Economies die from lack of produce though.

When the internet boom happened, computers had a tiny fraction of the RAM they have today. Everything worked fine. Programmers had to make efficient programs. But we were fine with that. We just programmed in C and C++ and shipped small binaries, because what choice did we have? Nobody tried to build desktop software in javascript on top of electron. And nobody built web servers in python.

If all consumer devices only shipped with 1gb of RAM maximum, we'd get over it remarkably quickly. Just about the only times large amounts of RAM is an actual requirement is AI, some data science / simulation, and editing video in 8k. And maybe 3d modelling. Lots of programs we run today are memory hogs for no good reason - like the rust compiler, cyberpunk 2077 and google chrome. But we could make those programs much more memory efficient if we really had to. Cyberpunk wouldn't look as pretty. But nobody would really care.

The economy won't die due to expensive RAM. Programmers will just adapt, like we've always done.

> But nobody would really care.

no, you should say that you personally wouldn't care, but that does not generalize.

People do care, just like people prefer eating better food than just bread and milk. And after having had a taste of the good stuff, people do not want to revert - loss aversion is real.

So if consumer devices regressed back to only having 1gb of ram, they will feel the loss, and they will complain if nothing else. The world of lean, efficient software that require little ram will not return. Programmers (read:companies selling products) will not adapt, but instead, the requirements for computing will become more exclusionary to those with the means.

Software that uses less RAM isn't necessarily worse, often RAM is wasted purely due to carelessness and because it didn't matter.

Your assertion that a world of lean software won't return is backwards looking; that was all driven by hardware being cheaper than developer effort.

If we now enter a world of AI-enhanced developer effort being cheaper than hardware, perhaps we can have lean efficient software again.

I wonder if you could use the same technique (RAM models as ROM) for something like Whisper Speech-to-text, where the models are much smaller (around a Gigabyte) for a super-efficient single-chip speech recognition solution with tons of context knowledge.

Right now I have to wait 10 minutes at a time for the 2+ hour long transcriptions I've uploaded to Voxstral to process. The speed up here could be immense and worthwhile to so many customers of these products.

I think this lack of 'G' (generality, or modality) is the problem. A human visualizes this kind of problem (a little video plays in my head of taking a car to a car wash). LLM's don't do this, they 'think' only in text, not visually.

A proper AGI would have have to have knowledge in video, image, audio and text domains to work properly.

Has overtaken Saudi Arabia as nation with largest proven oil reserves.

Although it is 'heavy' oil, the 'brown coal' of liquid fossil reserves (i.e. low quality).

The fact that such a fuss is being made about low-grade oil is a concern in itself.

Most of the USA's refineries specialize in low grade oil. The best grade oil is often shipped out of the USA for refining. Shipping costs are so low on a grand scale that it's more profitable to ship the USA's high quality oil overseas than building new refineries in the USA just for that: https://www.marketplace.org/story/2024/05/13/the-u-s-exports...

> The fact that such a fuss is being made about low-grade oil is a concern in itself.

Keep in mind there's a lot of 'idle' refining capacity at the southeastern coast of the US which was built for heavy oil.

At least HDMI is a 'low frequency' connector, often only ever plugged in once, as opposed to USB (or refueling a car)

I believe this is what "Cargo-Cult Programming" is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

Using 'copy' as a clipboard script tells me OP never lived through the DOS era I guess... Used to drive me mad switching between 'cp' in UNIX and 'copy' in DOS. (Same with the whole slash vs backslash mess.)

I believe this is why all modern digital watches use a 32768.0Hz crystal resonator, it's a power-of-2 frequency above the 20Khz top end of the range of human audio perception, to avoid the whole 'tinnitus on your wrist' thing.

Also a tuning fork cut for a lower power-of-two would be a bit bulky for a compact wrist watch.

The old 1980s computers also had no equivalent of flash storage though, the RAM had to store the program being run as well as act as scratch-space.

I believe youtube still uses 40 mel-scale vectors as feature data, whisper uses 80 (which provides finer spectral detail but is computationally more intensive to process naturally, but modern hardware allows for that)