Remember when the PlayStation 2 was "technically a supercomputer" and taking LSD a certain number of times made you insane? Great moments in marketing history

funnily enough the ps3 was literally a super computer, at least if you hooked up enough of them

https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...

Oh yeah I vaguely recall news reports about how the PS2 was so powerful it could be used for missile guidance or some nonsense?

An article about that from 2000. https://www.theregister.com/2000/04/17/playstation_2_exports...

Brilliantly it says:

Register readers with very long memories indeed will recall similar concerns being raised over Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX-81. The fear then was that the sneaky Sovs would try to buy heaps of ZX-81s for their Zilog Z80-A CPUs and might 1KB RAM to upgrade their nuclear missile guidance systems.

Huh. Today, a college kid without even any underlying knowledge of the math can train their own GPT-2-level language model as a semester project.

I would say that this take was correct, just not in the way the detractors at the time intended. The danger was to the usefulness of the internet.

I have yet to see any benefit to society from GPT's improvements, but I do see the internet quickly becoming more and more unusable due to the inundation of machine-generated spam on nearly every communications platform.

By more unusable, do you mean more dead? As in LLMs are helping make the Dead Internet Theory real?

In the most "doomer" possible view of my beliefs, yes, that'd be an accurate description.

I don't know if that will actually come true, of course - human society is pretty resilient in the face of its own self-caused adversity, but currently it does already extract a significant mental and emotional cost dealing with filtering out the "human mimics" on many platforms - especially search engines.

“some number” would be 65. things change

>things change

Often predictably.