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Hold on to Your Hardware

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301–310 of 559 posts

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#301
It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser.

Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app.

The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.

Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#302

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…

The framing here is wrong, I think. My iPad has a lot of software on it that I use for music production, it all runs locally. Yes I had to install it through Apple's app store but I could disconnect it from the Internet and expect it to, at this point, work as long as the software on almost any piece of hardware it replaces. Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with applications that primarily ex…

If you have to pass the bouncers vibe check to get in, and your dancers have to pay him a 30% tax to work there, do you own the strip club or does the bouncer?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#303
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'll have a demand crunch This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud. I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GP…

> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.

I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not sure where Roblox fits into what I said.

The problem I describe is companies pushing towards the "rent" model vs. "buy to own". Nvidia was just an example by virtue of their size. Microsoft could be another, they're also eying the game streaming market. Once enough buyers become renters, the buying market shrinks and becomes untenable for the rest, pushing more people to rent.

GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming. Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's before counting electricity". All upsides, right?

In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the datacenter market so would rather focus the available production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back so future generations of GPUs would get more and more expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming > shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step 1.

Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye candy. But what about all the other games that require beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps doing that.

The price hikes come only after there's no real alternative to renting. Look at the video streaming industry.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#304

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…

Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is easily possible.

There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are not based in reality.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#305
post #260
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…

> "I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop" This absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to yourself?

I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, and tablets is way under 20k.

I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than buying a top system once.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#306

It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser. Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app. The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seein…

Yeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as everything is done via browser.

Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now.

On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60% of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM.

I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that resource usage is.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point? Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high…

They're ultimately laptops, you won't be able to squeeze out the same amount of performance from a laptop compared to a desktop, regardless of the hardware. If you haven't tried out a desktop CPU in a while, I highly recommend you giving it a try if you're used to only using laptops, even when in the same class the difference is obvious.

I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.

For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they’re not that different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU.

If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven’t used a recent MacBook Pro.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#309
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?

We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#310
In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.
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