• vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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    10 hours ago

    Maybe “smart” electronics is a bubble. Understandable that some people want their puppet controller devices in every piece of reality. What’s not understandable is the motivation to buy those. Though I think Nazi courts did sometimes put the cost of investigation (and surveillance) upon the “criminal”, sometimes even make them pay for the bullet to execute them.

    I mean, it’s not until superprofits from oligopolized companies with their hands in everything exist. Because those superprofits go to clueless VC that also wants to take part in new superprofits.

    It’s going to fade very slowly, if oligopoly isn’t broken.

    On an unrelated note, I’ve just yesterday read about a German company going to produce fully optical general-purpose computers. For all bad things about optical computers (not much history, less density possible) some are very good, and it’s not even delays and fields and heat being not a problem - it’s production of these being less demanding for enormous very precise foundries like TSMC. And the fact that it’s a German company is refreshing, because, well, not USA and not China.

    And among alternative bases for computers I like optics more than DNA computing, because DNA computing is good for parallel equations and bad for response, which means it benefits big companies and big data processing if it happens. While for optical computers it’s the other way around, volatile memory is a bit of a problem to make cheap, but response is better than anything. So if optical computing boom happens, it might get us back to functional programming and conscious design as opposed to big data processing. I mean, well, that’s about plausible general purpose optical computers, while dedicated ones are usable for this “AI” thing too unfortunately.

    And I’m probably atrociously simplifying things, just - have read a couple of articles yesterday, one of them describing a general purpose optical computer design.