Anything @lifeinlowkey - Tumblr Blog

There's a thing in Classics studies where you'll read surviving descriptions of Ancient Greek automata which attribute all manner of near-lifelike behaviour to them – then you look at the reconstructed plans for the automaton in question, and it's a device with roughly the sophistication of a wind-up mouse.

The broad consensus seems to be that the authors of such descriptions are exaggerating for clout. For my part, I look at all the people in the year 2026 who've managed to genuinely convince themselves that LLMs are not only sapient, but smarter than they are, and I think: hmm.

vbartilucci

I'd accuse him of stealing the idea, but he doesn't like to read.

thegaymertrainer

Ribbon dancing I was not aware of your evolution 🤯

allthingseurope

Lucca, Italy (by heimann2)

wtf-scientific-papers

Wang and Lai (2014)

gemstone-gynoid

lionfloss

External shots of botanical gardens by Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller

damnhotpocket

Gema.piano on instagram

Why are all music teachers like this 😭😭😭

marimbles

underrated tumblr feature is being able to catch up to yourself on your dash. so there is an END POINT. and you can say “ah, I have reached where I left off, there is no more to see! I’ll take my leave now and come back later when there are new posts.” instead of being stuck forever in a bottomless algorithm pit digging deeper and deeper till you have to summon monumental strength to climb out

gobblechopstv

40ouncesandamule

The face Milhouse made haunted me for years. I don’t know what it is about that grimace that branded itself upon me but… it stuck. It stuck with me for years.

Even now, I feel a certain coldness

ilovecats4ever

because its based on this picture of a French man watching the Nazis march into Paris in 1940

sparrow-va

memories-of-ancients

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

from The Hunt Museum, Limerick

tarvek-sturmvoraus

localxenospores

i was compelled

I was also compelled

@randomitemdrop

Item: Walking Honker

recollections

I think that realistically, the thing that kills AI data centres isn't going to be cost, regulation, or public opposition. I think it's going to be the gen-AI equivalent of the WDM fiasco.

For context, back when commercial Internet service was just taking off and the dot-com bubble was at its peak, a bunch of companies put down vast quantities of fibre-optic cables in anticipation of future demand. The vast majority of that fibre subsequently ended up laying dormant, becoming what's known in the industry as dark fibre.

The dot-com bubble bursting is often cited as the reason why, but it can't account for all of the problem, or even most of it; demand for commercial bandwidth continued to grow in spite of the bust, albeit somewhat more slowly than predicted. The real culprit was the development of a technology called wavelength-division multiplexing, or WDM.

WDM tremendously increased the amount of data that could be transmitted using existing fibre-optic cables; post-WDM, many major urban centres found that they now had over one hundred times as much fibre as they needed to accommodate present and anticipated near-future demand for Internet bandwidth. Many of the corporations that had speculatively bankrolled that fibre installation ended up selling off their infrastructure for pennies on the dollar and subsequently went bankrupt.

Basically, I suspect that's what's going to happen here. The present rush to construct more and more AI data centres is being short-sightedly driven by predictions based on the first couple of generations of general-purpose generative AI technology. Any day now there's going to be some random unpredictable breakthrough that makes gen-AI models like a hundred times more efficient, and a lot of very powerful people are going to be left holding a lot of very expensive bags.

prokopetz

The plausible endgame for gen-AI isn't "the technology stops existing". It's "the bottom drops out of the infrastructure market because the technology reaches a point where a good-enough-for-Jane-Average version of the entire model can live in your pocket".

prokopetz

(If you're in the notes going "OP isn't this just DeepSeek", you need to understand that the efficiency gains achieved by DeepSeek are basically a rounding error compared to what could plausibly be achieved once we actually get this shit figured out – and if DeepSeek caused as much anxiety in the market as it did, imagine what serious improvements in model efficiency would do!)

prokopetz

I totally get where folks are coming from when they want Hornet and Lace's relationship post-Silksong to be a meeting of peers; for my part, however, it's textually explicit that Lace has the mind of a child in spite of being centuries old because Grand Mother Silk never permitted her to grow up – and doesn't that put an interesting spin on the game's core themes? – and I personally feel that Hornet randomly acquiring an incredibly annoying kid sister has its own depths to plumb (as well as being objectively much funnier).

prokopetz

Like, come on: Hornet, who never had a childhood because she was born into crisis as a political bargaining chip, then everyone she knew fucking died, and Lace, the eternal child imprisoned in a permanent adolescence by the god of all helicopter moms? You can't tell me there isn't meat on those bones.