Big Tech's $8 trillion AI bet is making consoles, cars, and electricity more expensive for everyone else

[Endymio]

Though debated, it is not clear what, exactly, is the economic system of Star Trek. It is a post-scarcity world:

This is why Star Trek (barring a few initial episodes) isn't Science Fiction: it's space opera fantasy for mental juveniles. There can never be a "post scarcity" world in which individuals have any and all material desires fulfilled. In the US and Europe today, a middle-class family lives better than the royalty of a thousand years ago, and yet they still have vast unfilled material wants.

Can the economy of Star Trek support every individual owning their own galaxy-traveling starship? What about housing? Who decides how large a residence you're allowed? What if you want a 50-room villa? A 500-room palace, with thousands of hectares of manicured gardens around it? Some items are inherently rare, or even singular: who decides who owns them, if not by some Gosplan-like commissar diktat?

At any rate, there are distinctions between socialism, communism, capitalism, and fascism, but people try to label an entire system as Socialist or Communist

Do you honestly believe this changes the argument? A system may not be fully socialistic -- but that doesn't mean one can't identical and criticize the socialist elements within in.

 

[Endymio]

My $0.02 Most current computer scientists were trained in Linear Algebra, however, there is something known as Clifford's Algebra or Geometric Algebra ... Most people in the field do not know about this, and my bet is that if AI an attempt to understand how AI operates, employing Geometric Algebra would, at the very least, help with that understanding.

I studied spinors and Clifford algebras extensively in graduate school, along with other alternative systems to extending R sans complex numbers. Your notion that "most people" aren't aware of this is false -- Clifford Algebra is already being extensively used in several types of ML models:

Introducing CliffordLayers: Neural Network layers inspired by Clifford / Geometric Algebras. - Microsoft Research

We are open sourcing CliffordLayers (opens in new tab), a repo for building neural network layers inspired by Clifford / Geometric Algebras. This repo contains the source code of our ICLR 2023 paper Clifford Neural Layers for PDE Modeling (opens in new tab) and will be populated by the new...

www.microsoft.com

 

[MiqWalsh]

imo the market is messed up forever, it'll recover somewhat but pricing will never come close to what it used to be. Instead of aiming for bigger and more photorealistic games studios will probably have to shift to whatever runs on what people can actually afford. (Or we're all effed, PCs/consoles are no longer a thing and to run a game locally you're stuck with a smartphone, but I hope that's not the case)

Mm. That's actually entirely subjective, and depends largely on:-

a) What your expectations are, and
b) What your tastes run to.

I know I'm very different in this respect to most of our 'regulars', but I've never had the faintest interest in keeping up with the "latest & greatest".....and AAA+ titles bore me to tears. I also have zero interest in A.I, or "homelabs", or indeed any of that stuff. Horses for courses, as the saying goes. We're all different.

"Retro" computing, and to a lesser extent, "retro" gaming is where it's at for me, so I'm content with much lower-tier hardware than many of you seem to find necessary (an entry-level GeForce GT 1030 is more than ample for my simple needs). I know 32 GB DDR4 must also seem slow & paltry to many of you, but 'Puppy' Linux uses so little of the stuff that virtually ALL my resources are available for MY exclusive use anyway.

I was weaned on FPS stuff by a mate in the mid-to-late 90s who ceaselessly played Quake & Doom on an early PS1.....and I actually find stuff like that, along with mid-2000s stuff like Nexuiz and later games - like RedEclipse, and Xonotic - to be way more engaging than the self-centered, hyper-realistic drivel which is all that game studios seem to have been churning out for years now.

I freely admit that's just me.....along with the fact that I only ever spend the occasional half-hour here & there when I DO actually get some free time. A good old mindless FPS "blast-out" is astonishingly effective for focusing the old grey matter....

Miq.