pg-gadfly

6 ms·

1.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
And why is that? Would bringing water into your house by a bucket also be a great idea? Unlikely, unless it serves another, non-obvious point.
2.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Waste is very subjective. When you have 100x the supply of something, it becomes cheaper to do stuff, which means other more valuable resources can be saved instead. We don't manage "information" as much as we do abstract obj
3.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
I don't think there is a problem with the former statement at all: Amplifying stupidity must mean it can solve problems without external intelligence. If it required more intelligence, you'd have a less useful machine.
4.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
As I've been saying, you don't know the point at which there is no more to learn. Even minor things can have major impact when combined with further research. Things like "enormous" are subjective, and it's indeed n
5.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
I think the author is giving lots of value to computation itself, which is not how humans generally allocate it. It's results are seen just as another generic resource. What do people do when clean water becomes nearly free? They do r
6.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
>There is no efficiency There is certainly efficiency to consider when making energy. We can't tap into the full potential of any source, there are "hard limits" to many of our current methods, but that doesen't stop
7.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
It isn't "exactly impossible" though, it never is. You can find out a more efficient way to create it, or you might have more power available in the future. All manmade elements have been extremely expensive to make the first
8.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
The word "auto"(oneself), often used with meaning to do by itself. Automation is a very broad term, which mechanization is a part, but not a requirement of. Anything that moves work from human to other forces is auto mation, havi
9.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
The simpler the task seems, the harder it must be. It's exactly why the task exists at all, it could not have been improved on before either and stopped there
10.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
In fact automation often goes top-down, reeucing complexity of difficult jobs and allowing lower-skilled workers to deal with the rest that isn't yet profitable to change.
11.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living. Provided there is competition
12.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
All things automation. Really a chainsaw is automation, and so is a compressor. Automation is a pen. They all remove work and increase efficiency. There are lots of examples which don't really count though, such as self-checkout, which
13.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Any load balancer will let you do that. Scaling is a few lines of scripts to do on any platform, and well worth the couple minutes, you don't even need a tool for just that. No tool "works the rest out". It's _always_ a
14.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
_any_ non-proprietary tool is "cloud agnostic". Kubernetes is bundled software, and achieves the things those pieces achieve. There is nothing holy about k8s specifically, the tools you train with are easy, and it's very easy
15.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
>It’s really bizarre to me that THIS is the aspect of consumerism that people go after for energy use It's more common than you think. In fact it's so common that it has it's own Wikipedia page(s): https://en.wi
16.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Observing complex reactions with chemicals requires much longer study than simply beaming things with microwaves. Results are nearly immediate, and any long term effect would have to be shared with everything else that warms things.
17.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Increasing attention available should be good regardless of how it would be used, even the worst-case scenario would be where we are now, only we get more done
18.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Increasing the responsiveness of everything should have the exact opposite effect, because attention is most affected by latency. If you're always immediately getting what you're looking for immediately you can't be distracte
19.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Depending on how many people a single point serves, it can imply a pretty sizeable chunk of energy. Smaller things add up when you're talking of hundreds of millions of people
20.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Attention is highly latency sensitive, and bringing reaction for your action a second sooner has major implications, and significantly increases your ability to interact with and understand content
21.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Of course there has been improvement in absolute terms, but our current state is much more than just that, which skews the results when thinking about where we are. The opinion is definitely not popular on hackernews, but I still want to th
22.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Behavior of microwaves is well-understood yes. Proving a negative would be rather difficult however, much like I find it hard to prove that no magical gnome exists at the bottom of my well, or that there is no renaissance-era teapot floatin
23.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
I think people often misunderstand how bandwidth (and generally any utilization) works. It's not about using 10% of the speed for some time, but using 100% of it for a fraction. You're practically always bottlenecked by transfer.
24.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Latency benefits would enable many new realtime applications both in business and consumer end and speed up many existing ones so they'd be much less janky to use, and thus more accessible to people. It's impossible to see all the
25.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
It's also to note that SSD capacity hasn't strictly improved, it's been gained through massive compromises that severely impact their lifetime and performance. More than that, a 5 year old nas drive can outperform a modern ch
26.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
You should be wary of any hostilities between your site and it's users. Even though it can't be brought down, your wallet sure can be if you don't set it up really carefully. You can simply retrieve the page constantly over a
27.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
The compute is really a negligible part and one that you can severely effect. Outbound bandwidth is the real killer, going at ~$90/TB
28.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
It reminds me of cult-speak, where everything has to be redefined according to some abstract higher level representation, even when it's simple.
29.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
It's can vs. can't, which is perfectly comparable, in both cases you cant know what you get until afterwards, which is not acceptable. When the freedom to use the your own devices is in question, it needs to be addressed. Shifting
30.
by pg-gadfly 6y ago
Buying a house and suddenly getting your water cut off because the county"doesent feel like it" is also similarily a "conscious" decision, and similarily bites you only a time after you bought something. You might say th

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