4 ms·

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

dfedbeef 3mo ago
3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but
- bigbuppo 3mo ago
  Make your secondary storage smarter.
neonmagenta 3mo ago
I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.
- goodmythical 3mo ago
  To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.
- sublinear 3mo ago
  It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.
satnhak 3mo ago
I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
- disillusioned 3mo ago
  Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...
refulgentis 3mo ago
"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)
brnt 3mo ago
Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.
xg15 3mo ago
Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?" The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
- ecshafer 3mo ago
  Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
- justaman123 3mo ago
  Do you think there's a possibility of getting more efficiency from existing hardware if it was used the same way that smaller amounts of RAM and processing were used in the past. Or because the rest of the computing landscape is so full of bloat it wouldn't even make much of a difference?
MadnessASAP 3mo ago
I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.
dvngnt_ 3mo ago
Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications
grantcas 3mo ago
[dead]

dfedbeef 3mo ago

3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but

bigbuppo 3mo ago
Make your secondary storage smarter.

neonmagenta 3mo ago

I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.

goodmythical 3mo ago
To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.
sublinear 3mo ago
It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.

satnhak 3mo ago

I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.

disillusioned 3mo ago
Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...

refulgentis 3mo ago

"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)

brnt 3mo ago

Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.

xg15 3mo ago

Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?" The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.

ecshafer 3mo ago
Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
justaman123 3mo ago
Do you think there's a possibility of getting more efficiency from existing hardware if it was used the same way that smaller amounts of RAM and processing were used in the past. Or because the rest of the computing landscape is so full of bloat it wouldn't even make much of a difference?

MadnessASAP 3mo ago

I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.

dvngnt_ 3mo ago

Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications

grantcas 3mo ago

[dead]