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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#121

Post by swiftcoder »

torben-friis wrote: post #43
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…

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work.

The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#122

Post by Forgeties79 »

adrianN wrote: post #117
myself248 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s helium all the way down

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#123

Post by vladde »

when you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the page changes to something weird, but really legit looking.

a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#124

Post by bitmasher9 »

drecked wrote: post #119
molszanski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fe…

If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#125

Post by Forgeties79 »

tmtvl wrote: post #57

I grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether or not it will actually las…

Built my PC last April and also did 32gb. Almost did 64 since ram was so cheap at the time too, but hey live and learn I suppose ha

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#126

Post by cmiles74 »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.

Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#127

Post by gessha »

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…

Man, going to personal computing was a mistake, we should’ve stayed jacked to the mainframes /s

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#128

Post by skydhash »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.

Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#129

Post by einr »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #112
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.

65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh.

0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#130

Post by pissinwind »

Everything about tech and economy slowing is 1000% man made.

The Trump/anti-America phase has gone on way longer than I thought but it won’t last forever.

Even if we have to wait for this old world cabal to die and fade away, time is still on our side.

Boomers are stupid for using time as a weapon.

I’m chillin. Waiting for people to die while growing my businesses.

Travel to a functional place off the beaten path to see nobody can really stop forward progress. Even in these places where time has stopped.

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