36% as per the linked post, 38% was a typo.
Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
361–370 of 662 posts
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#362Earlier 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...
But... They're not wrong. That IS the market. Unrestricted, gloriously free market with its historically predictable outcomes - yay!
That's not where the interesting discussion is. The interesting discussion is with the notion that free unregulated markets are universally good and will naturally lead to positive outcomes because... I don't know, I'm personally not religious, but somebody here will help me :-).
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Prices are decided at the margins. Having PE and REITs at every single table, even if their actual ownership is small as a %, makes huge differences.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Adam Smith had already clarified free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
You are confusing market outcome with market structure.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#365Running 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…
> DRAM is priced based on supply and demand, like every other market.
Please don't explain it away like that - you are referring to the theoretical "ideal" market where a bunch of small companies compete with low margins to the benefit of the wider customer base. This is not what is happening. We have a couple of intrinsically worthless, LLM-whale companies, working literally to swallow and entshittify literally everything in their weird transhumanist/accelerationist/weirdo way. To add to the insult, the whole creation of artificial scarcity is almost a political construct, paid for with "monopoly-the-game-money" that these companies DO NOT EARN but instead BORROW based on vague and dishonest promises of achieving a "Country of PhDs in a datacenter"/"Pocket PhDs"/"AGI by 2025" (oops, now apparently by 2028 according to the OpenAI CEO). In their weird vision, as humans we should be merely cattle to be managed, not independent spirits with interest and aspirations. That ghoul Karpathy speaks about "ghost in the machine", overlooking the magnificence of the already existing "ghost in the machine" in the form of human beings. We should not have to swallow the increasingly crappier future these folks are insisting on pushing on all of us.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#366Running 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.
Anyone who thinks modern data centers don’t use recirculated water can safely have their opinions summarily discarded.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man alive, stop being performatively dense. Getting to pay "the tax" in this context is just a colloquialism equating getting to pay "the burden" .
That doesn’t make sense either. How is it a burden to pay the market price for something?
OpenAI didn’t pay what is now the market price, while stockpiling wafers.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren't those the same startups that think they need to run on AWS EKS instead of using a single cheap server? The cheapest used Hetzner server currently is €39.24 / month: - Intel Core i7-6700 - 32 GB - 2 x 480 GB Datacenter SSD - 1 GB/s - 20 TB traffic Their VPS are even cheaper. And you can run a lot on this.
If your only need is a lot of bandwidth with very low server CPU use that’s fine. That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old. That DRAM is 2-channel DDR3. This could be a good deal for someone, but entrusting your startup’s operations to a 10 year old slow computer in Germany instead of using EKS would be an extremely short sighted move. A startup should be developing software and shipping it quickly to validate…
>That CPU is ancient, though. Over a decade old.
Coincidentally so are the t3 / t3a instances on AWS that everyone loves to use especially for dev/staging environments
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, and? That still does not mean we should add arbitrary taxes for a supply/demand issue.
Re: Hetzner Prices increase 30-40%
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I should point out the relevance of my argument, is completely independent from the fact the reply to this questions of yours, is higher than zero.
So dont see this reply as a justification. Just as a note that you failed to do basic diligence on distortions that are well known. And as I said, that are not relevant to the analogy.
"When Wall Street Is Your Landlord" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...
"In one Atlanta zip code, they bought almost 90 percent of the 7,500 homes sold between January 2011 and June 2012"