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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#151

Post by motbus3 »

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…

I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and commodities is a power move.

We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry in china, oil in middle east, etc...

This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with money and/or power enough to tilt the scale

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#152

Post by WillAdams »

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.

3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#153

Post by nhecker »

lpcvoid wrote: post #118
echelon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In a similar vein: seek efficiency.

I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.)

Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#154

Post by lpcvoid »

skydhash wrote: post #128
lpcvoid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of music in a way that Spotify allows it.

For the rest: I agree with you.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#155

Post by robinsonb5 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
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?

We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.

This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#156

Post by rolandhvar »

So what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market for the enthusiasts?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#157

Post by WillAdams »

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.

Just look at ITAR and the various attempts at legislating 3D printing and CNC machining of firearms parts to see one justification point of that.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#158

Post by 3form »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #115
cheschire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, as long as we're in the dreamland, most of these security upgrades do not actually require a hardware upgrade.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#159

Post by layer8 »

guardian5x wrote: post #83
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?

It would be nice for browser tabs and apps to reload less often.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#160

Post by 1970-01-01 »

einr wrote: post #129
1970-01-01 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700 Tiny with much better performance in both power and power consumption.
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