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Hold on to Your Hardware
31–40 of 559 posts
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#32I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#33Articles 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.
> ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital If this does occur, unfortunately it isn’t like any of the production capacity is going to immediately shift or be repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn’t usable outside of datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual availability of components again.
yeah 3 years sounds reasonable to me, less than one asset depreciation cycle in business. Pain for you and me, but just a bump in the road for the accounts dept.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#34I 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…
It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made…
People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech.
The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs.
That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#35uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ This happened because of the following filter: ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage
What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains
Kind of an interesting history to this kind of url: https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#36I 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
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#37I 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…
> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…
Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated push. Can control of compute be far behind?
It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision.
I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#38Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.
In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television.
The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#39uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ This happened because of the following filter: ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage
What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains
That whole feature is kind of paragraph 22. No legit/popular site uses it so users don't expect national characters in domain names, so no one actually hosts sites using "xn-" domains.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#40As the old saying goes: "This too will pass."
Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product.
If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack.