13 ms·
Hold on to Your Hardware
- camgunz 6mo agoI feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.
- XorNot 6mo agoIt's probably closer to the suppliers don't think this will last and are ramping slowly if at all so they're not left holding the bag. The US is headed for a cataclysmic crash at this point and it's not clear what will trigger it, but all those companies pushing underpriced tokens and Rust ports of existing tools by agents aren't going to survive it.
- not_the_fda 6mo agoChip manufacturers are used to boom bust cycles and are always hesitant to bring on more capacity, since it costs billions to do so. They will let the hyperscalers buy their supply at a premium and wait for the bust. Then they will shift back to the consumer space. Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6mo ago> Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be. At the same time, the article’s argument that the value of personal computer ownership is only going to rise, in terms of the value of speech, not strictly in terms of the value of lunch, is important to call out. I’m glad I held on to my 2009 MacBook, for example, as it still functions today as an active part of my homelab, at an amortized yearly cost of practically the price of taking a nice steak dinner once a year.
- Tade0 6mo agoI recall how in the 2010s RAM manufacturers were in crisis, as their margins were low and competition fierce - it got to a point where they started doing price fixing and got fined for it: https://web.archive.org/web/20180513133803/https://www.techrepublic.com/article/samsung-hynix-micron-sued-for-dram-price-fixing-that-could-have-raised-pc-prices/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180513133803/https://www.techr... Prices went down again after that. To me this is just a temporary swing in the other direction - they're riding the gravy train while they can, because once it ends it's back to low prices.
- llm_nerd 6mo ago[dead]
- mememememememo 6mo agoIn such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.
- jagged-chisel 6mo agoMaybe we’ll finally get some good tools to make real productive work possible on phones.
- Angostura 6mo agoLike a large screen and a keyboard? Hello Mac Neo
- kingleopold 6mo agoI see they are offering to macos for iphone pro and ipad pro next years with subsc. ? or via upgrade with price I mean it's now possible more than ever
- mememememememo 6mo agoHello HDMI adaptor and magic keyboard
- Angostura 6mo agoWrong OS though.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6mo agoVirtual desktop casting, a killer HID product, and what else do you need?
- pjc50 6mo agoiOS is apparently going to have mandatory age gating, so likely that will come to Android as well.
- not_a9 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- sheefers 6mo ago[dead]
- CraigJPerry 6mo agoArticles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital. Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.
- ramon156 6mo agoThey would rent out the data centers, not sell it off
- sva_ 6mo agoI think some players like xAi and Google can burn money for a long time. Google made $240B profit last year
- Shank 6mo ago> ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital If this does occur, unfortunately it isn’t like any of the production capacity is going to immediately shift or be repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn’t usable outside of datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual availability of components again.
- CraigJPerry 6mo agoyeah 3 years sounds reasonable to me, less than one asset depreciation cycle in business. Pain for you and me, but just a bump in the road for the accounts dept.
- lugu 6mo ago> If this does occur The capital from the gulf is already disrupted. It isn't anymore a matter of if or when.
- gzread 6mo agoMy computer, and I think all threadripper systems, has registered ECC DDR5 RAM which I think is the same type used in AI datacenters. Well one half of it, the other half being HBM memory used on video cards, which is soldered to them and non-upgradeable. But the main system memory from a used AI server can become your main system memory.
- keybored 6mo agoOwning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea. You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now. Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...: Liberty goes beyond that.
- falense 6mo agoI disagree. There is in fact a non-zero chance that we will get good enough models that are MOE optimized for desktop size hardware that can do a lot of the same things as the SOTA models. Im certainly crossing my fingers that the open-weights models continue improving. Engram from Deepseek for instance seems very interesting for a compute to memory offloading perspective. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s0czc4/round_2_followup_m5_max_128g_performance_tests_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s0czc4/round_2...
- vjerancrnjak 6mo agohaha, all of a sudden I see a tab "waifu pillow" on Amazon, and think I have a split personality that runs searches in between consciousness shifts, and then I come back to a funny message.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- duskdozer 6mo agouBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ This happened because of the following filter: ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage
- sva_ 6mo agoWhat a silly filter, blocking all xn domains
- duskdozer 6mo agoShrug. First time I'd seen this. If it displayed as the original text it would have been clearer.
