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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#261

Post by sigbottle »

semantic decentralization (not just AWS owning thousands of data centers and having their own distributed interoperability problems), standards, and regulations.

These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part of the stack.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#262

Post by TheRoque »

margalabargala wrote: post #249
TheRoque wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas.

And even if we figured out how to electrify everything (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.), nuclear fuel (uranium)...

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#263

Post by sfn42 »

barrkel wrote: post #227
sfn42 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever. I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same jo…

Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription. It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway. The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the…

I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's even better is to not buy a new car, let some other sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it a few years after that for not much less than you paid for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going for more than I paid.

I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really good deal, but it's really not much different than buying new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it. A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see any reason to buy brand new.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#264

Post by sys_64738 »

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.

Plex or Jellyfin client access.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#265

Post by lo_zamoyski »

margalabargala wrote: post #249
TheRoque wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Malthusians has been sounding the alarm for longer than Protestant revivalists have been claiming the end of world is next month at lunchtime. If there is a predication market for such things, betting on any Malthusian is patently foolish.

(Of course, I don't disagree with the notion that consumerism produces an extraordinary amount of worthless trash, but that's a different matter. The main problem with consumerism is consumerism itself as a spiritual disease; the material devastation is a consequence of that.)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#266

Post by G_o_D »

Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity.

In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats almost 1.5 month salary in private sector

Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just dream for use never to fulfill

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#267

Post by FeepingCreature »

lpcvoid wrote: post #110
skydhash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.

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.

fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.

("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#268

Post by wat10000 »

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.

I’d love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#269

Post by sfn42 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #184
sfn42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an applicat…

I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text. Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your b…

Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason - the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps using anything else. People complain about react too, react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as hell. It's just crappy devs.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#270

Post by sfn42 »

interf4ce wrote: post #202
sfn42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an applicat…

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resource…

I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap.

In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.

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