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In 1998 to transfer a megabyte over telephone lines was expensive and 5 years later is was almost free.

I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down, on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.

In 1998, 16 MiB of RAM was ~$200, in 2025, 16 GiB of ram is about $50. A Pentium II in 1998 at 459 MHz was $600. Today, a AMD Ryzen 7 9800X can be had for $500. That Ryzen is maybe 100 times as powerful as the Pentium II. What's available at what price point has changed, but it's ridiculous how much computing I can get for $150 at Best Buy, and it's also ridiculous how little I can do with that much computing power. Wirth’s law still holds: software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.

But why not measure $ per intelligence. In 2020 you'd need a billion dollars to get your computer to write good code, now it is practically free.

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