AAA gaming shows the effects of late term capitalism on gaming.

The distinction is that it’s not ‘something to do with neurons’, it’s ‘neurons firing and signalling each other’.

Like, we know the exact mechanism by which thinking happens, we just don’t know the precise wiring pattern necessary to recreate the way that we think in particular.

And previously, we couldn’t effectively simulate that mechanism with computer chips, now we can.

There’s plenty of economic reasons to think we will as long as it’s technically possible.

Assuming that the path to AGI involves something akin to all the intelligence we see in nature (i.e. brains and neurons), then modern AI algorithms’ ability to simulate neurons using silicon and math is inarguably and objectively a precursor.

I mean, no, not really. We know what thinking is. It’s neurons firing in your brain in varying patterns.

What we don’t know is the exact wiring of those neurons in our brain. So that’s the current challenge.

But previously, we couldn’t even effectively simulate neurons firing in a brain, AI algorithms are called that because they effectively can simulate the way that neurons fire (just using silicon) and that makes them really good at all the fuzzy pattern matching problems that computers used to be really bad at.

So now the challenge is figuring out the wiring of our brains, and/or figuring out a way of creating intelligence that doesn’t use the wiring of our brains. Both are entirely possible now that we can experiment and build and combine simulated neurons at ballpark the same scale as the human brain.

When I heard that line I was like “Yeah, sure. We’ll never have AI in my lifespan” and you know what? I was right.

Unless you just died or are about to, you can’t really confidently make that statement.

There’s no technical reason to think we won’t in the next ~20-50 years. We may not, and there may be a technical reason why we can’t, but the previous big technical hurdles were the amount of compute needed and that computers couldn’t handle fuzzy pattern matching, but modern AI has effectively found a way of solving the pattern matching problem, and current large models like ChatGPT model more “neurons” than are in the human brain, let alone the power that will be available to them in 30 years.

I mean what’s the point of “self” hosting then?

If you have to be a professional server administrator to host one of these services, then why even have a self hosting community as opposed to just a hosting community for server admins to discuss how to set and configure various services? Is this community dedicated to just discussing the uniqueness of managing a home server without a static IP?

Self hosting is just an extension of open source software. It’s only goal is being able to run your own backends of apps to not be exploited by major companies. It’s goal is not to be a niche technical hobby, if that’s your goal in its own right, then get a model train or a Warhammer set.

Mainstream consumers don’t know words “Plex” and “Home Assistant” either.

Yes, they do lol. It’s flat out weird to think that the only people who have ever heard of pirating are software developers and server admins who use the command line.

Notice that it hasn’t amongst mainstream consumers.

You know what self hosted projects have been successes? Plex and Home Assistant. You know what projects don’t require the terminal? Plex and Home Assistant.

Self hosting is doomed until this isn’t the answer.