331–340 of 427 posts
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> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.
If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely didn't rely on Pentium processors. Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.
Livelihood
Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface. In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for…
Yo, your comment makes it seem like AI deserves this memory and chrome does not...
AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good software.
Instead, we the users are forced to pay for more and more memory and CPU and disk because some rich asshole doesn't want to spend the money on developing good software. The costs are pushed to us. And since resources are now unimaginably expensive, it's still our problem and we still have to foot the bill a million times over.
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> You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars. Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!? Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159% change. Awesome! Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a slightly more comfortable life. Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state tuation in 2025: $11,6…
You're identifying the right problem (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down. The easy way to realize this is to notice that the median wage has increased by proportionally less than the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle can't afford school or housing either. And what…
On the housing side, the root problem is obvious:
Real estate cannot be both affordable and considered an investment. If it's affordable, that means the price is staying flat relative to inflation, which makes it a poor investment. If it's a good investment, that means the value is rising faster than inflation, which means unaffordability is inevitable.
The solution to the housing crisis is simple: Build more. But NIMBYs and complex owners who see their house/complex as an investment will fight tooth-and-nail against any additional supply since it could reduce their value.
I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…
Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface. In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for…
You have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months. You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React and React Native. And none of your customers will complain because the people with money to spend are rocking 12GB…
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I have friends with kids, have siblings with kids, and indeed did grow up in the US. Ate cereal growing up with maybe some eggs on the weekend. My siblings feed their kids exactly what I described. My friends feed their kids the same. I have no idea how that is out of touch, but I grew up lower-middle class and that's my lived experience.
I grew up similarly but regularly had eggs for breakfast, at least some of the time. Usually on toast. When eggs are cheap, that is competitive with cereal or pop tarts. I would have hoped that better access to nutrition information would have led to parents making better choices. Absolutely insane that they’re still choosing desserts for breakfast every day instead of high quality Whole Foods like eggs.
I think I see why you think eggs went up to $8 a dozen now
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I have friends with kids, have siblings with kids, and indeed did grow up in the US. Ate cereal growing up with maybe some eggs on the weekend. My siblings feed their kids exactly what I described. My friends feed their kids the same. I have no idea how that is out of touch, but I grew up lower-middle class and that's my lived experience.
It's more how you said it than what you said.
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Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working pretty well.
What are the limitations of machines like these?
Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface. In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for…
Yo, your comment makes it seem like AI deserves this memory and chrome does not...
Seriously though... I think most uses of LLMs are pretty stupid, but it seems like we're in the bubble and the only way people can continue to make money is by doubling down on AI spending. Or at least that's the only way they think they can make money.
So... sorry for leaving you with that impression. Maybe the only way to get to the post AI hype world is to give AI companies everything they want so they fail faster.
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" ( see https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-... )
Does anyone deserve RAM though?
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Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd. Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.
I have some Dell server with dual Xeons and 192GB RAM. It is NUMA but that’s fine for Docker workloads where you can just associate them with a CPU. The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.