I read it like that first and thought it was one of these illegal apps to track your partner without them knowing.

I made a physiotherapy game console for kids that logs physiotherapy executions to a .csv on a fat32 formatted sdcard ;)

The part that is growing is how many tools rely on apps and other connected features.

I have a blood pressure monitor, and it just outputs the result to a built-in screen. I can then log the values however I want, and it’s probably easier and quicker to manually enter the three numbers each consisting of 2-3 digits into an app than to wait for the bluetooth connection to be established.

This battery monitor will never be remotely shutdown, because there is no remote function. And if the blood pressure tracking app shuts down, I can just use any other.

I suspect people (not billionaires) are realising that they can get by with less. And that the planet needs that too. And that working 40+ hours a week isn’t giving people what they really want either.

Tbh, I don’t think that’s the case. If you look at any of the relevant metrics (CO², energy consumption, plastic waste, …) they only know one direction globally and that’s up.

I think the actual issues are

• Russian invasion of Ukraine and associated sanctions on one of the main energy providers of Europe
• Trump’s “trade wars” which make global supply lines unreliable and costs incalculable (global supply chains love nothing more than uncertainty)
• Uncertainty in regards to China/Taiwan
• Boomers retiring in western countries, which for the first time since pretty much ever means that the work force is shrinking instead of growing. Economical growth was mostly driven by population growth for the last half century with per-capita productivity staying very close to inflation.
• Disrupting changes in key industries like cars and energy. The west has been sleeping on may of these developments (e.g. electric cars, batteries, solar) and now China is curbstomping the rest of the world in regards to market share.
• High key interest rates (which are applied to reduce high inflation due to some of the reason above) reduce demand on financial investments into companies. The low interest rates of the 2010s and also before lead to more investments into companies. With interest going back up, investments dry up.

All these changes mean that companies, countries and people in the west have much less free cash available.

There’s also the value of money has never been lower either.

That’s been the case since every. Inflation has always been a thing and with that the value of money is monotonically decreasing. But that doesn’t really matter for the whole argument, since the absolute value of money doesn’t matter, only the relative value.

To put it differently: If you earn €100 and the thing you want to buy costs €10, that is equivalent to if you earn €1000 and the thing you want to buy costing €100. The value of money dropping is only relevant for savings, and if people are saving too much then the economy slows down and jobs are cut, thus some inflation is positive or even required.

What is an actual issue is that wages are not increasing at the same rate as the cost of things, but that’s not a “value of the money” issue.

You can totally host something on carrier-grade NAT using techniques like NAT hole punching.

Couldn’t this prove very troublesome in combination with carrier grade nat?

You got a few things the wrong way round.

First, the last few decades it wasn’t the demand that was going down but the supply was going up with each generation joining the work force being larger than the one leaving into retirement, and also more women joining the work force.

These effects have ended. There aren’t more women to join the workforce and the baby boomers, the largest generation that ever existed going into retirement.

Also, you are forgetting what governs the demand for workers. It’s not some mystical fixed amount of work that needs to be done. A main feature of capitalism is that consummation is only governed by the available money, and it’s practically limitless apart from that. If people have infinite money, they will just buy 10 cars. Not because they need them, but because they can.

That means if there’s enough money around, there’s virtually infinite work to do and thus infinite demand for labour. The demand is only bound by the amount of money people are able to spend.

This leads to the current crisis. It’s not a crisis of too little demand for workers, but one of a bad economy. If the economy picks up, companies will start to hire again.

Yeah, my bottom half also doesn’t have an inner monologue.

The company I work at has an AI-related job freeze.

At the same time, AI is in the evaluation phase in the company and hardly anyone uses it for anything really. There are surveys, and they all say that AI can help a little bit in some niche circumstances, but that for most of the work it really does nothing.

Also, the AI evaluation is entirely driven by some curious employees and doesn’t really have anthing to do with upper management. In fact, upper management doesn’t want to pay the AI subscription fees.

The issue here is that human intelligence and computer intelligence work completely different and things that are easy for one are hard for the other.

Because of that, measures of intelligence don’t really work across humans and computers and it’s really easy to misjudge which milestones are meaningful and which aren’t.

For example, it’s super hard for a human to perform 100 additions within a second, and a human who could do that would be perceived as absolutely super human. But for a computer that’s ridiculously easy. While on the other hand there are things a child can do that were impossible for computers just a few years ago (e.g. reckognizing a bird).

(Relevant, if slightly outdated, XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/)

For humans, playing high-level chess is really hard, so we arbitrarily chose it as a measure of intelligence: “Only very intelligent people can beat Kasparov”. So we figured that a computer being able to do that task must be intelligent too. Turns out that chess greatly benefits from large memory and fast-but-simple calculations, two things computers are really, really good at and humans are not.

And it turns out that, contrary to what many people believed, chess doesn’t actually require any generally intelligent code at all. In fact, a more general approach (like LLMs) actually performs much, much worse at specific tasks like chess, as exemplified by some chess program for the Atari beating one LLM after another.

Thanks for the summary!

Yeah, in Python each . is a dictionary lookup. The cost of having a dynamic language where the compiler can do pretty much no optimizations (and yes, Python does have a compiler).

In static languages these lookups can be collapsed to a single pointer address by the compiler.

The power consumption would be 5*10^62 Wh.

The sun outputs 3.9*10^26 W. If you captured all that energy with 100% efficiency, you would need 1.3*10^36 hours or roughly 1*10^22 times the age of the universe to collect enough energy.

That’s incidentally roughly the estimated number of stars in the universe.

So if you put a dyson sphere around every star in the universe, right after the big bang (ignoring that stars didn’t form instantly after the big bang) and you ran them until today, then you’d have just about enough energy to crack one wallet with current tech.

Considering that you’d need a paradigm-breaking revolutionary and incredibly expensive device to do so, I’d find it hard to believe that you could stay under the radar with it.

What I’d expect to happen is that some big corporation and/or university manages to build a quantum computer capable of breaking 256bit encryption, and quite instantly after the announcement bitcoin will tank into nothingness or will change the algorithm to something quantum-computer safe. Well before some shady actor will get their hands on a quantum computer to crack wallets.

Bitcoin private keys are 256 bit long. That means, there are 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 (1.15*10^77) possible private keys.

Say you are using a bitcoin miner that’s roughly 4x as fast as the curretly fastest one at 1PH/s (1*10^15), they you’ll need roughly 1*10^62 seconds or 3*10^54 years.

Lets say you got a million of these miners, then you are down to 3*10^48 years, or 2*10^38 times as long as the universe has existed.

I was going to calculate how much electricity this would consume and how expensive it would be, but the answer to that is plainly “too much to imagine”.

At that point though the whole concept of bitcoins will be moot. If quantum computers can crack lost wallets they can also crack active wallets, and at that point there’s no reason to buy bitcoin at all, which will tank the value of bitcoin making it mostly not worthwhile to crack wallets.

So if we get to that point, there will be one proof-of-concept wallet crack, and instantly after that bitcoin will cease to exist in any relevant fashion.

Moore’s law hasn’t been exponential for ~15 years now.

This. It’s the old “to the moon” mentality.

If my 2yo continues to grow at the current rate, we’ll have to buy new doors soon becouse at age 10 the kid will be the tallest person on Earth.

That’s what you get when the “research” for the article is AI generated.

Only if people give up on the whole concept by then. Each new generation of AI model takes more energy than the last.

I’d rather parents, who in 2025 probably grew up with connected devices, be responsible for it

That’s about as useful as saying that shops should be allowed to sell alcohol to 5 year olds and the parents should be responsible for it.