Post

mcc
@dryad.technology

In Bush era gestures at green tech, we briefly got excited about biodiesel. But in the US that meant corn, and experts got upset because corn biodiesel is negative EROI. I saw one person describe it as "a corn disposal method". In that sense, I posit Bitcoin and AI to be "compute disposal methods".

Stacked Automation@stacked-automation.bsky.social

decades of caring about big O, and now its just "throw more agents at it"

mcc
@dryad.technology

The US has immovable political forces that mean huge amounts of corn must be grown. More than we can eat. We must figure out some way of justifying it on paper. Similarly, the hardware industry *has* to make bigger, more powerful chips all the time. What if demand doesn't exist? We manufacture it

6 reposts45 likes

Alex
@ninealex.bsky.social

This has been my explanation for a lot of tech nonsense since moore's law died ~2016. The biggest part of our economy simply could not be allowed to stagnate, so they've been thrashing around looking for ways to sell more, newer computers. Crypto, metaverse, nft, AI, even ray tracing to an extent.

mcc
@dryad.technology

I'd really like to be able to use raytracing. Like I'd really, *really* like to be able to. Unfortunately it's locked in a box of baffling APIs

Alex
@ninealex.bsky.social

even if it was clearly *mostly* a way for nvidia to sell new cards where most of the performance improvement came from juicing the watts, raytracing has some legit cool uses!

Southe
@southe-lands.bsky.social

You know, I had the thought that the LLM craze was due to hardware companies realizing they couldn't make transistors any smaller, so they couldn't rely on selling new chips to everyone every 3-5 years, so the only way they could keep growing was if the world needed *more* hardware.

Southe
@southe-lands.bsky.social

I dismissed it as too close to a conspiracy theory, but the comparison to biodiesel (and E10/E15 gas) has me wondering. Plus "OpenAI/Anthropic":"NVIDIA"::"The Strategic Federal Food Reserve":"The US dairy industry" is pretty funny, to me.