- httpsterio 6mo agoIn this case yes but it's meant as a punycode scam prevention where common Latin alphabet letters are swapped for similar looking alternatives.
- numpad0 6mo agoIt would make it hard to spot impostor domains like "news.усомbiнаtor[.]сом" if it was. There's enough inertia for FQDNs to be strictly ASCII and any UTF-8(outside ASCII) in domain names to be felt unnatural for an URL, so most systems default to the raw "Punycode" xn-- scheme for all IDNs.
- bombcar 6mo agoSafari at least shows the proper マリウス.com - I believe it has more complicated heuristics that boil down to "if it looks like a real script, show it, if it looks like some mangled English, show the xn-"
- shusaku 6mo agoKind of an interesting history to this kind of url: https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html
- barrkel 6mo agoI don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while. This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it. I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.
- picture 6mo agoIt seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years? Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.
- barrkel 6mo agoPeople spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech. The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs. That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
- 6mo ago
- shusaku 6mo ago> These days, the biggest customers are not gamers, creators, PC builders or even crypto miners anymore. Today, it’s hyperscalers. … > These buyers don’t care if RAM costs 20% more and neither do they wait for Black Friday deals. Instead, they sign contracts measured in exabytes and billions of dollars. Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their employees?
- lmz 6mo agoMicron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer brand for RAM I don't think?
- dust42 6mo agoJust to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
- Arn_Thor 6mo agoConsidering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoGonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.
- myself248 6mo agoThat's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off. Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decades. Not so with helium.
- jleyank 6mo agoHold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.
- compounding_it 6mo agoIn order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television. The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).
- sigio 6mo agoAt the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat rare/expensive.
- bombcar 6mo agoEmphasis on "somewhat" - I was able to build a 10GB backbone for my NAS and such for less than $200 or so with a CRS305 and some direct connect cables; looks like the CRS304 would have made this even easier ... To be fair, I only started this because the dock I got had 10G - https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-pro-dock https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-pro-dock and I saw some 10G cards on eBay cheap and my old Nortel switch had a 10G uplink and ... well, you know how it goes!
- archargelod 6mo agoMy PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM. It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine. For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100. Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess. It’s enough for everything I need, and I don’t see a reason to ever upgrade. Unless my hardware starts failing, of course.
- jagermo 6mo agoI knew the time for my cable box would come!
- aurareturn 6mo agoCapitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI. There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices. Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.
- yubainu 6mo ago[dead]
- anonzzzies 6mo agoI do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
- defraudbah 6mo agoI refuse, I'll buy when I need to and can hold on for a few months if prices become insane. This means I'll spend less on hardware then what I could, if I wanted to buy max mpro or latest framework I just will not, because prices are too mad and g o for a cheaper version. whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it
- sigio 6mo agoFor laptops, I always spring for the lowest amount of ram + hdd/ssd, and then instantly upgrade this from local after-market sources. However, this wouldn't work for apple devices (Hence I don't own any Apple devices). For example, my current Thinkpad T14-gen5, was bought with 8GB ram and 256GB NVME, and then upgraded to 64GB ram and 2TB NVME, for the same price as 16G/512G would have cost at Lenovo. And then I still have the 8GB/256GB to re-use/re-sell.
- usrbinbash 6mo agoAs the old saying goes: "This too will pass." Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product. If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU
- imtringued 6mo agoI just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware. I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept opening it over and over again, then I realized that it completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the title contained the world "nudes" with a faked amazon favicon) and when you reopen the tab, it shows you a black overlay with a message intended to induce shock if you ever bother to read it (I didn't read past the first sentence so I don't know what it was actually about). Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session. The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.
- jaen 6mo agoIt doesn't write anything extra to the browser history. How about actually checking before exaggerating. If you are bothered by a single wrong title with the right URL, well... I think something else is wrong. You are also completely speculating on the intent. Less drama please.
- fishbacon 6mo agoThe pop-up is about disabling javascript, to avoid this kind of website doing this kind of thing. I thought it was clever. But it also seems ham-fisted, and in poor taste.
