It started with GPUs, then hard drives and now RAM.
It will probably take a while, but is the general public going to be priced out of computers eventually?
PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
351–360 of 402 posts
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully Sony has long-term contracts for their components. I presume they have an idea of how many PS5s they're going to be making still.
All that but they can still jack up the price cus why not.
Because, unless this changed, consoles are loss-leaders. At least back in the ps2/gamecube/OG Xbox, the systems were sold at a loss and the money was recouped on controllers and games.
Can’t use a ps2 controller to play a ps2 game on a ps2 without the ps2 console.
If this is still true or not, I don’t know. I do know that the ps5 with an optical drive cost $100 more than the digital edition. I also know that the drive does not cost $100 and sincerely doubt the labor makes up the difference.
So maybe I talked myself out of my whole point.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#353Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Claude takes your job either. But if you believe so much in AI, investing in it is accessible to pretty much any pocket, you don't have to be rich to partake. And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less. Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a…
> you don't have to be rich to partake. You still need to be rich to partake. Most business ventures will still require capital even in the age of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless. > And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone,…
> You still need to be rich to partake.
Again, you can invest, today, in AI stocks and ETFs, with just $100 and a Robinhood account. No need to be rich.
> Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless.
If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand for it.
> Countries with natural resources often have poor citizens because those citizens are not needed to extract that wealth.
Countries with or without resources often have poor citizens simply because being poor is the natural state of mankind. The only system that, historically, allowed the greatest number of people to exit poverty is capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe we got to witness an astonishing change of fortunes when we switched from communism to capitalism. The country and its resources didn't change, just the system and, correspondingly, the wealth of the population.
> it was their best strategy to become even richer. But that's no longer the case when you can be replaced by super-intelligence.
How can they become richer when most people are dirt broke (because they were replaced by AIs) and thus can't buy their products and services? Look at how even Elon's fortunes shrink when his company misses a sales forecast. He is only as rich as the number of customers he can find for his cars.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Claude takes your job either. But if you believe so much in AI, investing in it is accessible to pretty much any pocket, you don't have to be rich to partake. And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less. Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a…
Literally none of what you just said is true. All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich. If you want to look at what historically has happened when the rich have had a sudden rapid increase in intelligence and labor, we have examples. After the end of the Punic wars, the influx of slave labor and diminution…
> All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich.
Yet those things did not happen in communist countries (or happened way less in socialist ones), during the same time period, even though the market was there too. That is why EU's socialist countries consume high tech products and services from the USA and not the other way around.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is absolutely no guarantee that Claude takes your job either. But if you believe so much in AI, investing in it is accessible to pretty much any pocket, you don't have to be rich to partake. And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less. Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a…
I feel like you're fighting the fallacy of "the rich" being collectively blamed for every problem, by giving them credit for everything instead. We know that none of the goods you listed would be available to the masses unless there was profit to be gained from them. That's the point. I have a hard time believing a large group being motivated and mutually benefiting towards progression of x thing would result in wors…
> We just have never had an economic system that could offer that
Please propose it yourself.
> you assume the greedy motivations of a few is the only path towards progress
No. I assume the greedy motivations of the many is the best path towards progress. Any other attempts to replace this failed miserably. Ignoring human nature in ideologies never works.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them. Why are you saying that? Anybody working for a living (but saving money) can invest in AI stocks or ETFs and partake in that potential abundance. Robinhood accounts are free for all.
> Anybody working for a living > (but saving money) These two are already difficult or impossible for many people. Especially a big chunk of USAmericans have been living paycheck to paycheck for a long time now, often taking multiple jobs just to make ends meet. And then to gamble it on a speculative market, whose value does not correlate with its performance (see e.g. Tesla, compare its sales / market share with its…
> a big chunk of USAmericans have been living paycheck to paycheck
That doesn't mean they are poor, just poor with their money. Saving is a skill that needs to be learned.
> That's bad advice.
