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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#451

Post by landl0rd »

drecked wrote: post #119
molszanski wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen. Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead. Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a fe…

How much capital would you invest in a capacity expansion for a trend that may or may not yet be durable? Now, how much would you invest when there are two major state-backed chinese entities that essentially aren't allowed to go bankrupt and have infinity money are competing with you?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#452

Post by throwawaytea »

clusterhacks wrote: post #339
barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . " This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality tor…

Professional mechanics might do that, but a home mechanic can get very far one one $200 set, and then another $300 spent over years buying several useful things for each project.

I've replaced transmissions, head gaskets, and done all work for our family cars for two decades based on a Costco toolkit, and 20 trips to the autoparts store or Walmart when I needed something to help out.

Maybe I'm being a little forgetful that yes I bought a jack, and Jack stands, and have a random pipe as a breaker bar, and other odds and ends. But you can go very far for $1k as a DIYer.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#453

Post by ahartmetz »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #144
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…

Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)

Or C++. I buy fairly fast computers to compile stuff. Generally top of the line desktop hardware because Threadripper isn't as much better as it's more expensive (and annoying to cool!), so the next price point that makes sense is a highly clocked (because single thread also matters) Epyc for like 10k€.

I also do caching and distributed compilation with sccache.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#454

Post by margalabargala »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
doom2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices Competition.

Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#455

Post by arcanemachiner »

ryandrake wrote: post #314
lpcvoid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.

I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software d…

We have an open, universal application platform. That alone is something to celebrate.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#456

Post by pedalpete »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

I think the thin-client/flat-client is a pendulum that swings every few years.

Main-frame (thin) -> PC (fat) -> Internet/Cloud (thin) -> Mobile (fat) -> AI (thin)

I expect this to continue until the next technology transition.

In each of these shifts, and there have been others, things are not completely fat or thin, more of an in-between state but leaning to local vs cloud.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#457

Post by saulpw »

margalabargala wrote: post #454
hombre_fatal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices Competition.

Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.

How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies can build a memory fab?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#458

Post by tavavex »

QuiEgo wrote: post #433
EvanAnderson wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will ne…

There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model. I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.

What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market.

There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start manufacturing components more easily and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer players on the market than we have now, in addition to a complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any) and what prices you will pay for any of these things. Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the availability of all these individual components is putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one manufacturers can reasonably charge you.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#459

Post by margalabargala »

saulpw wrote: post #457
margalabargala wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.

How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies can build a memory fab?

In both cases, more than 1!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#460

Post by xerxes901 »

kps wrote: post #443
bit1993 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some modern phones do DisplayPort over USB C.

I plugged my iPhone 16 into my usb-C docking station the other day to charge it and was pretty surprised to discover it just started mirroring my phone screen. Keyboard worked too!
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