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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#271

Post by dgb23 »

sfn42 wrote: post #170
vladvasiliu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

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 have no issues with browsers specifically having to use a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck software, basically it's own operating system. Same for video games or programs that do heavy data processing.

The issue is with applications that have no business being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app is a program that runs in the background most of the time and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's, where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#272

Post by tonyedgecombe »

zozbot234 wrote: post #209
nhecker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vein: seek efficiency. I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your lo…

But commodity hardware that's right-sized for your own private needs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than datacenter hardware that's intended to serve millions of users simultaneously while consuming gigawatts in power. You're mostly paying for that hardware when you buy LLM tokens, not just for power efficiency. And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would r…

I doubt it because you aren't going to get the utilisation that a commercial setup would. No point wasting tons of money on hardware that is sat idle most of the time.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#273

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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.

Seems like the perfect target for ESG.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#274

Post by globalnode »

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.

Hilarious how comments like this consistently get downvoted, theres a lot of special interest lurkers on this forum

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#275

Post by intrikate »

einr wrote: post #129
1970-01-01 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.

65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh. 0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year

Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity, although they're both measures of energy.

TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep the unit within operational temperatures. It does not directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in operation.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#276

Post by dmitrygr »

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…

> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute

Are you kidding? Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#277

Post by SirMaster »

shevy-java wrote: post #77
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. I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article, but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously. Just compare them. That is fact. It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can afford something because the prices are now much higher than before. Add to this th…

The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#278

Post by utopiah »

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…

> with Tailscale for private access

FWIW might want to check https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy to remove yet another managed elsewhere piece of your setup.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#279

Post by darkwater »

duskdozer wrote: post #238
darkwater wrote: post #120

> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable. I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal comp…

Do you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10 years, largely due to the web.

Yes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the software support worked like in the x86 world.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#280

Post by kogasa240p »

TheRoque wrote: post #262
margalabargala wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Keep your eye on butanol https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol....
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