alt Hacker News> The empirical argument
> We can ask a question: how long (in nanoseconds) does it take to access a type of memory of which an average laptop has N bytes? Here's GPT's answer:
"Here's what GPT says" is not an empirical argument. If you can't do better than that (run a benchmark, cite some literature), why should I bother to read what you wrote?
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The article started really well, and I was looking forward to the empirical argument.
Truly mind-boggling times where "here is the empirical proof" means "here is what chatGPT says" to some people.
The cool thing about "here's what GPT says" is that you can make GPT says whatever you want!
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6eeba-8284-800e-b399-338e6c4783...
https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6ef4a-bdd0-800e-877a-b3d5d4dc51...
> why should I bother to read what you wrote?
The better question is: Why should you bother to read what the author didn't bother to write?
The empirical argument actually states that memory access is O(n^1/2)
https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1/3_fit.... "The blue line is O(√N)."
This has been rehashed many times before, and the best blog post on this topic is here: https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html