241–250 of 536 posts
Maybe this is the free market working as intended -- did you know that RAM is actually a luxury item, like a Rolls Royce, and most plebes should just make do with 4gb machines, because that is the optimum solution!
It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.
First crypto now AI. I just want to play video games so I don’t have to interact with people
Thankfully we're at a stage where a 4 year old second-hand iPhone is perfectly usable, as are any M-series Macs or most Linux laptops. Sucks for anyone needing something particularly beefy for work; but I feel that a lot of purchases can be delayed for at least a year or two while this plays out.
100%, there is a lost time factor which sucks though if someone wants beefy, some might be forced to cough up some money but honestly yea although I agree with your statement, the ram increases really impact the self hosting/homelabbing genres and there was a recent post relevant to this discussion on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416618: Self hosting is being enshittified.
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Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't eve…
I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implicatio…
Also, when treated right, computers almost never break.
There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).
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Without regulation, money begets money and monopolies will form. If the American voter base doesn't pull its shit together and revive democracy, we're going to have a bad century. Yesterday I met a man who doesn't vote and I wanted to go ape-shit on him. "My vote doesn't matter". Vote for mayor. Vote for city council. Vote for our House members. Vote for State Senate. Vote for our two Senators. "Voting doesn't matter…
Just so we're clear the current voter base says this is exactly how it should be.
All the ills of modern (American) politics stem by the blaming one side for the problems caused by both.
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Run a lightweight Linux distro on older hardware maybe?
This is it. Buy used Dell and HP hardware with 32 GB of RAM and swap the pcie ssd for 4 TB.
It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.
I understand the issue with all the devices. But what about the rest of the things that depend on these electronics, especially DRAMs? Automotive, Aircraft, Marine vessels, ATC, Shipping coordination, traffic signalling, rail signalling, industrial control systems, public utility (power, water, sewage, etc) control systems, transmission grid control systems, HVAC and environment control systems, weather monitoring ne…
Industrial microcontrollers and power electronics use older process nodes, mostly >=45nm. These customers aren’t competing for wafers from the same fabs as bleeding edge memory and TPUs. The world ran just fine on DDR3 for a long time.