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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

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Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#161

Post by xpe »

soulofmischief wrote: post #140
xpe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with a control theory background are welcome in economics; the field is more diverse than some would recognize. Certain professions and subfields are more open than others. There are plenty of economists who care about things like resilience and dampening shocks. I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regu…

As an engineer with a passing control theory background and a breadth of general knowledge, I'd love to explore this space more and find a way to apply my knowledge and share the results. Are there any particular problems you think well-suited to this treatment?

If you have a policy area you like you might start there. From my lens, here are some interesting ways to look at political economy from a broader point of view: economic disruption from AI (could be from energy prices, labor substitution, and lots more), climate modeling and its impacts on economies, conservation and ecosystem stability, and economic growth under different levels of inequality. I would add this to the mix even though it isn't a typical economic area: geopolitical destabilization from autonomous weapons, both physical and cyber.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#162

Post by bit1993 »

xpe wrote: post #116
mapt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.

> Investors love a monopoly... Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Underlying such a single point-of-failure is an implied but immense hope and thus pressure for stability. I wonder what the prediction markets saying about current levels of geopolitical stability in Taiwan?

> Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way.

Interesting. Capitalism is often touted to be more decentralized than socialism, but this is an example of how it can centralize.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#163

Post by pixl97 »

Xunjin wrote: post #88
mcny wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to imagine the reference in the movie margin call is that of a merry go round or a game of Musical chair. Like we are all on a ride, none of us are the operator, and all we can do is guess when the music will stop (and the ride ends). The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuf…

TBF, all financial market is speculation these days, what only change is the figure/percentage of how much a share is actually the value it's priced. > The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuff will be useful. The reasons for the high valuation is, in my guess, that there is more v…

And if you've been watching Deepmind AI has been making advances in medical sciences at a pretty damned fast rate. So not fulfilled is a pretty weak statement. The pipeline in medical is very long.

And that's not even talking about the head spinning rate robotics is advancing. The hardware we use for LLMs is also being used in robot simulation for hardware training that gives results in hours that took weeks or months in the past.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#164

Post by selectodude »

doom2 wrote: post #141
cmiles8 wrote: post #17

This is all basically a textbook example of irrational market decisions. There’s clearly a bubble and not enough money coming in to pay for the AI bonanza. It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the…

> in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.

I feel like the most recent time you could reasonably get an nvidia *80 GPU at the store for a normal amount of money was almost a decade ago.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#165

Post by pixl97 »

Gud wrote: post #77
high_na_euv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Why gamers must be the most important group?

I’d rather prefer that the average Joe has a good entertainment system than our corporate overlords has a good surveillance system.

The growth curve of technology has always pointed at the world becoming tiny and non-private.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#166

Post by 0-_-0 »

anthk wrote: post #79
aurareturn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. No, I think it is real demand. AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand. The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages. AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions…

AI's output is not reproducible. It's a disaster.

So it's like humans then

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#168

Post by pixl97 »

xpe wrote: post #101
glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

> Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. This sounds like economic dogma based on pointing at some future equilibrium. I like the saying that goes something like "life is what is happens when you are waiting for the future". In the same way, it seems to me that equilibrium is increasingly less common for many of us. Markets are dynamic sy…

Yes, this is why the prices of housing has dropped dramatically. The market stepped up and filled the demand needed and now everyone can afford a place to live

.....

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#169

Post by sincerely »

markus_zhang wrote: post #69

Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long. What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer…

Eh, if this demand is really sustainable they will eventually start producing in adequate volume

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#170

Post by digiown »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
digiown wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the HDDs are being used for any intensive loads. They have too much latency for most of that. It's probably just archival storage for their scraped content and generated slop.

For "cold" archival storage you would want to use tape, which is far cheaper per TB at scale.

I don't mean that type of archive, but rather "just in case" data like "last month's scrape of this website" after we scraped it 5 more times this month or higher resolution versions of book scans. You might want to still be able to dump it out quickly if you need it. Money is no object for these companies and the cost of HDDs is more than low enough for the flexibility they provide.
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