- captn3m0 6mo agoThe author also maintains https://disable-javascript.org/ https://disable-javascript.org/, which the pop-up links to. And has the exact script + titles used. > You may want to consider linking to this site, to educate any script-enabled users on how to disable JavaScript in some of the most commonly used browsers. The following code uses scare tactics to do so. > When added to your website, it will change the icon and the title of your website's tab to some of the most unhinged things imaginable once the user sends your tab to the background. Upon re-activation, the script will display a popover to the user informing them about the joke and referring them to this initiative.
- tmtvl 6mo agoI grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether or not it will actually last).
- Forgeties79 6mo agoBuilt my PC last April and also did 32gb. Almost did 64 since ram was so cheap at the time too, but hey live and learn I suppose ha
- bluejay2387 6mo agoThe general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.
- ozgrakkurt 6mo agoTo be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then
- daveidol 6mo agoNot my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoI "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro ~2014... only to eventually discover it largely unused when we were probating her properties. iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoNot necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first. (A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.) It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.
- cynicalsecurity 6mo ago[flagged]
- dist-epoch 6mo agoI'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage. Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it. This is pure Capitalism. If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain. But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged. Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt. And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them. Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin. AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.
- forinti 6mo agoThe market can remain irrational longer than the capacitors on my motherboard can resist bloating.
- shevy-java 6mo agoAI companies driving RAM prices up is, in my opinion, theft from the common man (and common woman). Sure, you can say that in capitalism, those who pay more benefit the most, but no system, not even the USA, has a purely driven capitalistic system. You still have transfer money, public infrastructure and what not. So private companies driving up the prices, such as for RAM, is IMO also theft from common people. And that should not happen. It can only happen when you have lobbyists disguised as politicians who benefit personally from helping establish such a system. The same can be said about any other prive-upwards scaling that is done via racketeering.
- meindnoch 6mo agoI know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?
- guardian5x 6mo agoLet me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoWe can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.
- robinsonb5 6mo agoThis year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bigfishrunning 6mo agoSure, but the price increase will be less, because less ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better then last years (but now we can run more/better software!) Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the market conditions are.
- cheschire 6mo agoIt’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago[dead]
- mmackh 6mo agoWe are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If expand our definition of computers outside of screens and traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram | storage). The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors. There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our environment. So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!
- functional_dev 6mo agoyou are right! Power management improvements are what really enable these form factors... being able to run a wifi sensor on a coin cell for a year makes applications possible that were unthinkable just a few years ago
- tavavex 6mo agoMicrocontrollers are great. But a lot of people who use them were bridged over by an interest in PCs, hardware or building something that interacts with something they already use. If free computing goes away, how long until the interest in microcontrollers slumps far enough for them to turn from fun, cheap commodities into expensive, proprietary, industrial devices?
- flyinglizard 6mo agoIt's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less. But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in your local mall and piece them together into a working device. It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on, thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a mess. Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot of sense any more. Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices, because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.
- the__alchemist 6mo agoYea; I believe this is unprecedented. This is the firs time I've observed this regression in GPU price/ performance. That 4090 is still top-tier, and now costs more than when it was new.
- pmdr 6mo agoI've seen comments on here before that went somewhere along the line of "adults don't care about RAM prices." HN is no stranger to siding with the oppressors.
- rswail 6mo agoA long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars. There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time. The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom. It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging. The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <-> Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.
- zozbot234 6mo ago> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.
- bitmasher9 6mo agoChinese firms won’t have the exact same problems as anyone else. Some problems will be the same but not all. * Chinese firms finance through different banks and investors than current ram producers * A company with a mission statement of consumer ram won’t have their supply outbid by data centers * Chinese manufacturing has more expertise in scaling then any other manufacturing culture
- bluGill 6mo agoThe biggest problem in expanding for everyone else is they don't trust the market to exist for long enough to be worth paying for a new factory so they are not investing in it. The Chinese might be small, but they think the market will exist and are investing. Will they be right or wrong - I don't know.
- jameshart 6mo agoThe fact that there’s been a massive expansion in the nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn’t mean the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.
- upofadown 6mo agoThis article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10. The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.
- 1970-01-01 6mo agoYour electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.
- einr 6mo ago65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh. 0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year
- cjs_ac 6mo agoIn the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.
