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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#391

Post by hollerith »

sfn42 wrote: post #270
interf4ce wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resource…

I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap. In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.

The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a device's total power consumption) so if the device is running off a battery and is designed to keep device weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as practical), then battery life is not as good as it would be if the device had only 16gb.

This is why the top model of the previous generation of the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM, bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17 Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to most buyers, they would not have been serving their customers well.

So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life or device weight for the duration of your ownership of any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want to having a good experience when running Electron apps on the device.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#392

Post by joe_mamba »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #384
random3 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#393

Post by upofadown »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #112
upofadown wrote: post #93

This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10. The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really do…

Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.

An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.

New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live in a cold climate and the heating season is something like half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.

[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/athlon-ii-x2-250-vs-ath...

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#394

Post by organsnyder »

itchynosedev wrote: post #333
organsnyder wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures. Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - on…

A hidden cost of self-hosting. I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.

Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have one server where a failure would cause issues: it's connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage, and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That would only cause Jellyfin to stop working—the other services that have lower storage needs would continue working, since their storage is replicated across multiple nodes using Longhorn.

Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had a failed node because some services didn't come back up until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster (looks like there are various projects to automate this—I should look into those).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#395

Post by PokestarFan »

kibwen wrote: post #169
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere . Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.

The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.

I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#396

Post by bit1993 »

m3nu wrote: post #131
raincole wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.

All we need is for HDMI to be unlocked so it works on phones, or maybe VGA adapters that work on phones. And a way to "sideload" our own apps. Hackers please make this happen.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#398

Post by echelon »

lpcvoid wrote: post #365
echelon wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Y'all aren't seeing the same future I am, I guess. - Our career is reaching the end of the line - 99.9999% of users will be using the cloud - if we don't have strong open source models, we're going to be locked into hyperscaler APIs for life - piddly little home GPUs don't do squat against this Why are you building for hobby uses? Build for freedom of the ability to make and scale businesses. To remain competitive. T…

I don't agree that we are being left behind with regards to AI, I believe it's simply not worth participating in. I hope it all comes crashing down.

That's not the right perspective to have.

Also, the only thing crashing down will be the economic participation of everyday people if we don't have ownership over the means of creation. Hyperscalers will be just fine.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#399

Post by charcircuit »

Aurornis wrote: post #338
random3 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world. We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#400

Post by mikewarot »

dust42 wrote: post #23

Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.

Helium is 5 parts per million of the atmosphere. It should be possible to extract it, and thus never run out.

Doing some googling yields an estimated cost of about $25,000 per kg. I can see why extraction from wells is preferred.

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