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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
231–240 of 592 posts
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#232OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.
Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?
That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price. You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
The EDU Neo is $500, too bad it’s not as versatile.
What is the edu neo
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#234I know this is a pipe dream (govt’s of the world working together to benefit their citizens instead of blowing some other country’s citizens up!) but if we aren’t gonna regulate AI collectively to ensure we are developing it responsibly, the least we can do is ensure AI is given bottom billing when it comes to all the resources it’s sucking up. Energy, components, engineers, construction, etc. My preference is respon…
I think the least we can do is even less than that.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't that they are crappy web devs. It is that often the org paying for the development doesn't care. I am a web developer of over 20 years. I can create insanely optimised pages using nothing other than vanilla CSS and JS. I have been paid exactly once to do this. There is a site I built in 2023 that has a JS and CSS footprint of less than 100KB after GZip (large site). We even had the Go templates compiled when…
> therefore there is zero incentive to even bother. I hear you, and this is a real problem. But it's kind of depressing to need incentives to care about the quality of your work.
There is something very wrong now with how companies operate in general.
You get beaten down eventually. Late last year. I spent like an hour going through why a PR (and this developer's work) in general wasn't acceptable to my superior. He said to me that he was perfectly fine with someone not understanding basic language features (after 6 months using the langauge). He then merged it.
It didn't work (as I had warned) and created a situation where I had to turn off tests in some projects as it totally broke them. I've spent months fixing his crap and still haven't recovered from one bad PR. Now add two other employees that are like this and my manager does nothing about it. I bought a AI package from Jetbrains and now have it do almost all the work. I normally spend some time cleaning it up. Management have made it clear to me that they don't care about quality, they won't hold anyone accountable and won't even fire people that clearly cannot program.
I am 43 years old this year. I just can't be bothered trying to be a hero anymore.
Similarly, my father who retired last week was a joiner/carpenter and would be considered a master boat builder. When my sister was little my dad made her new bed with hearts and flowers carved in the headboard.
He described how adversarial he was too his employer before he retired. He was engaging in Malicious compliance (he is a layman and didn't know it was called that) because management was making his life miserable by employing the same sort of the stand-up meeting ceremony nonsense in carpentry.
They managed to make someone with that level of skill hate their job because of process.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant. But I see things a different way. The logic I'm actually using is not pedantic. You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second. We're using different premises, and we're reaching different conclusions because of that. My logic is fine, and your logic is fine.
> If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant. I am not categorising any situation. The vast majority of people would omit unreasonable options. I could buy a racing bike that is £5000 new, for £200 when I live in London (back in 2000s). The bike would most likely would have been stolen. So technically I can buy a £5000 bike for £200. But most people wouldn't want…
I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown. The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#237Most software uses 10x more memory than is necessary to solve the problem. In an ideal world, developers would stop building bloatware if their customers can't afford the DRAM.
I agree, OTOH there are many very cool things that we can build if we're able to assume a user can spare 2GB of RAM that we'd otherwise have to avoid entirely like 3D scenes with Three.js, in-browser video/photo editing. Should be making sure that extra memory is enabling genuinely richer functionality, not just compensating for developer laziness (fewer excuses now than ever for that).
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Finally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?
Vibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.
This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
My iPhone 11 hanging on for dear life…
I had an iPhone 11. It was a good phone. It started giving up in early 2024. I held on with poor battery life until the new iPhones that year and bought the 16 Plus. I'm glad actually because they're discontinued the Plus models, annoyingly. But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models…
I had an iPhone 12 and just upgraded to a 17 because I don't see any point waiting - prices will just increase.
> It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
Strong disagree.
AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#240Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
First time in your life? Were you born after COVID and the 24 months of dire component shortages that followed?
This one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships.
If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US, but it is going to take time, those fabs won't have capacity for the whole world, and they still heavily depend on Taiwan based engineers if something goes wrong etc.
Just like with COVID you don't know how long this shortage will last.