- 1970-01-01 6mo ago£72.77 is more than enough for a PC: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659
- darkwater 6mo ago> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable. I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient. The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?
- duskdozer 6mo agoDo you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10 years, largely due to the web.
- darkwater 6mo agoYes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the software support worked like in the x86 world.
- vladde 6mo agowhen you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the page changes to something weird, but really legit looking. a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"
- foolserrandboy 6mo agoIt actually gives you warning in an overlay first that the favicon would change if you open a new tab. I did and I got "zuckerberg nudes"
- Izkata 6mo agoWent to try it out myself and the very first one I got was the HN icon and "The internet used to be fun".
- pissinwind 6mo agoEverything about tech and economy slowing is 1000% man made. The Trump/anti-America phase has gone on way longer than I thought but it won’t last forever. Even if we have to wait for this old world cabal to die and fade away, time is still on our side. Boomers are stupid for using time as a weapon. I’m chillin. Waiting for people to die while growing my businesses. Travel to a functional place off the beaten path to see nobody can really stop forward progress. Even in these places where time has stopped.
- abmmgb 6mo agoI actually think the central thesis is thought provoking, we have shifted far away from locally installed shit to remote data centre access, this was initially driven by cloud-based initiatives and now spiralling upwards by AI. For any researchers, hackers, builders wanting to play with locally installed AI, hardware could become a bottleneck especially as many machines, such as the beloved Macs, are not upgradable
- 2716057 6mo agoAs long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities. The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.
- pjerem 6mo ago> As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. That's not true at all. There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or Android. But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those niche.
- xbmcuser 6mo agoIn the last month 20-30% of oil supply 30% gas supply and 30-40% of fertilizer production has been destroyed and could take any where from 8 months to 5 years to come back online. Governments are acting as everything is okay so that there is no panic but we have crossed the point of no return even if the war ends today food & energy shortages are over the horizon. If you can get an ev, solar heat pumps, battery storage etc get it now today as fossil fuel based energy prices are going to go through the roof. I see similarities to when covid hit people kept looking at things happening in other countries and not preparing for the shit to hit their own cities and countries.
- rolandhvar 6mo agoSo what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market for the enthusiasts?
- bombcar 6mo agoThe difference is "datacenter equipment" has changed - it used to be large rack mount servers that, while a bit silly to run at home, at least could be done if you wanted to spend the power budget. These are entire datacenters build for one thing - and they're water-cooled and integrated so tightly that it's unlikely you can do much with any parts or part of the setup. The difference between buying an off-lease Dell server and trying to buy part of a supercomputer - which is what these really are. They're not datacenter; they're custom-built supercomputers.
- rolandhvar 6mo agoYes I see, fair enough
- dade_ 6mo agohttps://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nortel-Completes-Acquisition-of-JDS-Uniphase/a8354 https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nortel-Completes-Acquisit... Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet? So Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever? Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock valuations? "This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full potential of our high-performance optical component solutions business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership position in high-performance optical components and modules which are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."
- pjmlp 6mo agoI have been holding for my hardware for decades, some of my private hardware traces back to 2009. Phones and tablets only get replaced when they die. Why should I throw away stuff that still works as intended?
- grahammccain 6mo agoI feel like we will get out of the hardware constraints eventually.
- pcblues 6mo agoI think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.
- QuiEgo 6mo agoUnfortunately, data center computers are not something you can just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors, and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs. A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never going to be useable by consumers. If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long drought of supply.
- adamwong246 6mo agoI have often imagined writing a book, roughly "Fahrenheit 451 but with computers instead of books". Imagine a world you do not buy an iPhone- one is assigned to you at birth, a world were "installing software" on "a computer you own" are not just antiquated or taboo, but unthinkable.
- red-iron-pine 6mo agogoogle and facebook are actively salivating at this possibility. "don't create the torment nexus, etc."
- cyberrock 6mo agoI think Mr Bradbury would remind you his book was about how passive entertainment (the "parlor") slowly eroded books for decades before the actual book burnings, not the state just suddenly banning them. In that sense, I suppose you could still make it work. Our society celebrated surrendering ownership of media to iTunes and Steam for our convenience, whittled down online content that didn't make us feel good, limited which applications we could install on our phones in the name of security and privacy, and eliminated our anonymity to save the kids. At this point, removing the hardware is the least surprising step, because as Captain Beatty says, "if you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood." Or perhaps you were thinking of Brave New World.
