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Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.

BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.

Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.

To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.

I think there is a second order effect of this: it won't be worth making games for PC. At least, large budget games.

There a lots and lots of great games that will run on computers that would be considered low power today. And I’m not even talking about older games.

I'm still hoping some future LLM is good and small enough for people to run local AI for everyday life.

Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.

Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.

It's also killing the console market. Sharp drops in all console sales after "adjusting" to ram prices.

What is more sensible: Listening to the best music on an average sound system or listening to average music on the best sound system?

There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.

intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.

gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...

At least you'll be able to get a Pi 5 for $700.

On the bright side, you’ll be able to play Skyrim-halo-Pokémon-Minecraft as much as you want.

I'm just sticking with Tetris.

If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.

Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.

Not only if the internet dies. If the country or countries managing the AI decide they don't like your country and ban you from using their (major) AI providers, in a world where most knowledge and work tanks will require access, you're screwed.

Not even talking dictatorship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason.

I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.

Also:

- local latency is lower than network latency

- latency is important for action games

Can you think of examples of this cycle? I know this is roughly what happened with mainframes, but I struggle to think of other times it went like that.

Maybe arcade games?

One consequence has been lower power requirement for local machines. This is partly why a 2015 MacBook is still perfectly serviceable for basic use in this day and age.

The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.

People long ago stopped buying computers and started using Saas on their mobile devices instead. Ask HP.

that was when RAM and GPUs were cheap. Now that is dying, too.

> And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.

Like talking to people?

Trump and AI-power security research are both doing a good job of promoting installable software!

most games which require that big PC are poorly optimised and often times they arent even fun. these companies focus on visual fidelity and give all their engineers insane machines to build the games on. that has beenn destroying PC gaming way before AI/LLMs came into the picture.

I am using AI now to make a game engine that will run and make 'nice enough' graphics on simpler machines. things like laptops with iGPU and 4gb of ram.

U can still get quite ok graphics, and make very complex and rich gameplay systems using such a machine. It just needs to be the target machine while developing so the right tradeoffs are made.

Which is not a bad thing per se: most of use could use our devices a little longer than we usually do.

I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.

I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.

It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).

> A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.

> If you're not partaking that's only on you.

There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.

Yes, but that's a lot of money if you don't already have the hardware, plus you'll still be paying for electricity costs. (No comment on relative capabilities.)

$3k being a point of entry for a pale imitation of the models being compared to is not very inspiring.

Yes but then you'd have to give closed-ecosystem-ass Apple money, which is worse than giving it to Nvidia who at least support linux properly. And you still get prompt processing speeds of a leisurely sloth.

> Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.

isn't communal living the most efficient thing resource-wise though?

No, he was not saying that was his goal! That's what everyone seems to misunderstand about this quote.

It's like a highrise developer saying "people think our buildings take up a lot of land, but actually houses are much worse from a land use perspective". Which is objectively true, and yet does not mean the developer thinks the entire world should be turned into houses, or even that they dislike houses!

I agree, and it's on purpose. I deliberately made it stink of vibe coding. It's also hosted as a ChatGPT site.

It has nothing to do with his POV or even ego. It was an objectively true fact. GPUs in data centers do get more utilization than those used locally. That's all he was saying.

$15 can be spent on other stuff too, something useful

a growing geek god

No, it does. I donated 16 GB, and my FF usage slowly went up to 24 GB

I tried to upload 16 GB to help Zuckerberg, but the GUI is suspicious.

Yes, but system requirements bloated to this extreme point long before there was any AI at all.

Well there was no evidence they were colluding until they got caught the previous two (three?) times.

> where is the proof?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[3]

re "what proof means": Im not your house boy. Go get it yourself.

proof ... the thing a narcissist demands from you, but will never acknowledge having received.

its a good lever when it works.

If there was healthy competition, yes, because it’s not as if this hasn’t been going on for years at this point.

> struggle to make it to the end of the year.

Considering the profits they've made this year, on average they still wouldn't do too bad. SK Hynix employees got almost $500k for example, I can live on that for a few years. Companies are often also legally required to compete with each other.

But they are scaling up the production, they just conveniently did it a bit late. I also fear if/when the bubble pops, they'll quickly reduce the production to ensure prices stay high. I fear Nvidia could do the same. I think it'll be hard for all of them to go back to a world where they're paid way less per component, so instead of accepting that, they can reduce the supply and keep the prices high. Only antitrust regulators could intervene to stop that.

Many people expect prices to go down after the bubble pops, but it may not happen as much as we would want to.

Remember when the dot com bubble burst and after that the Internet became a billion times more important than before? Wikipedia didn't even exist when the dot com bubble collapsed!

All that bubble popping will do is wipe out some investor's money. Everything else will stay and become more and more important.

But of course, it is more profitable to sell one item for $1000 than it is to sell ten items for $100 each. And even if a competitor shows up, you can just price dump with all the extra money you already made until that competitor goes away.

Nothing silly was said really. The remark was specifically about local inference and RAM supply issues and it’s entirely true - if all current AI users tried to switch to local models, it would make the RAM availability situation much worse. I userstand that regular Twitter folk doesn’t grasp that, but this isn’t Twitter.

It’s almost like it’s a calculated move to distract from other things.

They are both villains.

If a customer ask me to get all my butchery stock for a year, it will make thousands of client unhappy and will make one client happy, so I'll simply refuse.

This is not how business is supposed to be, the world is not supposed to be a B2B chaos.

I know how the business is done "supply demand" bla bla. That does not make it ethical one bit.

It wouldn't matter if they made enough of it to meet demand.

It really seems like the majority audience of this site (lukewarm left wing nerds, let's be honest) is trying to square a circle with the unwavering AI support (I mean the ecosystem and the people, not the technology, which is indeed great).

If you look outside the tech bro / stock bro / tech worker circles and into the mass left wing populace everyone HATES ai and ai data centers... the Altmans, the Amodeis, the Huangs, they are not the devil himself levels just yet (cough, Musk, cough), but they are climbing up there.

People's jobs being taken (and especially entry/junior jobs, you know, the ones young people, who voted massively blue, need to get started in life), data centers increasing their electric bills or polluting the air with gigawatt level gas turbines (or both), consumer electronics prices rocketing up (~400% increases YoY in RAM and SSD prices) just so the corporate capitalist class can hoard millions of gpus in warehouses.

I mean, if the democrat politicians getting into power keep their promises and step on AI buildout's neck, it could be lights out for the AI bros.

+1

It depends on how much inelastic demand there is. For example:

Let's say there are 10 companies that need 1 GB of RAM each in a life-or-death scenario. They would be willing to pay $100,000,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.

At the same time, there are 90 more companies that need 1 GB of RAM each to make certain quarterly targets. They are willing to pay $10,000 per GB to get 1 GB of RAM.

If you make 9 GB of RAM, you can sell it for $900,000,000. If you make 99 GB of RAM, you can only sell it for $990,000, because the 10 life-or-death companies only need to bid high enough to push out a quarterly-target company.

It's a bit of a contrived example, but it shows you how restricting supply can boost total revenue if there is a segment of the market that has inelastic demand. (this is why medicine pricing has to be regulated - in the medical industry, there are lots of inelastic demand scenarios that can lead to predatory pricing)

Until making more means huge capex building extra factories. Semiconductors is famously a boom and bust industry, building too much in the boom will kill your company.

Really? You never heard about how OPEC?