7 ms·

> In ~1997 this level of compute power would have been enough to get on the TOPS500 list of the fastest computers our civilization is capable of creating.... no

> In ~1997 this level of compute power would have been enough to get on the TOPS500 list of the fastest computers our civilization is capable of creating.... now something that consumes only 54 sq mm of silicon that gets put into a $15.00 gadget. ... and it's incapable of doing anything useful without even bigger computers somewhere else. Progress is so odd sometimes.

londons_explore 6y ago
I often wonder if there is anything else in society that could scale in a similar way to moores law. Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for? Floors of a modern skyscraper are nearly that - they're made with moulds that get reused again and again on every floor. But to get decent scaling, you really need to make instances in at least 2, and preferably 3 dimensions in one go. We've already done it with things like the printing press that can churn out books very cheaply - but it turns out that we've now reached the limit of the numbers of books people want. Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. One needs enough space to support that growth, and we are sadly lacking in that... Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization?
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization? For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population, but also markets - or figure out interstellar travel rather quickly.
  - noja 6y ago
    > We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population We did this. Population growth is slowing rapidly.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Sure. But you even quoted me saying not just population, which is the key point. Stabilizing population doesn't buy us much if the market - and thus resource exploitation - is still growing exponentially.
      - astrange 6y ago
        Economic growth doesn’t imply increased resource use. Actually it’s more likely to be the opposite - growth is more likely to be in services and moving to electricity, which is renewable. Our use of many nonrenewable resources has peaked and gone down as population has gone up.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Our use of many nonrenewable resources has peaked and gone down as population has gone up. Our use, or the growth rate of use? It's good when the latter goes down, but we're not out of the woods as long as it stays > 1. > Actually it’s more likely to be the opposite - growth is more likely to be in services and moving to electricity, which is renewable. Most services have consumables, and electrification of everything is very production-intensive. And while digital services may be growing faster than manufacturing these days, manufacturing is still growing. Yes, in theory, we can have economic growth without commensurate manufacturing growth, but I think we're still couple abstraction layers short in our economy before we could think about running it completely on imaginary things.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    Population growth is predicted to effectively stop by 2100. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Resource consumption is the relevant metric.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. By the time mankind would be able to populate Mars, we would've probably have no effort to just build cities in space. The amount of steel, and aluminum you can make just from moon, and earth is enough for billions of space cities.
    - ta988 6y ago
      what about food? wouldnt that be the limiting factor?
      - baybal2 6y ago
        If you can lift exatons of steel into space, you can probably already afford to solve the problem of direct synthesis of all, and every fertilizer, and probably nearly every other chemistry process just by throwing more energy at it.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Raw materials will be cheap in space, once we crack orbital manufacturing.
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        Plants convert light to food, you don't even need anything from science fiction.
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        You still need carbon; plants just extract it from the air using light.
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        Reuse CO2 and human waste. You need some income, as reuse can't be perfect, but I think it's manageable.
- bserge 6y ago
  I believe space would be the least of our worries in that case...
- mistermann 6y ago
  Ideas, emotions (love, hate, apathy, etc). See: 1/6/2021 events at the US Capitol, the number of children that die annually due to malnutrition, etc.
  - seniorivn 6y ago
    bringing highly debatable very recent political event into a conversation like this should be inappropriate
    - mistermann 6y ago
      It is a part of reality, and a demonstration of the power that derives from ideas. Perhaps ideas could also be used for good, but that would have to be tested of course.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. With a sufficiently high birth rate, daycare, cheap real estate, schools with less than 100 pupils per class, free higher education, and solid, assured pensions, and state elderly care.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale? Human needs are not bespoke.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Because economic pressures are much stronger than humanitarian pressures, so standardized things are optimized to be as small and cheap as possible. Hence slums, standardized testing and junk food.
      - astrange 6y ago
        Small houses are good, as are standardized tests. What’s actually happening in the US is houses are getting larger because city governments are run by old people who nitpick all apartment buildings (because they think they’re ugly) and approve unlimited expensive single-family houses, which have only gotten larger over time.
        ethbr0 6y ago
        There's a lot of incentives in the US, but to simplify it: per-house-price and education funding are linked, via property taxes. Taxes paid by one home vs cost to educate average number of children per one home. If we funded more local public education directly from non-property-tax sources (or made public education more efficient), a lot of the resistance to lower-cost housing would disappear.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      The Eastern Bloc kind of tried, you can see how it went. Saying it being a half-success would be a complement. If a Union's citizen could've choose in between Union's kindergarten, and an American one, he wouldn't need to choose, though some people say daycare wasn't as bad in Western countries of the bloc. I would still admit, Union's secondary education was a rare somewhat half-success story, and it only looks so good if you compares it to USA, but not so much other Western bloc countries. China tried mass housing along Union's model, and it failed miserably (though this failure could've probably been called a success by standard of places like California.) It took it to adopt capitalist real estate model to get where it is now, and even today, Beijing has no viable recipe how to house 60% of population that got to stay behind in the industrialisation drive. The bling-bling Chinese 1st tier cities most Westerners get to see only represent how 5% of China population live, and even they get to house most of its citizens in rather gloomy "bedroom district" type suburbs which most outsiders lauding "Chinese housing model" never see. The quality of housing in China drops with inverse square root of a distance from nearest 1st tier city, and from downtown to suburb. > Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale? In other words, some most essential living needs are hardest one to scale, and mostly not for physical, but for social, and organisational reasons.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for? Very few. The thing with litho is that materials inputs, and outputs are nearly the same, it's just the value coming defies conventional economics. Thermodynamics limits all physical processes by entropy, but nothing limits the entropy itself.
- mechwarrior 6y ago
  Plastic molding of different types (injection, extrusion, blow molding, etc) enables massive quantities of physical objects to be produced at a staggeringly low cost and high rate of speed. This has of course enabled the production of many things that are beneficial to our lives. It has also increased the amount of waste that humans produce, to say the least.
bserge 6y ago
Well it's not technically incapable, it's just that the makers can't profit from it.
gsich 6y ago
I'd call that regress.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Sort the opposite effect with software. Something like "In ~1997, some of the largest desktop software applications would have been only a fraction of the size of today's smartphone apps."
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  I was thinking of the MS Office Android app. You can get it running on a $50 tablet. How powerful would it be vs let's say Office '97 on a Windows 95 PC purchased for around $2000 25 years ago?
remus 6y ago
I don't think it is that odd, it's just a case of costs, scale and who you're designing for. A TOPS500 computer is gonna set you back a few million $, so you're only going to have one of them and it's economic to employ a team of well qualified people to write software and interface relatively directly with the hardware. Now that same computing power can be purchased by ~anyone and most of those people are not specialists and have essentially no ability to write software for the platform, so (from a design perspective) it's a waste of time designing an interface that allows them to do so. If your goal is to have a small powerful platform aimed at people who want to run software on it directly that's completely doable. Just see the raspberry pi and the raft of similar devices now available.

