know. If it is intelligent, it has to assume that the surface might be curved and curve into a sphere, hence making it a finite surface.
Actual space and the universe is sort-of an analogy one dimension higher up. “Sort of”, because (1) we don’t imagine a surrounding four-dimensional space for curved space in the sense in which Earth’s surface is embedded in three-dimensional space, and (2) the cosmological horizon has a different cause (namely the speed-of-light limit) than the horizon of a planet.
Here is an alternative way to think about it: You can’t exclude the possibility that if you’d travel in a straight line in one direction through space, that you’d eventually end up where you started (i.e. like in the classic Asteroids game). Space might be connected like that, and then it would have a finite volume.
> The earth may be round, in which case we’re on the “surface” of a three-dimensional sphere. One much larger than what we’ve seen (since the ground around us is approximately flat), but nevertheless finite.
Of course maybe the 4D sphere of the universe is itself hung in a vast field of other 4D universes, that field is the surface of a 5D sphere, etc.
I count on a 128GB baseline in 10 years. Beyond the current atmosphere of despair, I really want to see what Apple especially is cooking. Local AI is right up their alley and the current scarcity is unacceptable for them in so many ways.
I got the feeling laptops gonna feel very different in 2036.
Given local AI requirements, I expect minimum configurations for higher end machines to accelerate quickly. Yes, an entry level MacBook Air might be at 32 GB, but the entry MacBook Pro should quickly have 128 GB as a baseline. All this assumes we can actually make all the RAM we need. Until then, we’re going to be artificially capped.
IMO focusing on the hyperscalers is kind of misleading.
Yes, for programmers and tech companies AI is kinda boring now, but AI integration in general is still kind of uncharted territory.
There are so many small companies and individuals just getting started with AI today and I believe a large the customer base (and revenue) is still untapped. Hell, I’m discovering new use cases regularly still and the average mismanaged 30 people whatever SaaS vendor probably didn’t even get started yet.
This is what so many people on HN and the market are constantly missing.
Jason Kottke almost didn't found his blog in 1998, famously quoted as saying: "I thought I was too late, that no one would be interested." Needless to say, the internet was a tiny joke in 1998 compared to what it is now.
We are just barely scratching the surface of what's possible with AI, both in terms of the leading edge and in the 'torso' of the economy (the portion you're describing).
Folks from Silicon Valley working in AI-forward companies have a skewed perception of how many people have adopted this technology so far. Codex recently celebrated hitting 10 million users. This is a great milestone and all, but to put it in context, Microsoft office has a billion users. Sure, many people use Claude Code and or some other harness and the growth is staggering, but the overall scale is tiny compared to software as a whole. Costs of serving and usage are still very high, prohibitively so for many, so we aren't even close to market saturation.
And even at the leading edge, people who do work in those AI-forward companies; models are still slow, require hand holding, and produce suboptimal outcomes sometimes. Imagine the value when instead of needing to prompt it once per 30 mins, you prompt it once per day. Then once per week. Then once per month. Imagine all this running not on 3 trillion parameter models, not on 10 trillion, but 100 trillion. What kind of computer infra will be needed then? Certainly more than we have today.
I've always marveled at how one can pick any year since the internet went mainstream and in that year people thought, "Oh my goodness, the internet is amazing!"
Then, move five years forward from that year and look back. In every case, people think, "Hah! The internet was so simple then!"
So much of the dotcom bust was essentially: "anything internet will work", but even after it was pretty easy to find different ways to publish web pages or migrate to new forms of social media, video, short-video, etc.
It's orders of magnitude harder to automate work, which is the business value proposition of AI (whether you are displacing worker or adding breakthrough capacity), and it's not clear the LLM hyperscalers will get the value-add from that.
On the consumer side, it might be a race to the bottom: same ad profits, but now you need AI to produce it.
imhho, I prefer the ambiguity, the increased hilarity, the increased mental work of considering whether a statement is in good faith or being sarcastic/sardonic, the opportunity to understand how people can be hurt and the motives of barbs and lashes and how to discern the distress and deeper needs of "violent" people, and eventually the remembered insights on how to better generate boundaries and equanimity
in the way of Buddhist psychology, phenomenological bracketing, non-violent/compassionate communication, Brechtian principles, deconstruction, clowning, DBT, etc
lol
though I know this doesn't scale to situations without a boundary, where you can get abuse just for existing. I would use /s in a commons that expects a higher standard of good faith/well-being interactions
(does thoroughly confusing or disrespecting people for a jape equate to an abuse? how much of memeing is not just legal but moral? these are rhetorical questions, you are allowed to save your mental labour on this for yourself, self-care is prime, though I hope you all have a appropriate levels of support)
Stuart Lee is my favourite comedian, they are masterful in playing with this
I've been using it a lot in recent months, even though I was very critical about this in the past.
Of course, asking it to give yes/no answers or specific numbers is asking for trouble, but finally I can let something else read the SEOed garbage, point me in the right direction and let me browse the search results in a much more pleasant way than before.
It's kind of funny when I open some books nowadays and the writing style and formatting just immediately scream LLM sometimes. Not because the book was AI-generated, most are too old, but because LLMs were simply trained on these exact books and are now reproducing their style, which I guess was either popular or selected during training.
Anyways, really hard to push through and I need to remind myself to judge the text by its meaning. But if it's some random blog, my "tolerance" is lower and I don't want to spend my time reading nonsense, I just can't stand the writing style anymore either.
Are there any particularily detailed areas? But maybe the humbling reality is just: The closer we look, the more galaxies appear where we thought was black void…