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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#111

Post by daveguy »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #97
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.

It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa. I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!

Sorry to burst your bubble:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than price). But close enough that when you said it, I thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the supply will bottleneck before the demand does.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#112

Post by 1970-01-01 »

upofadown wrote: post #93

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10. The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really do…

Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#113

Post by numpad0 »

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.

It would make it hard to spot impostor domains like "news.усомbiнаtor[.]сом" if it was. There's enough inertia for FQDNs to be strictly ASCII and any UTF-8(outside ASCII) in domain names to be felt unnatural for an URL, so most systems default to the raw "Punycode" xn-- scheme for all IDNs.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#114

Post by molszanski »

raincole wrote: post #65
barrkel wrote: post #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…

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever.

This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#115

Post by TeMPOraL »

cheschire wrote: post #103
guardian5x wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.

If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#116

Post by adrianN »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
adrianN wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#117

Post by adrianN »

myself248 wrote: post #101
Arn_Thor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off. Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decad…

You just have to put your hard drive in a pressure vessel filled with helium.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#118

Post by lpcvoid »

echelon wrote: post #54
barrkel wrote: post #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…

Local is a dead end. Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete. When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to…

> Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute.

Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill a bit?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#119

Post by drecked »

molszanski wrote: post #114
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.

Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.

Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#120

Post by darkwater »

> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable.

I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient.

The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?

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