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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I had an opposing shower thought the other day so I’m going to play devil’s advocate on this one.

    I think in a world of rational, good-faith actors (which I’m not arguing we live in), this is both by-design, and optimal at society scale.

    Think about those things you’re good at, and the things you’re not so good at. I’m really good with computers, my time is most efficiently spent troubleshooting and building technology stacks. This skillset is in demand enough that I make a comfortable living doing it.

    I’m comfortable enough that I have time to learn other skills when needed, but not comfortable enough to hire out all the otherwise commodity tasks I need done. A leak in the roof, a sink that needs replacing, some cat6 through the walls, leveling a floor before replacing broken tile from the 80’s… You get the idea. I can do drywall and other general contractor work but I’m not great at it. It takes me longer to end up with a worse end product than a professional, and I don’t enjoy doing it.

    Every Saturday I spend doing drywall could, at society-scale, be much more efficiently spent building a k8s cluster or helping a scientist build software for research. Just like the guy doing my drywall should have a me on the other end of a phone when he needs a new laptop, or his mother gets malware.

    When people hit “rich” the unspoken meaning is supposed to be that their time is valuable enough that society deems it more useful to spend it outside of commodity tasks. That seems like a good fundamental design… say what you will about its current real-world implementation.




  • Dran@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    An example of this:

    Bitcoin mining started on cpus, then moved to gpus, and now exists on dedicated asics.

    A $200 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the ASIC is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

    A $2000 GPU vs a $200 ASIC, the GPU is going to be a faster sha256 calculator

    A $200 GPU from today vs a $200 ASIC from 10 years ago vs a $200 CPU from today?.. You get the idea.

    There’s no way to know without specific details which will be faster. You could be running software encryption on a raspberry pi from 5 years ago or the drive could be running an encryption ASIC from 10 years ago, etc