/tech/ - Technology

>>23386
> You might point out how inefficient of a database it is. But you would be missing the point. Blockchain technology excites investors precisely because of how wasteful it is. Even if we had fusion (!!) it would eat up all that energy and more. It's difficult to express the magnitude of how wasteful this is, and the fact that it's built into the system intentionally is sinister.
No, this is stupid. There are proof-of-stake blockchains that don't waste any energy at all. Taking your money and setting it on fire by burning tons of carbon (which leads to profit…somehow) clearly isn't a motivating factor.

>More to my point, they offer a host of subjective, ill-defined tasks that are immune to being completed. They've managed to take something well-defined, well-scoped, and completable, and turn it into an untameable monster that will be sure to offer software churn for decades to come.
If a task were well-defined, well-scoped, and completable, there would have already been written non-AI software to perform it. AI is precisely for NON well-defined, well-scoped, and completable tasks. It does them cheaper (and shittier) than a human would.

>LLMs are a way to make software take orders of magnitude more computational power, electricity, and human labor
nonsense

>>23387
>say something accurate about 99.9% of something
<but what about this special 0.1%? haha you are wrong!
I don't think you disproved the author's point

>>23388
Cope. At no level did any of that bullshit make sense.

>>23387
>>23389
I'm sure your NFTs will gain value some day bro. HODL!

>>23390
NFTs are worthless.
>butthurt
>unable to defend your beliefs
embarrassing

I'm not sure if his explanations are correct, but he's on the right track and onto a real problem. The recent fads put out by the tech industry have scalability problems where its costs & energy usage either stays the same (blockchain) or actually becomes worse as it improves (large non-specific ML models). Gone are the days where we get both performance & cost-efficiency at the same time.

>>23392
blockchain does become worse. you have to store transactions in blocks, blocks have to include a proof of work to be added to the blockchain, the proof of work (finding a number x such that hash(x) meets a certain criteria) becomes harder as the number of blocks increases because there is a limited number of x that meet the criteria. as time goes on it becomes increasingly hard to store transactions

imo the interesting part is trying to understand to what extent capital is becoming opposed to progress

>>23387
>There are proof-of-stake blockchains that don't waste any energy at all.

The fact that the only alternative to proof of work is 'the rich get richer' is embarassing

OP, I will not follow the link you posted because I cannot make sense of what is in the snippet you provided. Proof of work can be made to scale with computational power, but this is not a requirement; and even if it is set to scale with computational power, this does not logically amount to a requirement of exponential growth in computational power. And as >>23387 said, there is also the alternative proof of stake. And why throw this together with "analysis" of LLMs, this looks like a total muddle. What is even supposed to be the topic here.
>>23390
What makes you think that poster has NFTs?
>>23393
>blockchain does become worse. you have to store transactions in blocks, blocks have to include a proof of work
Blockchain is not synonymous with proof of work.
>>23394
Proof of stake does not necessarily make the rich richer, but it preserves the hierarchy of wealth, yes.

Anyway, schemes for anonymous transactions are not relevant for socialism.

>>23395
>this looks like a total muddle. What is even supposed to be the topic here
Typical for leftist discussions on cryptocurrency.

>>23395
>And why throw this together with "analysis" of LLMs
Cause they both require energy use that's disproportionate to their actual use and which is high per capita.

>>23395
>Proof of stake does not necessarily make the rich richer, but it preserves the hierarchy of wealth, yes.

Well it means the people who own the most of a currency are the ones who also get the most new issues.

>>23401
you are replying to a disingenuous post. the author is referring to what allocations capital finds useful, and the best counter-argument the average crypto apologist can come up with is
>that might be true about 99.9% of crypto, but what about this shitcoin nobody cares about
because they want to deflect and derail discussions about the main point (it is not a coincidence that they refuse to address it); that they are wasting useful resources to equip an speculative asset with artificial scarcity. in a way, capital has resorted to pre-capitalist scams: as a marxist, what do you think is the organic composition of capital in crypto speculation? what do you deduce from this?

they apparently want to negate the wastefulness of crypto in the name of the pump&dump scheme of the week. most of the money in crypto is there precisely because of the artificial scarcity. it is funny how they refuse to address the point of the article, the allocation of capital towards the production of artificial scarcity in the software industry, "planned obsolescence" is usually limited for tangible products (there is a limit on how shitty a light bulb can be) but these restrictions might not apply to software

>>23402
he is saying that because some coin promises to be scalable, then bitcoin isn't a massive waste of energy. it is the same argument as the as saying that surplus value doesn't exist because there might be a worker out there that is making his employer lose money

and they obviously forget to mention that those promises are mere advertisement slogans, because the value (nominal, not in the marxist sense) comes solely from scarcity and advertisement

>>23394
proof of work that requires bigger and bigger storage leads to the same problem, retard
>pyramid scheme where only people with 6 exabytes of storage and increasing by the daily can even make transactions or own currency at all
that will turn out great

>>23403
>they apparently want to negate the wastefulness of crypto
>>23404
>he is saying that because some coin promises to be scalable, then bitcoin isn't a massive waste of energy.
Neither this hater >>23387 nor that hater >>23395 are in any way advocating for NFTs or Bitcoins or blockchain whatever you fucking illiterate schizos.

out of curiosity, do you think being openly dishonest looks convincing?

>>23428
Which posts you refer to?

>LLMs offer an even more ideal kind of software to the investor. First of all they require an enormous amount of capital to train, and specialized hardware to run, making them suitable to offer as a service, where the amount of profit can be made to go up in a controlled manner. What a delicious idea.

Open source LLMs are basically outperforming corpo ones

Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google And OpenAI
https://hackaday.com/2023/05/05/leaked-internal-google-document-claims-open-source-ai-will-outcompete-google-and-openai/

AIs don't really need specialozed hardware. A GPU is enough, the issue up until recently was that all major frameworks relied on CUDA, but they are already moving away from it.

>>23542
>AIs don't really need specialozed hardware. A GPU is enough
only because GPUs include the specialized hardware now. this is like saying that graphics don't require specialized hardware because some CPUs include integrated GPUs
why do you feel compelled to reply when you have no idea what you are talking about

>>23543
You talk about GPUs as if they haven't been shipped with even the lowest end office pc for the last 30 years.
For what it matters, even keyboards and mouses are specialized input hardware

> this is like saying that graphics don't require specialized hardware because some CPUs include integrated GPUs
You mean the thing which is actually the case in the real world?

>>23544
you are so dumb you didn't even register what I was talking about. GPUs from 30 years ago didn't have AI-specific hardware in them, neither did most consumer GPUs from 10 years ago. now if you buy a GPU you have to pay for the AI hardware in them that you are never going to use
AI requires specialized hardware in the GPU that is different from the hardware normally used for graphics

you didn't even get the analogy holy shit. what a moron

>>23545
>you are so dumb you didn't even register what I was talking about.
Are you Andrew Kelley then? The other poster was answering to Kelley's claim (quoted in OP) that LLMs "require" expensive hardware so that corporations will profit from offering them as a service.

Btw are you same nutcase who is randomly accusing people of being bitcoin shills ITT?