- Bender 6mo agoIt is a good article but I am holding onto my hardware for other reasons. I predict it will not be long until all hardware has a set of Nanny chips that are named and marketed so that even people here on HN will argue on behalf of having them. It will be some "Secure enclave AI accelerated Super Mega Native Processing Underminer" and will start off securing and accelerating something or a set of somethings but will eventually tie into age verification, censorship and a Central Nanny Agency that all countries will obey. - "Stare into this hole to verify your age. - "Stick your finger in the box. - "Ignore the pain to get your AI token bucks and unlock access to the shiny new attestation accelerated internet." - "Sync ALL of your usernames and passwords into this secure enclave." Every packet and data stream will be analyzed locally by the AI to determine the intentions and predict future behavior. The AI summarized behavior will be condensed into an optimized encoded table to be submitted hourly to the Central Nanny Overseer. I might be slightly exaggerating and a bit hyperbolic but it will be something in this spirit and people will sleep walk right into it. My only question is which country will control the behavior of these chips.
- selectively 6mo ago[flagged]
- the__alchemist 6mo agoIt is wild thinking how a few years ago, I didn't buy a 4090 direct from nvidia because "$1600 (USD) is too much to pay for a graphics card; if I need a better one, i'll upgrade in a few years. (Went with 4080, which is substantially slower and was $1200) Joke's on me! It will be scarcity mindset from here on out; will always buy the top tier thing .
- altcognito 6mo agoPart of this is that memory companies recognize that nobody is going to enforce antitrust law for the forseeable future, so collusion to raise prices is the norm now.
- xyst 6mo agoNot a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.
- c0decracker 6mo agoThey do, at least a lot of us do I would say. But not everyone is at liberty to dedicate (still very expensive) time of a software engineer to eek out better memory footprint when it is cheaper to "just throw hardware at it" in many cases.
- saadn92 6mo agoThe article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up
- gregoriol 6mo agoYou are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run. So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.
- Carrok 6mo agoI have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.
- organsnyder 6mo agoKeeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures. Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw alerts at me I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).
- BLKNSLVR 6mo agoThis may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related: I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems the pendulum is swinging the other way for the time being. I hope that, wherever the current direction ends up, there are lessons that can be learnt about what we had, and somehow fumbled, such that there is motivation enough to get back there.
- stronglikedan 6mo ago> I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future Me too, but without all the slavery this time please. It'll never work if some actors are willing to abuse their workforces to keep prices low as they do.
- 3abiton 6mo agoIt is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from aliexpress, around 1-2€ each, and having in a week or two delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.
- stuxnet79 6mo ago> I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. Not everyone benefited. Market globalism wasn't particularly kind to the global south, and the specific mandates that the WTO enacted on countries in latin america / africa (Washington Consensus) greatly increased local wealth disparities despite visibly growing GDP for a time. America profited handsomely because for most of the past 30 years, it was where the (future) transnational conglomerates were based. These companies stood to benefit from the opening up of international markets. Now that these companies are being out-competed by their asian counterparts, instead of going back to the drawing board and innovating they are playing the "unfair trade practices" card and of course the current administration is on-board with it. Globalisation is not going anywhere, but America is increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand to benefit from.
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoThe overlay and page title changing worked really well, ffs, I was like "Why is my machine displaying a page with zuckerberg nudes" haha.
- bombcar 6mo agoSo hard to find it again amongst all my infowars and Zuckerberg nudes tabs ... :D
- tangotaylor 6mo agoI'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence. War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed. Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
- lenova 6mo agoOh man, I've come across this person's blog before and I love it, not just because of the personalization/personality they've put into the site's design, but because of all of the random CLI/TUI-based tools they've developed. Examples: - https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/projects/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/projects/ Their github repos: - https://github.com/mrusme https://github.com/mrusme They even built a BBS-style reader client that supports Hacker News: https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem I miss the days of the web being weird like this :-)
- taikahessu 6mo agoPidän kaksin käsin kiinni muistitikuista niinku. Cha cha cha ...
