Hm. Nowadays a lot of games look alike. They use some 3D-Engine and most of the work is in the 3D-modelling and writing some interesting scripts.
For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.
You overvalue the HN crowd (or undervalue the AI hype-machine) considering you're downvoted and GP is upvoted (Another gamedev here smiling at GP's comment).
Today even tiny CPUs are really fast. Locally you have to mess up badly to run into trouble. But of course people will do exactly that...
Most real world problems still can be solved with 32-bit software, so the last ~20 years running out of RAM always counted as "using defective hardware". AI workloads now make things interesting again, but it's not that easy to hit the ceiling with real world workload.
Cache is indeed very important. Optimisations like that are gone when you go for distributed computing. Sometimes adding a single nop can do wonders. I wonder how many percent of developers have something in their toolbox to profile for that.
Arguably cache concerns are distributed computing concepts moving closer to the core. Same with concurrency semantics. These were far more exotic concepts when the fallacies were first written.
Very easy to hit the 3GB limit imposed by 32-bit architecture for any non trivial data processing app but luckily 64-bit is firmly established for at least 10 years
I once found that my old Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard had an option to disable the Caps Lock Key in the settings. I immediately used that. Then after a reboot Caps Lock was ON and the Key was disabled - Shift now also didn't disable Caps Lock...
That taught me that sometimes you need the Caps lock Key badly...
Software can control the state of the key - and you need a way to get rid of that. Back in the day - to enforce only Upper-Case Text in some Text-Field - some software even messed with global Casp Lock State when entering the Text-Field...
But remember that markets can stay irrational longer than anyone can hold his breath. If they get more funding there's a good chance they'll invest more in the destruction of the remaining production capacity. Admitting that with normal pricing anyone could have a decent AI-machine for 2K is hard - prices for acceptable AI-machines most likely will go >10K first.
Maybe sycophantic nature is a good fit for the legal system. A successful lawyer once told me that the most important thing is to know your judge. Objectivity isn't a big thing in court. They'll cite random newspaper articles as evidence and throw out expert opinions - if they like. There might be a way to appeal - but that road often is not functional.
The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?
I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.
Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.
Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...
One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.
I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.
Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?
I'm running a server in the 5K-league. And the results are very good. I get about 150 Tokens/s from Qwen3 for coding. And about 50 Tokens/s from the newer non-MoE Qwens.
I wouldn't bother with less than 32GB of VRAM. With 16GB you can already run something usable, but 32GB gives you much more power. 9B and 14B are only interesting if you want to tune models yourself. The sweet spot now seem to be around 27B-35B.
Real Linux on phones is a thing. They're usable, but most hardware is getting old. E.g. PinePhone still works fine, but they recently announced that it's unlikely that we see a new version. They mention that it's hard to be competitive with hardware when people can install PostmarketOS and SailfishOS on cheap old Android Devices for a similar experience.
For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.
reply