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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#471

Post by EvanAnderson »

tavavex wrote: post #464
QuiEgo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.

That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.

I'm afraid the acceptance (and, more troubling, the seeming desire on the part of technical people who I see as misguided) of mobile computers in the smart phone form factor to be locked down and hostile to their owners has moved the Overton window on personal computers being equally owner-hostile. The bucket-of-parts PC ecosystem is less susceptible to an effort to lock down the platform and create walled gardens. If that market goes away it gets easier to turn all of our personal computers into simply computer-shaped devices (like Chromebooks and iPads).

I'm really fearful that PCs are going down the road of locked bootloaders, running the user-facing OSs inside bare-metal hypervisors that "protect" the hardware from the owner, etc.

I'll accept that I'm likely under the influence of a bit of paranoia, too.

I'm strongly of the opinion several unaffiliated factions (oligarchs, cultural authoritarians, "intellectual property" maximalists, software-as-a-service providers, and intelligence agencies, to name a few) see unregulated general purpose computers in the hands of the public as dangerous.

I don't think there's an overt conspiracy to remove computing from the hands of the public. The process is happening because of an unrelated confluence of goals.

I don't see anybody even remotely comparable in lobbying power standing up for owner's rights, either.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#472

Post by CamperBob2 »

echelon wrote: post #300
lpcvoid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill a bit?

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…

Eventually, we are going to figure out how to do more inference with less RAM. There is simply no way that current transformer-based LLMs are the right thing to do. LLMs still rely on emergent properties that no one fully understands, where the sheer quantity of weights and duration of training are the dominant factors driving performance.

There is no reason on God's green earth why a coding model should need to ingest all of Shakespeare, five dozen gluten-free cookbooks, the complete works of Stephen King, and 30 GB of bad fanfic from alt.binaries.furry. Yet for reasons nobody understands, all of that crap is somehow needed in order to achieve the best output quality and accuracy in unrelated fields. This state of ignorance can't last. Language models shouldn't need 10% of the RAM they are taking now.

Every other point you raise is very valid, but I really don't think hardware is going to be the problem that everybody assumes it will be.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#473

Post by gchamonlive »

In time we'll have a surplus of machines lying unused in datacenters.

Then maybe you won't be able to buy a computer, but you'll be able to buy a server on a datacenter for half the price of one. Yours, one that if you wanted you could drop by the datacenter and ask for it. But you won't because you wouldn't be able to do nothing with it. It's only useful in the server rack, so you'll buy it and leave it there, maybe after one or two years, depending on contract, you'll have to pay rent, but it'll be incredibly cheaper than buying a pc and hosting yourself.

I don't know. Or maybe it's just a temporary shortage and we are just overreacting.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#474

Post by alsetmusic »

underlipton wrote: post #431
faust201 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player). Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing. Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)

>(Same like getting rid of awful flash player). I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case. Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Appl…

Flash was a dumpster fire on MacOS. Apple probably would have supported it on the iPhone if Adobe had stopped it from crashing apps and made it performant on Apple's primary platform at the time (the Mac).

I remember pulling up crash logs for people showing them that Flash was in every one of the Safari crashes the wanted me to fix. I told them it was out of my hands.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#475

Post by pdimitar »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #133
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.

My primary concern is for next generation hardware. Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?

Why would that concern you unless you are working on the cutting edge and the very limits of that hardware?

The current generation is insanely fast. I am planning to get a gaming PC for my wife and a mix of gaming + workstation PC for me (or maybe just base it off of the Ryzen 9950x3D and call it a day). We plan to hold on to them for 10 years.

I don't care if anything 6x faster comes out. For what I need the current generation is even an overkill.

I'd even go as far as to say that it would be quite OK if that's the very last generation and no further hardware development ever happens.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#476

Post by vladvasiliu »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #350
vladvasiliu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.

> If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has. > I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the ventilation channels…

Both devices are laptops. The old one had regular cleanups with a compressed air can. The new one is… new. I never cleaned it, but I figure it doesn’t require any cleaning one month in (I don’t live in the desert nor in a mine).

The new one is a thick thinkpad with a fat heat sink and dual fans. Its cooling solution looks much more serious than the old one, which only had a tiny heat sink and a single fan. It was also thinner.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#477

Post by snypher »

NoSalt wrote: post #260
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 absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to yourself?

~%25 of mean US household income.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#478

Post by alsetmusic »

Fnoord wrote: post #298
bluGill wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)

Yr.no [1] is free, and available in English. Thanks to Norway. Apps available as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no

Amazing. With an API I can poll. Thank you.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#479

Post by alsetmusic »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #416
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…

> I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us. Not everyone benefited. Market globalism wasn't particularly kind to the global south, and the specific mandates that the WTO enacted on countries in latin america / africa (Washington Consensus) greatly increased local wealth disparities despite visibly growing GDP for a time. America profited handsomely becau…

> but America is increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand to benefit from.

We're a clown show and we don't deserve to have friends until we get our shit together.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#480

Post by Aurornis »

bit1993 wrote: post #396
m3nu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iPhones and most Android phones already support connections to external displays with a cheap adapter.

Android phones already allow sideloading. Even the much protested upcoming restrictions to sideloading don't interfere with ADB sideloading.

No hackers needed. This has existed for years. I've had a few friends go through periods where they thought they were going to use their phones as plug-in terminals for something and then they never last very long. It's never as satisfying as imagined.

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