- commandlinefan 6mo agoWhen I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment. I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.
- rla3rd 6mo agoWhat a bunch of BS. The price of a commodore 64 from 1980's is over $4K in todays dollars. $4K buys a pretty decent workstation these days.
- politelemon 6mo ago> If you need a new device, buy it; I would specifically add, whatever you have, or whatever you choose to buy, it would greatly benefit you to ensure a degree is Linux compatibility to ensure its lifespan can be extended further than the greed enthusiasts at MS, Apple, and Google would like you to. They will be facing the same declines in purchasing habits and are further incentivised to assert their ownership over what you might mistakenly consider your devices.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoDepressing...
- cirelli94 6mo agoOkay but what about the icon and tab name changing and the pop-up about disabling javascript?!
- joshstrange 6mo agoPicture of the overlay: https://cs.joshstrange.com/ZTg30SPn https://cs.joshstrange.com/ZTg30SPn The favicon changes every time you switch away to something different with various tab names (ranging from porn, to right-wing news, to 4chan and I'm sure more). All this author has convinced me to do is block their website. I also don't agree at all with the premise of the article so I don't imagine I'm going to be missing much by not seeing this site again.
- sigbottle 6mo agosemantic decentralization (not just AWS owning thousands of data centers and having their own distributed interoperability problems), standards, and regulations. These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part of the stack.
- G_o_D 6mo agoMemory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity. In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats almost 1.5 month salary in private sector Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just dream for use never to fulfill
- MisterTea 6mo agoTo the people saying "The shortage wont last forever." - Yes, you might be right. However, such a supply crunch creates a perfect vacuum for rapidly change to fill in the vacuous hardware landscape of computing and shift the balance of power. Think about it like this: Imagine the AI/Cloud/Crypto companies who are buying up all these compute and storage resources realize they now control the compute hardware market becoming compute lords. What happens when joe/jane six pack or company xyz needs a new PC or two thousand but cant afford them due to the supply crunch? Once the compute lords realize they control the compute supply they will move to rent you their compute trapping users in a walled garden. And the users wont care because they aren't computer enthusiasts like many of us here. They only need a tool that works. They *do not* care about the details. They hardware lords could further this by building proprietary hardware in collusion with the vendors they have exclusivity with to build weaker terminal devices with just enough local ram and storage to connect to a remote compute cluster. Hardware shortage solved! All they need to do is collude with the hardware makers with circular contracts to keep buying hardware in "anticipation of the AI driven cloud compute boom." The hardware demand cycle is kept up and consumers are purposefully kept out of the market to push people into walled gardens. This is unsustainable of course and will eventually fall over but it could tie up computing resources for well over a decade as compute lords dry up the consumer hardware market pushing people to use their hoarded compute resources instead of owning your own. We are in a period where computing serfdom could be a likely outcome that could cause a lot of damage to freedom of use and hardware availability and the future ability to use the internet freely.
- Yanko_11 6mo ago[dead]
- Kiboneu 6mo agoThe other side of this is that we can still make software more efficient, and make better use of the old hardware than we had ever thought possible. I’m doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured before “Attention is all you need“, than I could 5 years ago, when quantization techniques were implemented. I’m holding on to my 32 bit machines. Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved on.
- bob1029 6mo agoI am still rocking that 5700XT 50th anniversary edition. I see no reason it won't make it to 2030 at this point. There was a moment where I thought it was dying, but it was a combination of dust and a shader bug in BF6 that caused the concern. I've also got a 1080ti in case of disaster. Newer graphics hardware is pointless to me. The expensive new techniques I find incredibly offense from an interactivity standpoint (temporal AA, nanite & friends). I run Battlefield 6 at 75% render scale with everything set to low. I really don't care how ass the game looks as long as it runs well. I much more enjoy being able to effectively dispatch my enemies than observe aesthetic clutter.
- arexxbifs 6mo agoIt's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser. Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app. The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies. Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.
- antisthenes 6mo agoYeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as everything is done via browser. Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now. On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60% of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM. I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that resource usage is.
- mikewarot 6mo ago>Everything today is a web app. Maybe it was a few years ago, I had to download a phone app just to try to restore delivery notifications on my Amazon echo. They no longer have a web interface to control it. Worse than that, I had to ask the AI to do it in said app.
