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by LgLasagnaModel 343 days ago
Good point. Also, the fact that I’m adamant that one cannot fly a helicopter to the moon doesn’t mean that I think helicopters are useless. That said, if I’m inundated everyday with people insisting that one CAN fly a helicopter to the moon or that that capability is just around the corner, I might get so fed up that i say F it, I don’t want to hear another F’ing word about helicopters even though I know that helicopters have utility.
2 comments
alganet 343 days ago
It's an unholy chimera. As militant as GNU, as greedy as Microsoft, as viral as fidget spinners. The worst aspects of each of those communities.

Actual promising AI tech doesn't even get the center stage, it doesn't get a chance to do it.

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benreesman 343 days ago
I was talking to a buddy earlier and realized in a conscious way something I suppose I knew but hadn't thought about deeply.

As godawful as this brute force, "change the laws because China!", 24x7 assault of LLM hypelords has been (and I love GP's analogy about finding a helicopter useful), and its been preeeeety unpleasant, there is a silver lining.

The compute and tooling needed for all the other under-explored, nifty as hell, highly accessible ML/AI stuff is like free by comparison now: there are H100s floating around for around a dollar an hour, L40s for sometimes pennies on that dollar, and like, all of neural machine translation or WaveNet era speech to text or resnet style transfer was done on like, a thousand bucks in today's compute. Lambda Labs has a promo on GB200 where its cheaper than H100!

And there's " plenty of room at the bottom": Jetson boards and super cool autonomy stuff like that is Raspberry Pi accessible.

I'd rather they didn't feel the need to like, take over the government to get terrawatts of "just make it bigger", but given that's sort of already happened, I'm looking for what opportunities are created by such monomania.

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alganet 343 days ago
You can't buy friends giving away discounts.
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m4rtink 343 days ago
Well, that's just because Earth and moon are too far apart and don't both have an atmosphere. If they were closer, you could totally do that, just watch for the microgravity around the barycenter.

Better still, you could do that even with a hit air baloon and late middle-age technology! There is even a SF book series about that:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Astronauts

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