Going to show my age again now.

I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn’t have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.

So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.

As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn’t too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you’d have A:, B: and C:.

I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).

A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.

Well I didn’t want to go full Orwellian. But I have thought about it too. Of course the most sinister thing in 1984, where they change history by replacing articles in the newspapers. That would be possible. Because if all you have are some hand scribbled notes or your certain own memory that we were DEFINITELY at war with East Asia, but everyone else knows the truth, they assure you of the truth. That we were always, at war with Eurasia. You’re suddenly that crazy guy.

The vast majority of people have little real memory or grasp of history. Already on X people are asking grok such simple questions.

Now, you might say, well they couldn’t change every copy of information could they? Humans, no. AI, quite probably.

In all seriousness, I’m aware of how far it could go. I just hope there’s enough humanity left in the world that it doesn’t.

Yes, that’s not a bad idea. I need to start drafting the 500 page TOU/Privacy policy right now.

But they’re not going to stop you using computers. They’re just going to stop you using YOUR computer. They want you to pay a subscription to use THEIR computer, and to own all your data. So of course they can scan that for even more targeted ads.

This is the endgame the techbros want. And the shitter about this is, we’ll end up paying more in subscription fees than we did buying parts, and to kick us in the teeth, I’d bet that we’ll only get whatever GPU/CPU compute is leftover from their priority corporate/AI contracts.

Yeah, I’ve not booted into windows since I got the latest kernel that can fix NTFS drives from within Linux. I do keep a VM for specific tasks. But those are very rare too. It’s still dual boot, but I wonder for how much longer.

I have 64GB in my main PC. I generally always buy the next step up in terms of RAM. Precisely because the market for computer parts has always been volatile. Also, so I don’t need to do extra stick upgrades in the interim.

Oh, I think they knew about the Ireland problem. Since it was pretty much being shouted about, before during and after the vote. I think the governments (and that’s the sad thing, we went through a few during the process itself) in charge took the stance of “Get brexit done, worry about the rest later”.

Which was stupid. But, again I’m going to point at the characters in charge of the governments at the time(s).

Cameron could have really sewn this up had he not flipped the table and ragequit. Sure the usual noisy tory backbenchers and Farage and co would be up in arms. But Cameron should have just followed the referendum to the letter, and tried (because you know we’d need to apply) to move us out of the EU and straight into the EEA. Really, it would have satisfied the terms of the referendum. Would have had minimal impact in real terms. Would have gotten Farage out of the European parliament (the rest of Europe would thank him for that).

I know people that voted to leave. None of them specifically wanted a hard brexit. The vast majority I asked would actually have been fine with EEA membership.

I mean, I have 32GB of DDR4-3200 in my old PC I can sell him at the current rates if he really needs it.

That sounds like… A WITCH-HUNT!

Yeah, I mean ultimately if I knew the future I could have sold it all at $140 or so. But you don’t really ever know what is happening tomorrow. So ultimately, if you made some return, it’s always good.

Well it’s certainly rarely based on any logic I can ascertain, that’s for sure.

They’re already up in OOH trading. Not a guarantee they will go back up when US trading opens proper. But, it’s usually a good indication.

Yeah it came right down to <$20 at one point. I bought a fair bit in 2025 when it first did, and sold most of it at $100. So you know, I’d not mind if it came back down again to repeat the exercise. Although when I got it 2 years ago, I thought “Not even Trump would let Intel fail” and to be fair, he did authorise a cash boost.

I am not completely sure that would be true again. I’d probably still take the punt at $20 again though.

This is a weird one though, because they’ve not even been the biggest name behind AI by anyone’s estimation. Why they took the biggest hit goes beyond AI I think.

It wasn’t terrorism. It was a special military operation. They should be able to recognise that better than most to be honest.

Well, to be blunt, it depends. Would the eventual extermination of the human race cause them to lose money in the short term?

I never said it was. But, I’m also not an investor. I’m just saying the kind of things that scare off investors. And this would be a big one.

It’s more about not spooking investors. If it’s known that your AI is being used to reverse engineer software from well off corporations. They’re going to be a little less likely to invest if 1: They’re connected to any of those corporations 2: They’re concerned about future lawsuits heading their way.

And of course the actual fear of potential lawsuits landing on their door, or being named in lawsuits against people using their AI to do this.

Yes, if you want control over AI you MUST host it yourself in reality.

Well if they are using that method it’s only going to work as a refinement technique on existing or new traditional models. At the end of the day they can only tackle difficult tasks using knowledge they have vacuumed up by their (often from dubious sources) large datasets. This reinforcement training still won’t produce innovation. It will most likely just specialize the models, possibly to work better for specific tasks while requiring less memory or other resources. A good thing for sure, but it still doesn’t mirror innovation.

Now, I’m going to be honest. On one hand, I realise if we got AGI the best case scenario is most of us would have ended up with no jobs, the rich would get richer until we’d have a violent, bloody revolution and have AI design us a more efficient guillotine (for any future legal trouble, it’s important to note this was a hypothetical based on us achieving AGI, we didn’t so you cannot legally constitute this as a threat, call to action or plan to commit a crime).

Nonetheless I did kinda hope that with the huge investment the tech bros got for AI, that they would spend it going down the avenue of trying to achieve AGI, rather than just buying all the GPUs and making more expensive models where we’d already know there was a diminishing return before they did it! Yeah it might go full skynet on us, well apparently current models are perfectly capable of going skynet on us if we let them near our nukes. But, still this would have a chance to just bypass us and do it anyway. But if it didn’t, such issues of innovation might have been solved.

As it is, they squandered the money and here we are now. Which I suppose is still a good thing, in a weird way.

Anyway I’ve gone off path, but I’ll leave it all there. My main point is, what we have is ultimately a dead-end failing some great discovery. It should be used as a tool to assist skilled writers, artists, programmers and anyone else. Not to replace them, but to augment them. Oh and it wouldn’t go amiss to not take all the returns to the top, maybe the little guy could get a tiny tiny piece of the pie for a change.

The main issue is. If companies enforce AI use (and many do), and/or they stop recruiting junior developers (a lot have), then we’re going down a road where soon (for values of soon) we just won’t have people with the skills to evaluate what they produce.

Worse than that, they can only improve if we provide the input for them to use to improve. Any future models are going to be consuming a mixture of human work, human curated AI work and AI slop, ever skewing towards the latter. I am not convinced the way these models work, they are able to tell the difference.

We might well have the best models we’ll ever have, right now.

There’s a huge difference between “It makes things a lot easier/better” and “Coding is impossible without it”… One of them you can argue is true. The other is an outright lie, and even he knows it.

Umm. Just no. A lot of what I do at work, AI can help only in minimal ways. I know this because some people insist on using it, and I’m always seeing their trash PRs. Because it’s just no good with such specific stuff where it can really only try to find generic solutions.

While I think the visual studio and similar auto completion stuff to be awesome stuff. The internal tooling we have to write code doesn’t have this and guess what, we’re doing fine.

But then I don’t work in a game studio. I cannot say how it is in that industry.

Is it convenient for a lot of things? Sure it is. But, you know I try to avoid it for my own personal stuff, just so I keep the brain cells that are there for software development, active and able to do it unassisted.