- poolnoodle 6mo agoI've never seen a non-latin alphabet URL before, huh.
- redbell 6mo agoIn a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.
- kogasa240p 6mo agoThis site finally got me to disable javascript through ublock. 10/10!
- n2j3 6mo agoI wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of private property altogether. The question is who owns the means of production(computation) I suppose.
- mikewarot 6mo agoI have a small amount of hope that I'll live long enough to own a means of producing chips, thanks to Atomic Semi. The 3d printing, and home CNC machine advances of the past decade make it a lot easier to turn out a small doodad or replacement part at home.
- kelvinjps10 6mo agoI was about to upgrade because I'm using a Thinkpad t480, I decided to optimize my computer instead. I run i3 and a couple of native apps and chromium web apps run fast enough. And some kernel and other tweaks + gamemode in arch make gaming better. I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.
- solomonb 6mo agoI'm not saying we are in one, but isn't a RAM shortage like this is exactly what one would expect at the early stages of a take off scenario?
- drillsteps5 6mo agoI very much would like to know how much of this presumably ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going to end up being released back to the market when the dust settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money they got towards the future projects?
- T-A 6mo agoAs much as 23.1GW of capacity is under construction globally, split across 831 sites. The Americas region hosts 17GW of this capacity, across 311 locations. Europe, Middle East and Africa or EMEA as well as the Asia Pacific (APAC) region trail significantly. APAC has marginally more ongoing construction, with 3.2GW across 283 sites versus EMEA’s 2.9GW across 258. The US alone hosts 15.9GW of ongoing construction. https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/ai-data-center-build-advances-at-full-speed-five-things-to-know/ https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/ai-data-center-b...
- philip1209 6mo agodistracted by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
- Velocifyer 6mo agoWhy doesn't Hacker News render punnycode in domains?
- bombcar 6mo agoBecause it's the simplest solution to punycode attacks - һасkеrnеwѕ.com is xn--krnw-43d5ac5g0ix2b.com but can you tell it from hackernews.com?
- WarcrimeActual 6mo agoIt's super cool that this site changes the tab name to NSFW phrases when you switch off of it, and then pops up a rambling chastisement to turn of JS in your browser. Even cooler when I use HN to legitimately keep up with tech news at work and it does it on my work computer where I share my screen in meetings. Domain blocked. Don't erode user trust for your crusade. Moron.
- focusgroup0 6mo agoNot to mention Age Verification / KYC being baked into every future OS and device. Buy and hodl to have a hope of independent, censorship-resistant computing in the future.
- evanwolf 6mo agoso… Hold on to Your Medical Devices. (And everything else with a chip in it.)
- QuiEgo 6mo agoOn the plus side, we've reached the end of Moore's law and are living in an amazing age of personal computing devices. M1 Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are still good computers 5+ years after release. Many games are still playable (and being released on!) the PS4, which is almost 12 years old. The iPhone 15 pro has 8gb of RAM which will likely be sufficient for a long time. Don't get me wrong, this whole parts shortage is exceptionally annoying, but we're living in a great time to weather the storm.
- mattfrommars 6mo agoAs someone who has been in the line of PC building, the entire “build your own” industry has been in a decline. And this “RAM apocalypse” is pretty much nail on the coffin. Enterprise business from small, medium to large get laptops or use mobile application and online SAAS. There entire PC industry is for enthusiasts and tiny segment of the worlds computing needs. The laptop variation has already been eating into PC market. In today’s world, it’s just not practical to own a PC unless you are gamer. And for gamers, it’s just better to get console. And for developers, their is more money to be made selling games on console then PC. In the end, from business, to revenue generation stand point, custom PC industry is just a legacy of old computing world. As I type this, custom PC is more of a “marketing segment” for Nvidia for example to upsell Nvidia cloud offering - i might be stretching too far - but that basically is the point.
