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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#341

Post by seany »

guessmyname wrote: post #28
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…

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…

With the way legislation is going these days, self hosting is becoming ever more important. RAM for zfs + containers on k3s doesn't end up being that crazy if you assuming you need to do everything on your own. (at home I've got 1 1tb ram machine, 1 512gb, 3x 128gb all in a k3s cluster with some various gpus about about a half pb of storage before ~ last sept this wasn't _that_ expensive to do)

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#343

Post by wwweston »

bitwize wrote: post #247
archargelod wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM. It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine. For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100. Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess.…

Wait, you type the code in directly? That's like a baby's toy!

I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case there are readers who don’t take it that way:

* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.

* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#344

Post by kelvinjps10 »

I was about to upgrade because I'm using a Thinkpad t480, I decided to optimize my computer instead. I run i3 and a couple of native apps and chromium web apps run fast enough. And some kernel and other tweaks + gamemode in arch make gaming better.

I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#345

Post by tristor »

guessmyname wrote: post #28
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…

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…

> spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB.

As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k going?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#346

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tristor wrote: post #345
guessmyname wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a sing…

> spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k going?

It could be a different country?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#347

Post by [deleted] »

foobarian wrote: post #216
tormeh wrote: 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?

[deleted]

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#349

Post by saadn92 »

utopiah wrote: post #278
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.

thanks for sharing, will check it out!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#350

Post by aleph_minus_one »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #147
teeray wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.

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.

> 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.

If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the ventilation channels (in other words: clean the fans)) is very important for the computer to actually achieve the performance that the hardware can principally deliver.

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