Yeah, the article was a good read, nothing wrong with that. But I think it’s important to make it clear what the intent is.

What is not true?

Do the math yourself, it’s only grade school level:

A download takes 100 minutes at 10Mbit. How long does it take at 20Mbit and how many minutes are saved?

The same download takes 2 minutes at 500Mbit. How long does it take at 1000Mbit and how many minutes are saved?

This calculation doesn’t even take into consideration that most servers don’t allow for gigabit downloads and that most wifi connections also don’t allow for gigabit.

A relevant part is that double the speed doesn’t save the same time.

So e.g. if a download takes 100 minutes on 10MBit, you save 50 minutes by doubling the speed.

The same download would take 10 minutes on 100MBit, doubling the bandwidth would only save 5 minutes.

And on 500MBit it’s two minutes, so doubling the bandwidth only saves one minute.

We are deep into diminishing returns here.

€58 vs €49 means an extra €108 per year. That’s quite a sum.

In my case going from the 150Mbit/s I have to gigabit would cost me €35 extra per month, €420 a year, yeah, that’s not worth it to speed up some background downloads.

I’m on Fedora, updates are frequent as well, but since they download in the background I hardly care about the speed. I see there’s a new update, so I start the download in the beginning of the day. It finishes within half an hour or an hour or so, while I continue doing my stuff, and in the evening when I’m done I run the actual update if it requires a reboot.

I guess the rather consistent 6 minutes don’t come from it actually taking so long but rather from some kind of caching that only makes these repos show up after 5 minutes plus 1 minute for fetching and using the api key.

But how often do you do that? And do you need all 10 games instantly available on your PC?

I recently setup a new laptop on Fedora on a 150MBit connection. That was around 10min for downloading Fedora, 20min for installing it, another 20min or so for setting up Steam and Heroic launcher (for GOG, Epic and Amazon Games). I started the first game download on Steam while I was setting up Heroic and it was done downloading before I was done with Heroic.

Since I can only play one game at the time, I could already start playing and let the rest of my library download in the background.

A faster internet connection would have just shaved off a few minutes from the initial 10min downloading time for Fedora, but I don’t know how fast the server even lets me download the image.

I mean, if you pay €20 for gigabit, sure, why not. The only network provider who serves gigabit at my home wants €65 per month for it compared to the €30 I pay right now. That’s €420 per year extra, and there’s really no point in paying that to save a few minutes every few months or so.

Tbh, I don’t think the post is bad at all. If you have special high-bandwidth use cases that require massive speed you know that already and then the article isn’t for you.

If you say you “didn’t have fiber” I’m guessing you were on 50MBit VDSL? Then, of course, switching to gigabit makes sense.

In the blog post the author explicitly doesn’t say “Go get VDSL”, but they compare Gigabit with 500MBit. That’s not nearly that much of a difference, you’ll still be able to play a new game minutes after you bought it, but just twice as many minutes. If that at all, because if you have wifi in your home, it will likely limit your bandwidth to less than 500MBit in real use anyway.

The main point of the post is to show whether a regular user really benefits from Gigabit, and no, they don’t. Their netflix stream will not improve when going from a few hundred MBit to a Gigabit. Neither will most of their experience.

If you are lucky enough to live in a place where Gigabit costs nothing, sure, might as well. The only provider who serves Gigabit to my home wants €65 per month for that, €780 per year. That’s a lot of money for something that maybe saves me a few minutes once or twice a month.

Info for anyone reading, while the read was quite interesting, the whole article turned out to be an ad.

Or Firefox.

Just buy keys at resellers :)

No, in honesty, use single-use virtual credit cards.

LLMs don’t need to become AGI. They only need to convince people in charge that they are.

Yeah, but also the red lightning bolt sign of the polish pro-abortion movement was introduced in 2016. The SS sign with the sigrune was introduced in 1929.

If nazis had time travel, how did they manage to screw their war effort up so badly? They must have been even worse tacticians than we thought!

Dude, you got the timeline completely wrong: https://www.obieg.pl/en/210-the-red-lightning-of-all-poland-women-s-strike-forwards-and-backwards

The red lightning sign as part of the polish pro-abortion movement came into existence in 2016! A whopping 87 years AFTER the Nazis created the SS sign.

If the Nazis made the sign to discredit poland’s pro-abortion movement, they would have needed time travel to do so.

Oh, it’s even better than just evicting mexicans. They did so under the pretence of building public housing. After the evictions they dropped the plan and built a privately owned stadium instead.

I’m gonna need some proof of this. I wonder why a German, designing a sign for the German members of the SS in 1929 (10 years before Germany invaded Poland), would choose a sign with the purpose of harming a Polish feminist/pro-abortion movement.

It makes no sense and I can’t find any sources saying anything like that at all.

So cough up some sources. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Of course. That’s why we trust it. My point was that a tool doesn’t need to have “understanding” (whatever that exactly means) to be useful, it needs consistency.

The compiler doesn’t understand. It converts, following strict rules. There’s no “thinking” or “understanding” in the process. It’s a pure one-to-one conversion. That makes it consistent. If I run the same code twice through the same compiler I will get the same output. It’s an output that I can trust and thus using a compiler is helpful.

If an AI was able to consistently, dependably, provably convert my natural text input into a correct program, then I’d also be able to trust it.

The problem is that this is technically impossible, because the whole point of using natural text input is that I can use vague, unclear and incomplete language to describe what I want. With an ambiguous input there cannot be an unambiguous output.

A compiler also doesn’t “understand” like a human does, but it’s so accurate and reliable, that collectively we decided that a programmer doesn’t need to understand the output of the compiler any more. We can trust it, because it works perfectly reliable.

So the question isn’t so much whether AI “understands” the way a human understands things, but instead whether it will become reliable enough to be trusted. And I don’t see any evidence towards that yet.

Yeah, he likely will. The whole department management is in a gold rush here.

But, you know, my boss can now finally code himself. He could never get his head around coding, but now he finally can code. Who knows, maybe he won’t need us expensive software developers anymore when AI gets better, then he can do it all himself.

That is correct, but it’s also kinda beside the point. A compiler doesn’t “understand” anything either, it’s just a program, but it’s still very useful. So useful in fact that most programmers nowadays trust it unconditionally to the point where we say “a programmer doesn’t need to understand the code the compiler outputs”.

But AI is just really not trustworthy, and the question is whether they will ever be trustworthy enough that we can say “The programmer doesn’t need to understand the code the AI outputs”.

And yet, that’s all my boss wants of me. “Does a dev really need to understand the code if the AI understands it?”

That’s frustrating.