- beloch 6mo agoThe global memory shortage is something that will probably end, perhaps even soon. e.g. Google announced Turboquant[1] today. If as described, it would significantly reduce thirst for more RAM at data-centres. Even if it doesn't pan out, data centres aren't being built at the same rate as they're being financed due to the practical, but unavoidable, problem of finding enough power. Demand for memory may actually have a very real bottom that we hit soon. However, there is another reason to look after and hang onto to certain types of products long-term. Tariffs. If the trade barriers that the Trump administration has put up remain long-term, it fundamentally changes what can be built. High volume items (like RAM) are the least likely to be affected. Low-volume, high performance items are what are threatened. Say you're building a very specialized, very low demand item that's simply-the-best. You're probably going to source the best components and materials from several countries, build it in one place, and then ship it globally. You amortize the cost of tooling, etc. across the entire global market. If a few countries throw up trade barriers, as the U.S. has done, your material costs go up and your access to markets decreases. People on the other side of those trade barriers may suddenly not be able to afford your products. Supply gets more expensive and demand drops. What was marginally profitable in the old world order becomes uneconomic in the new order. Such items aren't going to be magically on-shored to the U.S.. They're just not going to be made anymore. If you own something that's niche and barely profitable to make, that's what you should look after and take care of, because more of it might not be made for a while if trade barriers don't come back down. ---------- [1]https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-efficiency-with-extreme-compression/ https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-effici...
- mrinterweb 6mo agoIf turboquant can reliably reduce LLM inference RAM requirements by 6x, suddenly reducing total RAM needs by 6x should have a dramatic shift on the hardware market, or at least we can all hope. I know 6x is the key-value cache saving, so I'm not sure if that really translates to 6x total RAM requirements decrease for inference.
- T-A 6mo ago> Google announced Turboquant[1] today Most commentators seem to have missed that the TurboQuant paper was posted in April 2025: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874 So it's been public knowledge for almost year, and internal Google knowledge for longer. Did Google reduce its capital expenditure plans over the past year? Let's ask Google: Google is expecting to see a capex of between $175-185 billion in 2026, approximately double that of 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-estimates-2026-capex-of-up-to-185bn/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-estimates-...
- gchamonlive 6mo agoIn time we'll have a surplus of machines lying unused in datacenters. Then maybe you won't be able to buy a computer, but you'll be able to buy a server on a datacenter for half the price of one. Yours, one that if you wanted you could drop by the datacenter and ask for it. But you won't because you wouldn't be able to do nothing with it. It's only useful in the server rack, so you'll buy it and leave it there, maybe after one or two years, depending on contract, you'll have to pay rent, but it'll be incredibly cheaper than buying a pc and hosting yourself. I don't know. Or maybe it's just a temporary shortage and we are just overreacting.
- kaiwenwang 6mo agoReally strikes me as hyperbole, because the article overestimate the solidity (as opposed to leakiness) of the real world and companies and their willingness to create such a feudal society. The author with his custom designed website would be a much better spot to implement such a rent hardware scheme compared to the likes of HP.
- chka 6mo agoThis is already happening. Most VPS providers have raised prices 15-20% (last month I got emails from Hetzner & OVH even some tiny budget ones). The $5/month VPS that every self-hoster relies on is becoming very quuickly the $7-8/month VPS and that's before the memory shortage really hits.
- pugchat 6mo ago[dead]
- danw1979 6mo agoI think you could choose to believe that “the industry’s priorities have fundamentally changed” or you could choose to believe in the economics of supply and demand.
- bombcar 6mo agoI understand why HN shows the raw domain, but I feel it'd be more ... appropriate if they also showed the "correct" domain - マリウス
- rldjbpin 6mo agowhile one should make the most of our electronics, the theory behind the article's headline is fuelled by fear-mongering most of us are jaded by. personally been stretching the most life out of my machines. particularly because there has been some supply-demand "issue" happening ever since i could afford to. my previous computer was a laptop without any tensor cores. it was bought right on the onset of lockdown-related supply chain issues. i was ok to stretch it beyond the better half of a decade before it died on me. now had to build a computer out of necessity while paying 5x for ram. it took a lot to suppress the internal rationalisation of waiting it out for overall costs to improve. but in this decade, they almost never have!! stepping back, we forget to appreciate how the cost of computing against cost of living have been so good to us for almost two decades. now thanks to opportunistic greed and real issues, it is coming back to the older times. one could still, for the price of a month's rent*, afford a decent computer which can last years.