There are still reasons for people to have a lot locally, but it shouldn't be the default.
There's a meme for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreaking:_The_Worst_Perso...
Whats better if all the RAM, CPU and storage of phones went to DCs. People are more productive without phones. They work instead of consuming content. The tens of thousands of hours lost (opportunity cost), even at a minimum wage is >$1 million over a lifetime.
'Enslaving' RAM so we can get the most work from it as we can isn't quite the same.
(No one is saying the RAM is "enslaved")
EDIT: upon re-reading, maybe we agree
And that's just one of 3 he owns in SF alone. Also he has 2 kidneys and 2 lungs, while he could get by with just 1 of each, and there are people badly needing them.
I will renounce my hardware when he renounces all homes and bedrooms. Until then he's a hypocrite.
Isn't the view that people having extra homes used 5% of the time a very well-known and common criticism, and there has even been legislation enacted in a number of places to discourage or penalize such homes?
(For SF, it appears:
- Tax rates for >1 homes are higher under the Homeowners' Exemption
- There was also an 'Empty Homes Tax' but it was struck down by the court in Eric and Andrew Debbane v. San Francisco)
Context and amount matters deeply. People like Sam Altman often like to refer to utilitarian principles, when it helps further their goals. Whether that is really their true motivation can be seen in small things like whether they apply the same principles to the same decisions of their lifes.
You should watch the talk yourself, it's pretty entertaining.
Like we have these billions of smartphones just sleeping all the time instead of running at 100% all the time.
But the whole point of personal computing is that you can do whatever you want.
It is the same old argument between centralization and decentralization. Yes, centralization is more efficient, but also the goals of centralized systems are ultimately wrong. So they are efficiently sailing towards the cliff.
Bathrooms are even more inefficient, btw. How many hours a day do you really use a bathroom? And some people even have more than one just for convenience.
Efficient use of Resources for the production of more Capital.
Those with inefficient usage of their resources (gamers and RAM) go bankrupt, and release the resources to those which can extract more Value from the same resources.
His solution is to return us all to an undemocratic model of computing that has been in decline since the 1970s.
I have a phrase in mind that's considerably more appropriate and to the point but, here, out of respect for HN's guidelines, I'll satisfy myself by merely saying: get off my lawn.
Nitter: https://nitter.mie.foundation/daradoescode/status/2116654047...
He could very easily solve the shortage by not buying up the entire supply. Further, the frontier labs could even coordinate in favor of consumers and agree to limit their compute purchases.
What I don’t like is the idea of rationing it and making it more and more expensive when you promise an era of abundance.
In the condo I used to own, I shared 5 out 6 faces of the box with neighbors. Cheapest electricity bills I ever had because you're mutually insulating your neighbors.
However, my HOA fees were more than that savings. The chairman noticed we had a lot of money in the reserves and pushed for a vote to do a multimillion dollar renovation. Popularity contest for things I don't value and HOA fees go up. Want to make a change or need to make a repair, need to get approval from the board.
Anyway, I'm sure the parallels are obvious with a little imagination, but I prefer a standalone house.
Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices and convenience for consumers.
But the elephant in the room is the question of who would control all that RAM and set or change the rules about which usages are allowed, for what price and which aren't allowed.
This against the backdrop of Anthropic just now deciding to block using Claude for reverse-engineering video games.
Or to go with your meme, the person you hate didn't just make a great point, they would also get to control what you do with your computer. Would you be fine with that?
Oh wait, much of the basis of the modern economy is letting individuals make decisions for themselves.
If one could use their RAM in a way that was actually private and without leading to them accumulating huge power it would be different matter.
Not by Sam Altman, surely. Hypocrisy is an individual sin, you don't get out of it because everyone else thinks you're wrong.
To murder the humor: the joke is funny because the idea that we should centrally plan resource usage for the benefit of society as a whole and discourage/disallow individually driven use of those resources for individually popular but socially wasteful applications is... communism, basically.
You can repeat this analysis for pickup trucks or cross-continent travel or desert agriculture, ad nauseum. And we do. And people like Sam Altman tend very strongly to be on one side of the argument. Until they need more DRAM, then it's all "let's pull together comrades".
roscas•2h ago
Back to Sam, his memory is not as good as it was before, money gets in the eyes and vision get muddy and foggy.
catchnear4321•1h ago
yes that’s what he’s saying, if consumers had less memory, his would be better.
gruturo•32m ago