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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#81

Post by mmackh »

We are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If expand our definition of computers outside of screens and traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram | storage).

The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors. There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our environment.

So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#82

Post by zozbot234 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #55
guessmyname wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well. I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even…

> Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well.

No, it won't. The power drain of merely refreshing DRAM is negligible, it's no higher than the drain you'd see in S3 standby over the same time period.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#83

Post by guardian5x »

meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#84

Post by jusssi »

barrkel wrote: post #37
guessmyname wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Can control of compute be far behind?

How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#85

Post by httpsterio »

duskdozer wrote: post #20
sva_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case yes but it's meant as a punycode scam prevention where common Latin alphabet letters are swapped for similar looking alternatives.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#86

Post by flyinglizard »

It's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less.

But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in your local mall and piece them together into a working device. It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on, thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a mess.

Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot of sense any more.

Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices, because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#87

Post by forinti »

dist-epoch wrote: post #68

I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage. Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it. This is pure Capitalism. If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain. But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitali…

The market can remain irrational longer than the capacitors on my motherboard can resist bloating.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#88

Post by rswail »

A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars.

There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time.

The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom.

It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging.

The current vortice of money between OpenAI Microsoft Oracle NVidea Google etc etc is going to break.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#89

Post by TeMPOraL »

meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

That's crazy talk. What will you ask for next? Add functionality to make apps at least as good/capable as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s? And then? Apps that interoperate? Insane.

More seriously and more ironically, at the same time, we've now reached a strange time where even non-programmers can vibe-code better software than they can buy/subscribe to - not because models are that good, or programming isn't hard, but because enshittification that has this industry rotten to the core and unable to deliver useful tools anymore.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#90

Post by skydhash »

tormeh wrote: post #79
zozbot234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.

That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
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