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> He uses the iPod as an example. For a few iterations, it did in fact double in storage size from 10 all the way to 160GB. If it had continued on that trajecto

by roenxi 2y ago

> He uses the iPod as an example. For a few iterations, it did in fact double in storage size from 10 all the way to 160GB. If it had continued on that trajectory, he figured out we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. I think Brooks' opinions will age poorly, but if anyone doesn't already know all the arguments for that they aren't interested in learning them now. This quote seems more interesting to me. Didn't the iPod switch from HDD to SSD at some point, and they focused on shrinking them rather than upping storage size? I think the quality of iPods have been growing exponentially, we've just seen some tech upgrades on other axises that Apple thinks are more important. AFAIK, looking at Wikipedia, they're discontinuing iPods in favour of iPhones where we can get a 1TB model and the disk size trend is still exponential. The original criticism of the iPod was that it had less disk space than its competitors and it turned out to be because consumers were paying for other things. Overall I don't think this is a fair argument against exponential growth.

ozgrakkurt 2y ago
How can it exponentially grow ever? It is a small device that plays music
pyrale 2y ago
> Overall I don't think this is a fair argument against exponential growth. Do we still need to make a fair claim against unrestricted exponential growth in 2024? Exponential growth claims have been made countless times in the past, and never delivered. Studies like the Limits to Growth report (1972) have shown the impossibility of unrestricted growth, and the underlying science can be used in other domains to show the same. There is no question that exponential growth doesn't exist, the only interesting question is how to locate the inflexion point. Apparently the only limitless resource is gullible people.
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  Moore's law?
  - pyrale 2y ago
    A slowdown already happened once (the original pace was doubling every year), and I believe it's widely accepted that we're not going to keep the current pace for long.
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      > Exponential growth claims have been made countless times in the past, and never delivered. But one did though? Pronouncements of the future do not invalidate current results.
croes 2y ago
People thought we have FSD now because of the early success, but the last 20% are the hardest. The same is true for LLMs. What they can do is impressive but to fix what they can't will be hard or even impossible.
- lostmsu 2y ago
  There was never universally recognized early success in FSD.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    When self driving cars started driving around public in 2010 that was a universally recognized success of self driving cars. That shocked many people, as before then self driving cars was entirely science fiction. There was of course never a recognized success of FSD, since we don't have FSD, but when people started seeing cars drive themselves on public streets 2010 they assumed we would have FSD in 5-10 years, but we still barely have restricted self driving cars today 14 years later.
    - lostmsu 2y ago
      Who are these people you are talking about? 99.9% of population never saw a self-driving car in their life, and only a few would treat a single spotting on media as indication of anything. ChatGPT on the other hand is widespread.
      - croes 2y ago
        And still governments made laws for self driving cars. Building cars is just harder than deploying a web service.
albert_e 2y ago
> we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. 160 Tera Bytes to store what? I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Why would anyone keep investing in exponential growth or even linear growth beyond a point of utility and economic sense. This can be extrapolated to miniaturization also ... why is a personal computer not smaller than my fingertip already?
- roenxi 2y ago
  Arguing from a lack of personal imagination is not a strong position. It is the people with ideas who are responsible for finding uses for resources. They've succeeded every other time they were given an excess of storage space; I'm still not sure how I manage to use up all the TB of storage I've bought over the years. Maybe we store a local copy of a personal universe for you to test ideas out in, I dunno. There'll be something. > I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Well from that I'd predict that uses would be found other than music. My "music" folder has made it up to 50GB because I've taken to storing a few movies in it. But games can quickly add up to TB of media if the space is available.
  - albert_e 2y ago
    Storage did become cheaper and more compact. Both flash drives and SD cards offer this functionality and showed significant improvements. Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead. IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing... Well, yes but if we're literally talking the iPod, it has been discontinued. Because it has been replaced by devices - with larger storage, I might note - that do more. I'm working from the assumption that as far as Brooks was talking iPhones basically are iPods. This is why the argument that the tech capped out seems suspect to me. The tech kept improving exponentially and we're still seeing storage space in the iPod niche doubling every few years.
latexr 2y ago
> I think Brooks' opinions will age poorly, but if anyone doesn't already know all the arguments for that they aren't interested in learning them now. Or they are too young still, or they just got interested in the subject, or, or, or… https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Don’t dismiss someone offhand because they disagree with you, they may really have never heard your argument. > AFAIK, looking at Wikipedia, they're discontinuing iPods in favour of iPhones where we can get a 1TB model and the disk size trend is still exponential. iPods were single-purpose while iPhones are general computers. While music file sizes have been fairly consistent for a while, you can keep adding more apps and photos. The former become larger as new features are added (and as companies stop caring about optimisations) while the latter become larger with better cameras and keep growing in number as the person lives.
Sharlin 2y ago
Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called diminishing returns. Every proven technology reaches maturity; it happened to iPods, it happened to smartphones, it happened to digital cameras and so on. There’s still growth and improvement, but it’s greatly slowed down from the early days. But that’s not to say that there won’t be other sigmoids to come. If you haven’t noticed how growth in storage capacity of HDDs in general screeched to a relative halt around fifteen years ago? The doubling period used to be about 12-14 months; every three or four years the unit cost of capacity would decrease 90%. This continued through the 90s and early 2000s, and then it started slowing down. A lot. In 2005 I bought a 250 GB HDD; at the same price I’d now get something like a 15 EB drive if the time constant had stayed, well, constant. There is, of course, always a multitude of interdependent variables to optimize, and you can always say that growth of X slowed down because priorities changed to optimize Y instead. But why did the priorities change? Almost certainly at least partislly because further optimization of X was becoming expensive or impractical. > quality has been growing exponentially That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.
- csours 2y ago
  > rigorous way to quantify quality. Most rigorous definitions of quality incorporate a target expectation that is impossible to exceed. You are removing errors, so best case, exponential improvement in quality adds nines - a la the sigmoid function you mention.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality. We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes. Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years. His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later. He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.

by roenxi 2y ago

ozgrakkurt 2y ago

How can it exponentially grow ever? It is a small device that plays music

pyrale 2y ago

> Overall I don't think this is a fair argument against exponential growth. Do we still need to make a fair claim against unrestricted exponential growth in 2024? Exponential growth claims have been made countless times in the past, and never delivered. Studies like the Limits to Growth report (1972) have shown the impossibility of unrestricted growth, and the underlying science can be used in other domains to show the same. There is no question that exponential growth doesn't exist, the only interesting question is how to locate the inflexion point. Apparently the only limitless resource is gullible people.

