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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#211

Post by bparsons »

raincole wrote: post #65
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…

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#212

Post by gregoriol »

saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.

So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#213

Post by stronglikedan »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #207

This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related: I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems th…

> I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future

Me too, but without all the slavery this time please. It'll never work if some actors are willing to abuse their workforces to keep prices low as they do.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#214

Post by barrkel »

porkeynon wrote: post #210
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…

$20k? People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there’s this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore. But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just like the looksmaxxer.

Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless, it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#215

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node.

How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point?

Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#216

Post by foobarian »

tormeh wrote: post #79
zozbot234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.

I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#217

Post by TeMPOraL »

bluGill wrote: post #177
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.

I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)

I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.

--

[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#218

Post by Carrok »

gregoriol wrote: post #212
saadn92 wrote: post #201

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers. Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it j…

You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long…

I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#220

Post by chmod775 »

Aurornis wrote: post #215
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…

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point? Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high…

They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do.

A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.

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