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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#401

Post by nine_k »

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.

The original Raspberry Pi was built around an overstock phone chip. Modern alternatives built around Rockchip and similar high-end phone chips venture into the territory of lower-end laptops. Aliexpress is full of entry-level laptops based on ARM phone chips (apparently running Android).

This will likely extend further and further, more into the "normie" territory. MS Windows is, of course, the thing that keeps many people pinned to the x64 realm, but, as Chromebooks and the Steam Deck show us, Windows is not always a hard requirement to reach a large enough market segment.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#402

Post by bitmasher9 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #363
bitmasher9 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.

Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while. Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.

High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.

Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#403

Post by ProllyInfamous »

daveidol wrote: post #223
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.

I "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro ~2014... only to eventually discover it largely unused when we were probating her properties.

iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#404

Post by jamesgeck0 »

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.

Or Headscale, which has the blessing of Tailscale and contributions from some of their employees. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#405

Post by ProllyInfamous »

meindnoch wrote: post #73

I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated? Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

Among my favorite failed dorking around experiences is pre-Raspberry, when the Arduino was still hobby-level equipment. This was over a decade ago...

With only a few kilobytes of code, you could send a UDP packet directly to your phone, with an app you "wrote" with just a few lines of code (to receive, without auto-confirmation).

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#406

Post by leptons »

random3 wrote: post #331
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.

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

8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop. It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#407

Post by Anamon »

margalabargala wrote: post #249
TheRoque wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopoliti…

Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.

Energy production is only part of the bill, though. The oil shortage is having an effect on a mind-boggling variety of consumer goods where crude oil is used in manufacturing. For many products we don't have good alternatives. A lot of oil is needed to build an electric car.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#408

Post by fhdkweig »

gryfft wrote: post #175
sfn42 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an applicat…

"chrome uses 2gb of ram" these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of ram.

Don't know about chrome, but Firefox has an about:memory special page that will let you know which tabs are using the most ram. Of all the sites I use, youtube is the only culprit. When I am done watching a video, I use the about:memory to kill the associated process (doesn't destroy the tab (in case I want to come back to it)). I assume it is all the javascript cruft.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#409

Post by cmxch »

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.

Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.

Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.

They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#410

Post by 3abiton »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #207

This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related: I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems th…

It is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from aliexpress, around 1-2€ each, and having in a week or two delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.
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