alt Hacker NewsIt was obvious AI would further stratify the haves and have-nots, but I was too naive to realize the tech of the have-nots could literally just regress. Has such a thing ever happened before in tech?
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Yes, the previous fad (crypto) killed consumer GPU prices for good. I don't believe anything has compared on price-performance to a 1080 in the 10 years since.
Also the enshittification of software might count? You used to own Photoshop for life, now you're expected to pay a subscription for life. And legal onslaught, too. Encryption and consumer VPNs are on the chopping block in much of the world at the rate things are going. The end goal of governments and corporations alike is to remove the ability of consumers to own hardware they control. We are rapidly moving towards a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a "trusted device", which will be a thin client with a TPM, biometric verification, telemetry of everything you do on it, and which will require paying an ongoing subscription to use.
I don’t see that at all obvious.
Businesses are competing like crazy to make algorithms that are in high demand. AI could theoretically let people and create new things that they would never be able to otherwise.
It is entitled to thing that people wanting GPUs and new PCs for gaming and hobbies is a more valid use. And if someone values it, all they have to do is pay the market price.
Sorta, kinda. For a long time, a new PC tended to be built with new parts. New motherboard, new storage, new CPU, new graphics card. New.
During every mining crunch that made GPUs very expensive, we sometimes went backwards on parts of new builds. A used GPU from years ago was often a more-viable choice than a new model in any kind of condition.
edit to add: A lot of folks in 3D printing like to have a small computer driving the machine, especially with tinkerer-friendly hobbyist printers of yore. That often meant some manner of Raspberry Pi because it was inexpensive-enough, small, and a known quantity that was simple to deal with in an appliance-like way.
During the covid-era chip shortages, Pi hardware was expensive, hard to find, or often both. So folks started driving their printers with things like old cell phones or cheap Android TV boxes instead.