> All major technological advances have come with economic bubbles, from canals and railroads to the internet.
Is this actually correct? I don't see any evidence for a "airflight bubble" or a "car bubble" or a "loom bubble" at the technologies' invention. Also the "canal bubble" wasn't about the technology, it was about the speculation on a series of big canals but we had been making canals for a long time. More importantly, even if it was correct, there are plenty of bubbles (if not significantly more) around things that didn't have value or tech that didn't matter.
Apologies for arguing from first principles, but for anything that spurs a lot of activity, the only alternative to a bubble is this: people ramp up investment and activity and enthusiasm only as much as the underlying thing can handle, then gradually taper off the increase and gently level off at the equilibrium "carrying capacity" of the new technology.
Does that sound like any human, ever, to you?
(The only time there isn't a bubble is when the thing just isn't that interesting to people and so there's never a big wave of uptake in the first place.)
I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.
I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)?
There was just a long Derek Thompson podcast with a Transcontinental Railroad scholar about this! (That's why I knew about it.)
The whole subtext of that podcast was how eerily similar the Transcontinental Railroad was to AI (as an investment/malinvestment/prediction of future trends).
The Intelligent Investor by Graham talks about investors putting so much money into airlines and air freight that it became impossible to make a return. I don't know if you would call that a bubble, maybe just over exuberance.
Advanced organizations (think not startups, but companies that have had years of decades of profit in the public market) might have solved all the low-hanging fruit problems and have staff doing things like automated quality audits (search summaries for swearing, abusive language, etc).
It’s so funny to reference a game that has like 12 editions and is on every platform including a refrigerator and think “this game is missing something”
By the way there are LLM dialog mods for Skyrim and everyone thinks they’re a joke because they suck.
Not with pixel perfect accuracy. You vaguely remember, although it may not feel like that because your brain fills in the details (hallucinates) as you recall. The comparisons are closer than you might think.
I’m not well versed enough on this but wouldn’t it be a problem with custom training that the specific project training codebases probably would likely have a lot of the implemented stuff, relevant for the domain, only once and in one way, compared to how the todays popular large models have been trained maybe with countless different ways to use common libraries for whatever various tasks with whatever Github ripped material fed in?
You have no idea if I remember with pixel perfect accuracy (whatever that even means). There are plenty of people with photographic memory.
Also, you're a programmer you have no foundation of knowledge on which to make that assessment. You might as well opine on quarks or martian cellular life. My god the arrogance of people in my industry.
Repeated studies have shown that perfect "photographic memory" does not in fact exist. Nobody has it. Some people think that they do though, but when tested under lab conditions those claims don't hold up.
I don't believe these people are lying. They are self-reporting their own experiences, which unfortunately have the annoying property of being generated by the very mind that is living the experience.
What does it mean to have an eidetic memory? It means that when you remember something you vividly remember details, and can examine those details to your heart's content. When you do so, it feels like all those details are correct. (Or so I'm told, I'm the opposite with aphantasia.)
But it turns out if you actually have a photo reference and do a blind comparison test, people who report photographic memories actually don't do statistically any better than others in remembering specific fine details, even though they claim that they clearly remember.
The simpler explanation is that while all of our brains are provide hallucinated detail to fill the gaps of memories, their brains are wired up to present those made up details feel much more real than they do to others. That is all.
So what do you make of the video - do you think it's fake, or are you just making the distinction between eidetic memory and photographic memory?
There are so many well documented cases of idiot savants with insane memory skills in various areas (books, music, dates/events, etc), that this type of snapshot visual memory (whatever you want to call it) doesn't seem surprising in that context - it'd really be a bit odd such diverse memory skills excluded one sensory modality (and it seems it doesn't).
Hearsay is not reliable. Yes there are stories of savants. When you put them in a lab and actually see how good their memory is, it turns out to be roughly the same as everyone else's. The stories aren't true.
(They may be better at remembering weird facts or something, but when you actually calculate the information entropy of what they are remembering, it ends up being within the ballpark of what a neurotypical person remembers across of general span of life. That's why these people are idiot savants (to use your term). They allocate all their memory points to weird trivia and none to everyday common knowledge.
> They allocate all their memory points to weird trivia and none to everyday common knowledge.
I think it's more complex than that - it's they way they are forming memories (i.e. what they remember) that is different to a normal person. In a normal person surprise/novelty (prediction failure) is the major learning signal that causes us to remember something - we're selective in what gets remembered (this is just mechanically how a normally operating brain works), whereas the savant appears to remember everything in certain modalities.
I don't think that "using up all their memory" is why savants are "idiots", but rather just a reflection of something more severe that is wrong.
To be fair, in the case of Steam they legitimately did try. They supported bitcoin purchases for nearly two years before they stopped, citing volatility and processing fees:
I wouldn't call using Bitcoin legitimately trying. Even in 2017 Monero existed, which solves both the fee and transaction time problems, and as an added bonus is way more private.
It was tried, way back when it started, and it didn't work very well. Maybe a modern blockchain can work better, but the transaction volumes of credit cards are orders of magnitudes above the busiest blockchain today.
Why not? I regularly buy products and services online with crypto and it works quite well, usually a better experience than with a credit card.
There are plenty of chains that can confirm transactions in a couple seconds, and if you're concerned with volatility, just use USDC/USDT. There are crypto payment processors that handle all of this and allow payment across a range of chains and handle the volatility so that the merchant doesn't need to worry about anything crypto and just receives fiat.
Can you elaborate? If crypto is the only viable option to pay for something, I would agree due to the low amount of people familar in dealing with crypto. If it is an additional option, what part of it is not working?
So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.
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