Eisenstein 2y ago
Moore's law?
- pyrale 2y ago
  A slowdown already happened once (the original pace was doubling every year), and I believe it's widely accepted that we're not going to keep the current pace for long.
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    > Exponential growth claims have been made countless times in the past, and never delivered. But one did though? Pronouncements of the future do not invalidate current results.

croes 2y ago

People thought we have FSD now because of the early success, but the last 20% are the hardest. The same is true for LLMs. What they can do is impressive but to fix what they can't will be hard or even impossible.

lostmsu 2y ago
There was never universally recognized early success in FSD.
- Jensson 2y ago
  When self driving cars started driving around public in 2010 that was a universally recognized success of self driving cars. That shocked many people, as before then self driving cars was entirely science fiction. There was of course never a recognized success of FSD, since we don't have FSD, but when people started seeing cars drive themselves on public streets 2010 they assumed we would have FSD in 5-10 years, but we still barely have restricted self driving cars today 14 years later.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    Who are these people you are talking about? 99.9% of population never saw a self-driving car in their life, and only a few would treat a single spotting on media as indication of anything. ChatGPT on the other hand is widespread.
    - croes 2y ago
      And still governments made laws for self driving cars. Building cars is just harder than deploying a web service.

albert_e 2y ago

> we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. 160 Tera Bytes to store what? I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Why would anyone keep investing in exponential growth or even linear growth beyond a point of utility and economic sense. This can be extrapolated to miniaturization also ... why is a personal computer not smaller than my fingertip already?

roenxi 2y ago
Arguing from a lack of personal imagination is not a strong position. It is the people with ideas who are responsible for finding uses for resources. They've succeeded every other time they were given an excess of storage space; I'm still not sure how I manage to use up all the TB of storage I've bought over the years. Maybe we store a local copy of a personal universe for you to test ideas out in, I dunno. There'll be something. > I probably would never listen to more than a few GBs of high fidelity music in my life time. Well from that I'd predict that uses would be found other than music. My "music" folder has made it up to 50GB because I've taken to storing a few movies in it. But games can quickly add up to TB of media if the space is available.
- albert_e 2y ago
  Storage did become cheaper and more compact. Both flash drives and SD cards offer this functionality and showed significant improvements. Whatever innovative use cases people could come up with to store TBs of data in physical portable format is served by these. And along the way the world has shifted to storing data more cheaply and conveniently on the cloud instead. IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing (for average global consumer) and proprietary connectors and software would not have made a compelling economic case to over-spec it in hopes that some unforseen killer use case might emerge from the market.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > IPod being a special purpose device , with premium pricing... Well, yes but if we're literally talking the iPod, it has been discontinued. Because it has been replaced by devices - with larger storage, I might note - that do more. I'm working from the assumption that as far as Brooks was talking iPhones basically are iPods. This is why the argument that the tech capped out seems suspect to me. The tech kept improving exponentially and we're still seeing storage space in the iPod niche doubling every few years.

latexr 2y ago

> I think Brooks' opinions will age poorly, but if anyone doesn't already know all the arguments for that they aren't interested in learning them now. Or they are too young still, or they just got interested in the subject, or, or, or… https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ Don’t dismiss someone offhand because they disagree with you, they may really have never heard your argument. > AFAIK, looking at Wikipedia, they're discontinuing iPods in favour of iPhones where we can get a 1TB model and the disk size trend is still exponential. iPods were single-purpose while iPhones are general computers. While music file sizes have been fairly consistent for a while, you can keep adding more apps and photos. The former become larger as new features are added (and as companies stop caring about optimisations) while the latter become larger with better cameras and keep growing in number as the person lives.

Sharlin 2y ago

Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called diminishing returns. Every proven technology reaches maturity; it happened to iPods, it happened to smartphones, it happened to digital cameras and so on. There’s still growth and improvement, but it’s greatly slowed down from the early days. But that’s not to say that there won’t be other sigmoids to come. If you haven’t noticed how growth in storage capacity of HDDs in general screeched to a relative halt around fifteen years ago? The doubling period used to be about 12-14 months; every three or four years the unit cost of capacity would decrease 90%. This continued through the 90s and early 2000s, and then it started slowing down. A lot. In 2005 I bought a 250 GB HDD; at the same price I’d now get something like a 15 EB drive if the time constant had stayed, well, constant. There is, of course, always a multitude of interdependent variables to optimize, and you can always say that growth of X slowed down because priorities changed to optimize Y instead. But why did the priorities change? Almost certainly at least partislly because further optimization of X was becoming expensive or impractical. > quality has been growing exponentially That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.

csours 2y ago
> rigorous way to quantify quality. Most rigorous definitions of quality incorporate a target expectation that is impossible to exceed. You are removing errors, so best case, exponential improvement in quality adds nines - a la the sigmoid function you mention.
roenxi 2y ago
> That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality. We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes. Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years. His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later. He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.