londons_explore 6y ago

I often wonder if there is anything else in society that could scale in a similar way to moores law. Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for? Floors of a modern skyscraper are nearly that - they're made with moulds that get reused again and again on every floor. But to get decent scaling, you really need to make instances in at least 2, and preferably 3 dimensions in one go. We've already done it with things like the printing press that can churn out books very cheaply - but it turns out that we've now reached the limit of the numbers of books people want. Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. One needs enough space to support that growth, and we are sadly lacking in that... Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of civilization? For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population, but also markets - or figure out interstellar travel rather quickly.
- noja 6y ago
  > We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just population We did this. Population growth is slowing rapidly.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Sure. But you even quoted me saying not just population, which is the key point. Stabilizing population doesn't buy us much if the market - and thus resource exploitation - is still growing exponentially.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Economic growth doesn’t imply increased resource use. Actually it’s more likely to be the opposite - growth is more likely to be in services and moving to electricity, which is renewable. Our use of many nonrenewable resources has peaked and gone down as population has gone up.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Our use of many nonrenewable resources has peaked and gone down as population has gone up. Our use, or the growth rate of use? It's good when the latter goes down, but we're not out of the woods as long as it stays > 1. > Actually it’s more likely to be the opposite - growth is more likely to be in services and moving to electricity, which is renewable. Most services have consumables, and electrification of everything is very production-intensive. And while digital services may be growing faster than manufacturing these days, manufacturing is still growing. Yes, in theory, we can have economic growth without commensurate manufacturing growth, but I think we're still couple abstraction layers short in our economy before we could think about running it completely on imaginary things.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  Population growth is predicted to effectively stop by 2100. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Resource consumption is the relevant metric.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. By the time mankind would be able to populate Mars, we would've probably have no effort to just build cities in space. The amount of steel, and aluminum you can make just from moon, and earth is enough for billions of space cities.
  - ta988 6y ago
    what about food? wouldnt that be the limiting factor?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      If you can lift exatons of steel into space, you can probably already afford to solve the problem of direct synthesis of all, and every fertilizer, and probably nearly every other chemistry process just by throwing more energy at it.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Raw materials will be cheap in space, once we crack orbital manufacturing.
    - vbezhenar 6y ago
      Plants convert light to food, you don't even need anything from science fiction.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        You still need carbon; plants just extract it from the air using light.
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        Reuse CO2 and human waste. You need some income, as reuse can't be perfect, but I think it's manageable.
bserge 6y ago
I believe space would be the least of our worries in that case...
mistermann 6y ago
Ideas, emotions (love, hate, apathy, etc). See: 1/6/2021 events at the US Capitol, the number of children that die annually due to malnutrition, etc.
- seniorivn 6y ago
  bringing highly debatable very recent political event into a conversation like this should be inappropriate
  - mistermann 6y ago
    It is a part of reality, and a demonstration of the power that derives from ideas. Perhaps ideas could also be used for good, but that would have to be tested of course.
baybal2 6y ago
> Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. With a sufficiently high birth rate, daycare, cheap real estate, schools with less than 100 pupils per class, free higher education, and solid, assured pensions, and state elderly care.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale? Human needs are not bespoke.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Because economic pressures are much stronger than humanitarian pressures, so standardized things are optimized to be as small and cheap as possible. Hence slums, standardized testing and junk food.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Small houses are good, as are standardized tests. What’s actually happening in the US is houses are getting larger because city governments are run by old people who nitpick all apartment buildings (because they think they’re ugly) and approve unlimited expensive single-family houses, which have only gotten larger over time.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        There's a lot of incentives in the US, but to simplify it: per-house-price and education funding are linked, via property taxes. Taxes paid by one home vs cost to educate average number of children per one home. If we funded more local public education directly from non-property-tax sources (or made public education more efficient), a lot of the resistance to lower-cost housing would disappear.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    The Eastern Bloc kind of tried, you can see how it went. Saying it being a half-success would be a complement. If a Union's citizen could've choose in between Union's kindergarten, and an American one, he wouldn't need to choose, though some people say daycare wasn't as bad in Western countries of the bloc. I would still admit, Union's secondary education was a rare somewhat half-success story, and it only looks so good if you compares it to USA, but not so much other Western bloc countries. China tried mass housing along Union's model, and it failed miserably (though this failure could've probably been called a success by standard of places like California.) It took it to adopt capitalist real estate model to get where it is now, and even today, Beijing has no viable recipe how to house 60% of population that got to stay behind in the industrialisation drive. The bling-bling Chinese 1st tier cities most Westerners get to see only represent how 5% of China population live, and even they get to house most of its citizens in rather gloomy "bedroom district" type suburbs which most outsiders lauding "Chinese housing model" never see. The quality of housing in China drops with inverse square root of a distance from nearest 1st tier city, and from downtown to suburb. > Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and food to scale? In other words, some most essential living needs are hardest one to scale, and mostly not for physical, but for social, and organisational reasons.
baybal2 6y ago
> Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers for? Very few. The thing with litho is that materials inputs, and outputs are nearly the same, it's just the value coming defies conventional economics. Thermodynamics limits all physical processes by entropy, but nothing limits the entropy itself.
mechwarrior 6y ago
Plastic molding of different types (injection, extrusion, blow molding, etc) enables massive quantities of physical objects to be produced at a staggeringly low cost and high rate of speed. This has of course enabled the production of many things that are beneficial to our lives. It has also increased the amount of waste that humans produce, to say the least.

bserge 6y ago

Well it's not technically incapable, it's just that the makers can't profit from it.

gsich 6y ago

I'd call that regress.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Sort the opposite effect with software. Something like "In ~1997, some of the largest desktop software applications would have been only a fraction of the size of today's smartphone apps."

ladyanita22 6y ago
I was thinking of the MS Office Android app. You can get it running on a $50 tablet. How powerful would it be vs let's say Office '97 on a Windows 95 PC purchased for around $2000 25 years ago?

remus 6y ago

I don't think it is that odd, it's just a case of costs, scale and who you're designing for. A TOPS500 computer is gonna set you back a few million $, so you're only going to have one of them and it's economic to employ a team of well qualified people to write software and interface relatively directly with the hardware. Now that same computing power can be purchased by ~anyone and most of those people are not specialists and have essentially no ability to write software for the platform, so (from a design perspective) it's a waste of time designing an interface that allows them to do so. If your goal is to have a small powerful platform aimed at people who want to run software on it directly that's completely doable. Just see the raspberry pi and the raft of similar devices now available.