> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it. It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, c…
Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…
Isn't there a full wafer ai chip mainframe for data centers now that blows anything needing ram out of the water? I don't understand the ram shortage exists companies have surpassed nvidia.
> Isn't there a full wafer ai chip mainframe for data centers now that blows anything needing ram out of the water?
Guess what's inside these chips and what equipment they're made on.
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
> And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. I don't think that ever happened. Using relatively sparse amount of memory turns into better cache management which in turn usually improves performance drastically. And in embedded stuff being good with memory management can make the difference between 'works' and 'fail'.
The need to use optimal patterns didn't go away, but the techniques certainly did. Just as a quick example, it's usually a bad idea now to use lookup tables to accelerate small math workloads. The lookup table creates memory pressure on the cache, which ends up degrading performance on modern systems. Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was *slow.*
I'm glad we're starting to use the term "slop" for human outputs as well. Especially corporate slop.
It’s not exactly new. Pig slop is generally random food scraps etc. Big brother used “slop” for their flavorless penalty food long before LLM’s. Arguably the connotation has changed slightly, but AI slop caught on because it fit so well.
Slop is also evocative of spam, another great unwanted gastronimic tech byproduct.
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
I never really bought in to the anti-Leetcode crowd’s sentiment that it’s irrelevant. It has always mattered as a competitive edge, against other job candidates if you’re an employee or the competition of you’re a company. It only looked irrelevant because opportunities were everywhere during ZIRP, but good times never last.
Most developers work at banks, insurance companies and other “enterprise” jobs. Even most developers at BigTech and who are working “at scale” are building on top of scalable infrastructure and aren’t worrying about reversing a btree on a whiteboard.
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
There exists domestic supply, it's just not scaled up:
The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
AI demand isn't going away. It will just move from the data center to the local machine. On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud. Expecting people to stick with a few dozen gb of hbm is going to be the 'no one needs more than 640kb' of the 2030s.
> On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud
Which is exactly how you know it will always be nerfed. The last thing these guys want is to take their claws out of our data.
Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..
The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level, they still have margin in there even at market prices, and they are notorious for supply chain management and locking in contracts/prices ahead of time. So doubt Apple will change anything here short term. On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 yea…
> The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level
Probably not quite, but I was pricing a Lenovo laptop last week and this is the first time the lenovo price for RAM upgrades was lower than 3rd party RAM.