Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vertis 854 days ago
That's a slippery slope argument, which is a common logical fallacy[0]. This model being inefficient compared to the best possible implementation does not mean that future additions will also be inefficient.

It's the equivalent to saying many people programming in Ruby is causing all future programs to be less efficient. Which is not true. In fact, many people programming in Ruby has caused Ruby to become more efficient because it gets optimised as it gets used more (or Python for that matter).

It's not as energy efficient as C, but it hasn't caused it to get worse and worse, and spiral out of control.

Likewise smart contracts are incredibly inefficient mechanisms of computation. The result is mostly that people don't use them for any meaningful amounts of computation, that all gets done "Off Chain".

Generative AI is definitely less efficient, but it's likely to improve over time, and indeed things like quantization has allowed models that would normally to require much more substantial hardware resources (and therefore, more energy intensive) to be run on smaller systems.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

1 comments

That is a fallacy fallacy. Just because some slopes are not slippery that does not mean none of them are.
The slippery slope fallacy is: "this is a slope. you will slip down it." and is always fallacious. Always. The valid form of such an argument is: "this is a slope, and it is a slippery one, therefore, you will slip down it."
No, it isn't.
Yeah. Yeah, it is.