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

mashable.com

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

#271

Post by Sharlin »

xantronix wrote: post #256
Sharlin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.

Is this an inevitable future? The amount of people ready to cede their computational resources, thinking, digital sovereignty, to centralised platforms, all in the name of progress, is truly shocking to me, especially in the current political moment. The main reason I do not prioritise AI usage in my own life is to retain my skills and mental acuity. All of the forms of computing and opportunities that I value do not…

No, clearly not. First, future is never inevitable, and second, I was being ironic. Though the fact is that thin vs rich clients is one of the major fashion cycles in the IT industry.

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

#272

Post by throwworhtthrow »

runjake wrote: post #233
throwworhtthrow wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is actually true, I think you can find a more reliable source than Elon Musk. I'm not saying you should never listen to a word he says. His actions shape the world after all, so it's important to understand how his words precede his behavior. But I'm baffled why anyone would take Elon at his word, or even slightly hedge their perception of reality based on Elon's claims of fact.

I was leaving an HN comment, not writing an essay. I'm not fond of Elon's personality, but I listened to the context of the conversation and believe him. Did you listen to the conversation? There was a great amount of detail. Which parts of the conversation seemed unbelievable to you? Regardless, it's also been reported in the press over the past quarter, and TSMC's previously largest customer, Apple, notably has had…

> Did you listen to the conversation?

No, and I'm sorry for derailing your point. Thank you for the additional links. I skimmed them all but didn't see anyone corroborate the claim that TSMC is limited by its upstream component suppliers, rather than its own factory underinvestment in prior years. Am I misunderstanding, and those two things are the same?

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

#273

Post by lelanthran »

aurareturn wrote: post #73
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…

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 will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand.

Real demand, sure, I agree, but maybe not retail or business demand; at the moment the "demand" is entirely VC demand.

It's a really distorted market which is to be expected in any bubble/hype phase. The current retail/business demand doesn't appear to exist at the price point these investments require - even at the low low cost of "free, gratis and for nothing", not enough consumers and businesses are signing up.

The ones really going all-in on AI are the slop-producers. I dunno if slop is enough to pay back the investment into AI - I mean, even the slop producers are going to realise that paying $200/m to produce something in 1/10th of the time is a race to the bottom because someone else on the same plan is going to do the same, but cheaper.

> The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages.

I think the word "progress" is inaccurate there - the physical world supply product at the demand maintained by VC's money.

It's not "cannot keep up with progress", it's "cannot keep up with demand from VCs".

> The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data.

That'll be a first :-) Physical commodities have never been moats on their own before.

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

#274

Post by xantronix »

Sharlin wrote: post #271
xantronix wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an inevitable future? The amount of people ready to cede their computational resources, thinking, digital sovereignty, to centralised platforms, all in the name of progress, is truly shocking to me, especially in the current political moment. The main reason I do not prioritise AI usage in my own life is to retain my skills and mental acuity. All of the forms of computing and opportunities that I value do not…

No, clearly not. First, future is never inevitable, and second, I was being ironic. Though the fact is that thin vs rich clients is one of the major fashion cycles in the IT industry.

My apologies. It's so hard to tease apart irony from genuine mouth frothing on HN these days.

C'mon, bubble, burst...

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

#275

Post by lelanthran »

aurareturn wrote: post #134
geerlingguy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can be useful today, while also being insanely overvalued, and a bubble.

There will be a bubble. It's inevitable. The most important question is are we in 1994 or 2000 of the bubble for investors and suppliers like Samsung, WD, SK Hynix, TSMC. What about 10 years from now? 15 years? Will AI provide more value in 2040 than in 2026? The internet ultimately provided far more value than even peak dotcom bubble thought.

> The internet ultimately provided far more value than even peak dotcom bubble thought.

Yeah, but not to the early investors. The early investors lost their shirts. The internet provided a lot of value after the bubble popped and everyone lost money.

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

#276

Post by Sharlin »

xantronix wrote: post #274
Sharlin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, clearly not. First, future is never inevitable, and second, I was being ironic. Though the fact is that thin vs rich clients is one of the major fashion cycles in the IT industry.

My apologies. It's so hard to tease apart irony from genuine mouth frothing on HN these days. C'mon, bubble, burst...

No worries! I definitely sympathise. Irony is truly dead these days.

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

#277

Post by bigstrat2003 »

pixl97 wrote: post #156
anthk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we want reproducible output we already have conventional software. Stop using a hammer on screws.

We do in fact want reproducible output. Which means LLMs are not fit for actual work.

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

#278

Post by ASalazarMX »

tasuki wrote: post #250
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…

> Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI. Cheap hard drives and ram, yay! Perhaps GPUs too!

You wish. More likely all that data center capacity will be used to sell something as nefarious, like VDI for the masses. You won't need RAM, disk and GPUs when you can rent those from OpenVDI.

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

#279

Post by mapt »

pixl97 wrote: post #216
bit1993 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Socialism is always talked out how it works out in practice, capitalism is talked about how it works out in theory

We don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban administrations.

A partisan Republican will reliably interrupt you to shout nonsense, as if admitting a single positive outcome is trying to deceive them. As if a cost-benefit analysis can just be cut in half. As if these were not just authoritarian/totalitarian, but completely lacking domestic support.

This outcome was achieved with a great deal of money and propaganda over more than a century.

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