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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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?

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

Make your secondary storage smarter.

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

To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.

It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.

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

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

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.

Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...

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.

"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!?)

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