No. Not investing, when the S&P500 index had a 6% inflation-adjusted annual historical return over the last 100 years - is bad advice. Not hedging the arrival of an AGI that you think can replace you - is bad advice.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't say communism was the only other option; this seems like a bad faith reply. Capitalism increasingly fails to provide well-being to the majority of the global population. It's obvious we need to come up with something else, even if it's not clear yet what shape that will take. If we can't find an alternative that works, we can also just wind down humanity, and not much of value to the universe will be lost…
But there's solutions proposed all the time; tax the rich, tax the corporations, and use that money for socialist policies, like the ones being dismantled by the US right now. Regulate the biggest expenses like health care, housing and energy, restrict how much datacenters can use as their consumption drives up the prices, etc. You don't need to go full communist to make things better.
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Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases , but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near imposs…
There are some use cases that simply require a lot of memory because they do, but I'm talking in general. Software that doesn't have a good excuse, used to run in 64MB how it now runs in 64GB. Besides, you just said you only needed 512MB, which is still nothing these days.
> Besides, you just said you only needed 512MB, which is still nothing these days.
I didn't say I "only needed 512MB", only that things were a lot better once we got a 512MB machine. Things continued to get massively better as I upgraded to a 1GB machine, an 8GB machine, etc.
> I'm talking in general
Isn't doing some light picture editing/organizing, playing back multimedia, etc. pretty dang general computer use these days? Or what, is "general" computer usage entirely limited to 80 column text manipulation? You'd have a hard time even just keeping my displays drawn with 64MB of memory at the resolutions and bit depths and multiple desktops that are common.
I play around with retro computers (especially the early/mid 90s for that nostalgia) and I'm constantly reminded of how little memory we really had to play with back then, and these are on pretty much fully loaded home desktop machines. Have a Word document open and you're trying to play back an MP3 and have a couple browser windows open? Oof, good luck! You want to stream a video? I hope its about 10FPS at 320x240! Opening one photo from my camera today and you'll have used half the memory before its even hit the framebuffer.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you don't have to be rich to partake. You still need to be rich to partake. Most business ventures will still require capital even in the age of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless. > And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone,…
> You still need to be rich to partake. Again, you can invest, today, in AI stocks and ETFs, with just $100 and a Robinhood account. No need to be rich. > Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless. If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand…
> Again, you can invest, today, in AI stocks and ETFs, with just $100 and a Robinhood account. No need to be rich.
And then? I'll compensate the loss of thousands of dollars I don't earn anymore every month with the profits of a $100 investment in some ETF?
> If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand for it.
Property has inherent value. A house I can live in. A farm can feed me. A golf course I can play golf on. These things have value even if nobody can buy them off me (because they don't have anything I want). Supply and demand determine only the _price_ not the _value_ of goods and services.
> Countries with or without resources often have poor citizens simply because being poor is the natural state of mankind. The only system that, historically, allowed the greatest number of people to exit poverty is capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe we got to witness an astonishing change of fortunes when we switched from communism to capitalism. The country and its resources didn't change, just the system and, correspondingly, the wealth of the population.
None of this has any connection to anything I've written. I'm talking about the concept of a resource curse. Countries rich in natural resources (oil, diamonds, ...) where the population is poor as dirt because the ruling class has no incentive to share any of the profits. The same can happen with AI if we don't do anything about it.
> How can they become richer when most people are dirt broke (because they were replaced by AIs) and thus can't buy their products and services?
Other rich people can buy their products and services. They don't need you to buy their products and services because you don't bring anything to the table because all you have is labor and labor isn't worth anything (or at least not enough to survive off it). Put differently: Why do you think rich people would like to buy your labor if using AI/robots is cheaper? What reason would they have to do that?
> Look at how even Elon's fortunes shrink when his company misses a sales forecast. He is only as rich as the number of customers he can find for his cars.
You're proving my point: Elon still lives in a world where labor is worth something. Because Elon lives in a world where labor is worth something it is in his interest that there are many people capable of providing that labor to him. This means it is in his interest that the general population has access to food and water, is well eduacated, ...
If Elon were to live in a world where labor is done by AI/robots there would be little reason for him to care. Yes, he couldn't sell his cars to the average person anymore, but he wouldn't want to anyway. He could still sell his cars to Altman in exchange for an LLM that strokes his ego or whatever rich people want.
The point is: Because rich and powerful people still have to pay for labor, their incentives are at least somewhat aligned with the incentives of the average person.