| HN Mirror

Funny, you seem to have [mis]read the thread as somehow being about computing being better in the past, when it’s actually about the trend being worse in the present and foreseeable future. Computers aren’t getting faster or cheaper today not because we’ve passed peak computer, but because we’ve collectively decided to let billionaires chase the next AI winter. An economic bubble that represents a colossal societal self-own — the actual effect of which is to generate enormous environmental and economic hardship in exchange for a very small real productivity gain, nothing even vaguely resembling AGI, and an unbelievably large amount of misogynistic wank material — coupled with the geo-political instability and violence required to stoke that fever is the actual reason compute isn’t following the trajectory of the past.

Could I have used a less sarcastic way of voicing the basic point that allowing the capitalists to capture and secure all the means of production drives up the cost of those means while simultaneously pushing down the quality of the capital, the product, and the lived conditions of the capitalist’s feed stock, sure… but then I’d really be spending too much time and energy on this throwaway thread (and, ironically, on producing more waste energy for less valuable compute time).