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Hold on to Your Hardware

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

11–20 of 559 posts

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#11
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.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#12

In 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.

Maybe we’ll finally get some good tools to make real productive work possible on phones.

Virtual desktop casting, a killer HID product, and what else do you need?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#14

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#15
I 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.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#16
post #2

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.

Chip 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.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#17

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What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#18

Articles 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.

I think some players like xAi and Google can burn money for a long time. Google made $240B profit last year

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#19
> 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?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#20
post #17

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What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains

Shrug. First time I'd seen this. If it displayed as the original text it would have been clearer.
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