this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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[–] [email protected] 156 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

If you ever study biochemistry, it leaves you absolutely in awe. The best engineering we can do is pretty amazing, we have computers and airplanes and all this magic stuff, but the stuff in you is a hundred, a thousand times better made. It's stunning. Comparatively speaking, it is perfect. And that's only the stuff we understand. The stuff in your brain, we do not.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In the relatively short amount of time we've had with computers we've made pretty astounding progress though. If we had had a few million years to improve those silicon brains I think we'd give evolution a run for its money!

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yea, our engineered stuff might be simplistic compared to the brain and biology, but evolution is just a combination of luck, randomness and "unguided" trial and error. There's no "thought" to evolution and that's why we end up with all these....weird quirks and flaws LMAO

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago

those quirks are all features, i swear

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Antivirus protection could be better, though. Oh, and the built in self destruct is kind of a bummer, too.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Figernails are so annoying

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

If you ever need to claw your way out of a heap of rubble, you'll be thankful for them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Rip them off.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

It is a planned obsolescence.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I remember a quote from Civ along the lines of "if the brain was simple enough for us to understand, our minds would be to simple to understand it."

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Natural selection is essentially just a massively parallel Monte Carlo optimization algorithm that's been running for billions of years. It's so simple yet produces such amazing complexity.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Give it a few more billion and we'll finally have an intelligence, that's not hell bent on destroying itself.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think this might be a case of expecting a fish to climb a tree. Brains are terrible in fp32 performance, and computers are so far not great at reasoning. But that's mostly because they are made for different things. I'm not sure of this, but i would expect a single neuron firing costing a similar amount of energy as a single transistor firing. The difference is in part that they work differently, but I think the most important part is that they are put together differently. Computers were made for arithmetic while brains evolved for socialising and survival. For most other things you are 100% correct though, we could not recreate a bee or an ant even if we wanted to.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I can create real time visual imagery with no apparent resolution limit or perceptible frame rate including audio and a soundtrack.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Apparent and perceptible are the key words here. Your brain makes up pretty much everything and pretends it's the real deal. Detail and consistency really aren't all that great actually, much like ai video generation

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The fact that we only recently mapped out the brain really tells you a lot about its complexity.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

And that was only a fruit fly brain! Human brain still hasn't been mapped.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Watch this whenever you think humans have rivalled nature in building stuff that works.

Nature's crafts in unrivaled

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hold my nanostructured beer.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (12 children)

It makes me wish I believed in God.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This article estimates that GPT-4 took around 55 GWh of electricity to train. A human needs maybe 2000 kcal (2.3 kWh) a day and lives 75 years, for a lifetime energy consumption of 63 MWh (or 840x less than just training GPT-4).

So not only do shitty "AI" models use >20x the energy of a human to "think," training them uses the lifetime energy equivalent of hundreds of humans. It's absolutely absurd how inefficient this technology is.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

I think you underestimate how much time and energy it took to get us to this point. Like, billions of years of evolution to arrive at a brain as efficient as ours.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's usually a lot faster in producing outputs though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How many R in strawberry ?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

how many R not in strawberry?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Human energy needs are incredibly variable so the estimates for normal consumption are wrong for most people, but when you get into essential systems (basically cardiovascular and nervous, not even including digestive or any muscle movement) you actually need even less - the average (by weight, height & age) man needs 1950kcal or so and the average woman (by height, weight & age) needs 1450kcal or so

When we replace AI with brains in jars I'm sure we can cut it down even more though

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago

My brain has the same power draw as a Switch 2? This explains a lot...

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Just connect your brain up to a monitor and imagine your game with the best graphics you can possibly think of.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Capitalism has us by absolute fools.

Paying $69.99 for something someone else dreamed up.

We have a solution for this, its called going to sleep.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think I got the shareware version where it kicks me off after a few hours.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

I've tried some of the free mods, but I can't really recommend them. Definitely steer clear of frying-pan to the dome, and you won't get any real lasting effect from hold your breath till you're blue.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

I remember listening to a podcast with indy devs and they agreed that engaging player's imagination is the best way to make sure your game succeeds. And most indy games don't have the budget for super good graphics.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

20% of our body's energy use is our brain, it's a major energy expenditure.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Compared to what, >50% for a 4090 in a PC?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

That's 50% of your households energy

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

My shit ass wetware needs to lock in and catch up. It can't even run Doom or play back Bad Apple properly.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Visualise playing Doom in your head. It's free, and the cops can't stop you.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

"You wouldn't imagine downloading a car, would you?"

Well? Would you?!

.....?

ANSWER ME!!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What would happen if you did the equivalent of feeding your A.I. a healthy diet, then run a parallel system and fed it only burgers and pizza and Doritos?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Nothing, cos energy is energy

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

My GPU can compute stuff faster than your brain though.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Your GPU might tell you to glue cheese to your pizza, but at least it's fast!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can generate an image in my head faster than your GPU

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Efficiency wins out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

My brian not do hard maths stuff tho

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