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[–] 261 points 2 years ago (4 children)

No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

One of the Wright brothers said that. It's actually my favorite quote because it always reminds me we have no idea what the fuck we're wrong about.

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  • [–] 275 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

    googles

    Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:

    Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909

    No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

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  • [–] 129 points 2 years ago (3 children)
  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Thank goodness computers are never wrong. :-P

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hey, they always do exactly as they're told!

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Hrm, in that case, now I wonder how they are ever correct!?:-P

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Easy, think about who decides whether or not they're correct.

    Again, humans.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    For now... except managers don't want to actually think, yet do want to be in control of even the tiniest aspects of every single fucking thing (see e.g. Boeing planes literally falling out of the sky, against the wishes of the engineers bc the managers figured that this way of skipping maintenance and then covering that truth from federal safety commissioners was "better"... for the sake of their profits ofc), so how soon until their unthinking need to "feel like" they are in control leads them to using computers to control the people, without even those humans who hold the admin rights ever making any conscious decisions?

    I suspect that a thinking computer may be correct far more often than an unthinking human.:-D

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

    -- Thomas Watson, president of IBM

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I cannot stomach much of it, but it is fun to go back and watch older media related to technology - e.g. the six million dollar man has like spinning tape disks, when computers were entire-room affairs.

    So he was right, using the definition at that time, though there was also so much potential for more.

    Also it is funny to hear them say that technology would literally make the six million dollar man "better", not just "well again" or "he will have side effects but his capabilities will be far above the norm" or some such. One glance at Google these days, or a Boeing plane, does not inspire me to think of the word "better" than what came before even from those exact companies. Technology moves forward, but I am not so sure that the new is always "better" than the old. It was an interesting bias that they had though, during the cold war and after the moon landing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Considering we now have a "CD" that stores 125TB of data ( https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/new-petabit-scale-optical-disc-can-store-as-much-information-as-15000-dvds ).

    Not all older tech are necessarily worse. An LTO-9 tape can also store 18TB of data per tape. It's still sold today and great for archival.

    Other cheaper, less error prone tech usually gets mass market penetration. But I am happy that massive storage niche tech is still there.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah tape is niche, but still serves its particular purpose well!:-)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    True. 12h to write the whole 18TB makes it a bit impractical for stuff other than backups. ;)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, I imagine the write-once, re-write-never part also may limit its applicability too:-). Then again, for a purpose where the data doesn't need to be constantly changing, like storing a TV show or movie, possibly even music if someone wants to listen to albums rather than randomized songs, it could offer a lot of practical utility to many people.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh you can totally erase and reuse the tapes. Depending on the tape software you can also rewrite parts or replace older files with incremental updates. It just really takes a while of rewinding. And the noise it makes is kinda retro...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Hehe, I can just imagine that in my mind...wrrr.....:-P

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    As a wise person said once, "Not all older tech are necessarily worse.":-)

    It's just that capitalism wants to sell you what they want you to buy, rather than what you truly want:-(. I mean, capitalism made this too, but I am saying that I think that is why people are constantly pushing for the newest and latest thing: b/c if you already have old thing, then they want you to buy new thing too, even if old thing was perfectly fine for what purpose you were using it for. :-|

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "We can improve him."

    And I believe tape storage hadn't even been invented when Watson said that. It may have even been pre-magnetic tape entirely because I believe he said it before a computer was actually invented (unless you count Babbage's difference engine). It was a prediction of what the world would need if computers existed if I remember correctly.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    And it makes total sense, bc the idea of a "PC" hadn't been tried yet, bc the technology simply wasn't yet up to the task. And yeah I think I remember the same thing about that quote, though who knows:-P.

    Anyway, it was hard for computers to be wrong about simple arithmetic operations, but they've come a long way since then, and AIs are now wrong more often than not.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Oh, and to provide numbers:

    https://www.distance.to/New-York/Paris

    That's 5,837.07 km.

    As of the moment, the longest flight by distance:

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

    In February 2006, Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer for the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km).

    That's 7.1 times the Paris-to-New-York flight distance.

    As for time:

    No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping...

    The longest flight by time:

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

    The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot (4,600 m) runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    the longest aircraft flight distance in history: 25,766 miles (41,466 km)

    That's 800 miles (1,400 km) longer than the circumference of the Earth. Humans are a trip.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Plus X-37B has flown round the earth for two and a half years on its longest flight. I know it's not really what he was thinking about as it's launched in space from a rocket in orbit but then that just adds even more to the notion tech advancement can be almost impossible to predict.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    “Brought in its train” what an interesting phrase, do people still say this? Is it the same as “in its wake” we use today?

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It appears to be meant like “retinue” or “followers.”

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    “retinue”

    ret·i·nue

    /ˈretnˌo͞o/

    noun: retinue; plural noun: retinues

    a group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person.
    "the rock star's retinue of security guards and personal cooks"
    
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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    He also isn't talking about airplanes, but airships. Sure plenty of planes make the journey every day, but zero airships do because they really are quite useless for it. Obviously he was wrong becauae a few airships did end up making Atlantic crossings, but they were slow, cramped, and dangerous compsred to ocean liners.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    At a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

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  • [–] 56 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That quote was in the context of the 1981 personal computer market, and in that context is correct.

    It’s like a game company CEO saying 12GB of video ram is enough in 2024 so we don’t all need an RTX 4090.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    12GB of video ram is enough in 2024

    And then Stable Diffusion showed up

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Im getting away with my 8gb for now.

    Its the language/text stuff that really needs like 30gb GPUs.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Im getting away with my 8gb for now.

    I don't think that you can do the current XL models with 8GB, even for low-resolution images. Maybe with --lowvram or something.

    I've got a 24GB RX 7900 XT and would render higher resolution images if I had the VRAM -- yeah, you can sometimes sort of get a similar effect by upscaling in tiles, but it's not really a replacement. And I am confident that even if they put a consumer card out with 128GB, someone will figure out some new clever extension that does something fascinating and useful...as long as one can devote a little more memory to it...

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Scientists in the 1800s also proclaimed we figured everything out and science was completed.

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    *1900s. Max Planck famously pondered whether he should pursue physics or music and was told by his professor that Physics was “done except for a few minor details”. Planck then went on to invent quantum physics to screw over students the world over.

    https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-56594-6_11

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