Hold on to Your Hardware

Micron 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?

I 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.

Pidän kaksin käsin kiinni muistitikuista niinku.

Cha cha cha ...

semantic 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.

I knew the time for my cable box would come!

It'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.

What 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.

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."

I've never seen a non-latin alphabet URL before, huh.

I feel like we will get out of the hardware constraints eventually.

This site finally got me to disable javascript through ublock. 10/10!

Depressing...

Capitalism 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.

I 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

The overlay and page title changing worked really well, ffs, I was like "Why is my machine displaying a page with zuckerberg nudes" haha.

It'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.

I 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.

Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.

This is just brainrot garbage. The idiotic stuff you see YouTubers saying. Why is this at the top of HN? Bots, I assume?

AI 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.

Everything 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.

Fear mongering hysteria.

I'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.

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Owning 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.

It 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.