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Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
351–360 of 662 posts
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...
correct, both of those things are examples of free markets
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why tax something that the market will figure out? This is normal and things will sort themself out.
We see that market is very irrational now and it can stay irrational for long enough to destroy everything we know in tech. By the time market figures things out, you may no longer have services, and hardware that you use daily. When such amounts of stupid money are pumped into a single industry, even if all AI companies went out of business tomorrow, it's going to take years for things to go back to normal. FWIW, I'…
> ...and it can stay irrational for long enough to destroy everything we know in tech.
Nah. For decades software engineers have been more expensive than the cost of buying the extra hardware needed for vastly inefficient software. There are orders of magnitude of inefficiency there. So there's a ton of slack in the world's software that can be taken up by software engineers while hardware is scarce, pushing back the date where there will really be a problem probably by decades more.
Of course software engineers will see a problem though, because they'll have to learn to to write efficient software again.
ie. "Great, but now make it work with less RAM" will be a thing again, instead of "It needs more RAM so order some as it's cheaper than your time to fix the code".
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...
Which neighborhoods are now entirely owned by hedge funds?
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
Saying this is just the market...is like saying housing is a free market after hedge funds buy your entire neighborhood...
People love to say that but they own a very small percentage of housing in reality. What’s driving housing costs is also supply and demand. Especially supply, since we’re not allowed to build any houses in most places people want to live.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems we will run out of hardware by March? What happens when an unstoppable force (building everything in Electron because hardware is cheap) meets an immovable object (oh no hardware is expensive now)?
We go back to the demoscene days, being creative with what we have instead of shipping Electron junk.
Inshallah
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#357Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
> It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market. When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere. > That's not normal market dynamics. This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in…
> When demand goes up, the price goes up for everyone. It’s not a “tax” on the rest of us in any sense. There’s just a lot of demand everywhere.
> This is actually a textbook example of markets functioning in response to a demand shock where supply cannot be increased rapidly.
You act like it's a competitive market. It's not the case. It's an oligopoly with an extremely inelastic supply side.
The market is already completely broken and ineffective due to concentration and export controls. The actual response to a major demand shock should be investments to increase capacities but it's currently extremely limited because suppliers want to protect their margins and fear the market contracting again.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most markets don't have three purchasers trying to corner the entire supply of one product.
Economic history is full of examples of demand shocks. This is not some unique situation that has never occurred before. This is actually a clean commodity price spike because it’s specifically not for market manipulation or financial engineering. It’s because demand for this product really did explode overnight.
It is manipulation when wafers are purchased in order to not process further a la OpenAI.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markets only "figure things out" in a petri dish economy where: 1) There are no barriers to entry for competitors (e.g. protectionist tariffs, equal access to capital for everyone) 2) There are perfect substitutes available, so transitioning to a competitor is seamless and free (e.g. no requirement to store data in Country X, no vendor lock-in, no security compliance) 3) The industry is not a "natural monopoly" when…
Markets are never perfect but over the course of history they are a pretty good mechanism to solve these type of problems. Not sure why we think taxing hyperscalers differently is the answer. Government usually does worse than the market when it comes to sorting it out. My argument is not that market is perfect but that the alternatives are probably far worse, like a new tax on a specific group of companies.
Market only exists due to government.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#360Running a small project on Hetzner from Germany. Got the email this morning. Honestly, even after the increase their dedicated boxes are still absurdly cheap compared to what you'd pay at AWS or GCP for equivalent specs. The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home ser…
"The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax."
We might also have our aquifers depleted and our electricity prices skyrocket. But at least we see really great benefits, such as being able to script some side-project while unemployed due to AI.