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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#241

Post by embedding-shape »

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.

[dead]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#242

Post by organsnyder »

Carrok wrote: post #218
gregoriol wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.

I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.

Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw alerts at me

I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#243

Post by duskdozer »

lexlambda wrote: post #137
duskdozer wrote: post #14

uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ This happened because of the following filter: ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage

This is a filter added by you (or by an overzealous list maintainer), it does not happen by default or even with the provided additional filterlists.

Yeah, I remember going on https://filterlists.com/ one day all mad and just adding a ton because of how many ads and manipulative patterns I was dealing with

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#244

Post by TheRoque »

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 are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is, we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#245

Post by commandlinefan »

When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment.

I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#246

Post by jameshart »

rswail wrote: post #88

A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars. There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time. The AI boom/"…

The effects of the AI hyper scaling boom on the commodity hardware and energy markets are very much not like the dot com boom.

Outside of the obvious economic effect of the dot com boom - the creation of near infinitely scalable high margin online businesses - there was a secondary effect on consumer electronics, with a massive growth in demand for networked devices; there was then much more of a balance between the hardware growth in the network infrastructure and data center worlds as well as in desktop and mobile.

The AI boom’s hardware impact is much more skewed, as this article details.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#247

Post by bitwize »

archargelod wrote: post #78
jleyank wrote: post #26

Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.

My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM. It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine. For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100. Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess.…

Wait, you type the code in directly? That's like a baby's toy!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

layer8 wrote: post #173
TeMPOraL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.

I’m running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without issues. While it’s admittedly near the end of its life (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose it for Linux), I’m expecting the next one to also last a decade or longer.

So is my wife, her laptop is still decent today, but doesn't support Win 11. I'm not worried about Microsoft as much as certain other competitors killing it - similarly to how she was forced to update to Windows 10 in the first place because, one day, out of the sudden, her web browser decided to refuse running on Windows 7.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#249

Post by margalabargala »

TheRoque wrote: post #244
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 are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopoliti…

Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
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