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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly. It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operat…

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itc…

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long.

I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#292
God of war 2 ran on 32MB of ram. There is enough ram in the devices for any reasonable workload. Just the developers on all levels of the stack weren't bothered to give rat's ass for optimization.

The current crunch and constrain in compute is great time to show once again some ingenuity. The lowest level of smartphones from couple of years ago have more computing power than XBOX 360. That should be enough to run Whatsapp smoothly.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#293
post #239

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly. It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operat…

> It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.

You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#294

We always knew the limits to Moore‘s Law are first and foremost economic. Given an industry used over decades to predictable lowering of price per compute function and thus swallowed any advance for new user functions and overhead when the limits are reached there is going to be a squeeze. AI scaled up at the time the production capacity became more inelastic. Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also sof…

AI data centers are eating like 80% of memory.

Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand.

I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#297
"and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive."

As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itc…

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. He was also using very sketchy Python imports when…

> my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#299

This is great news, maybe people are going to start caring about their electronic gadgets more and not treat them as disposable? Maybe longevity is going to become a criteria again?

The blokes in Agbogbloshie will hopefully make more money from recycled e-waste.

It has been a disturbing trend on TikTok to see all the livestreamers in the united states showing how to recover gold and metals from e-waste... it used to be an exceptionally dirty and low margin business only done by the world's poorest. Now it has become valuable enough, and the economic situation in the usa has deteriorated enough, that americans are doing it in their homes and backyards.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#300

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

William Gibson coined the term "The Jackpot" to describe an apocalypse made up of many different disasters all happening near in time, overwhelming civilization. Pandemic, war, mismanagement, corruption, resource scarcity, climate breakdown, ...
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