Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 682 posts

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#481

Post by dyauspitr »

eecc wrote: post #140
dyauspitr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple, Google Microsoft Amazon should all set up memory and CPU fabs. I don’t understand why they don’t do it. $400 million ASML machine is chump change and you can almost certainly find/train locals or provide incentives to immigrants to come here as workers to fill the roles there.

Well, isn’t Musk doing something similar with his new solar panels fab? Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.

Now that I look into it, it looks like he is, which is a good thing. For some reason I thought Terafab was like a pie-in-the-sky idea where he was going to do compute in space on satellites or something, but it isn’t that. It’s actually a real fab in the United States and I fully support that even if Elon is a piece of shit.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#482

Post by WalterBright »

samiv wrote: post #236
WalterBright wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 90% of the world lived in poverty before capitalism. Besides, America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

The fact that some countries (mostly the political west) developed a wealthy middle class post WW2 was not due to capitalism but due to social democracy. Capitalism by itself does not produce egalitarian wealthy society. The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict. There are plenty of capitalistic countries where most people are poor. In fact many of the as said West…

The middle class emerged in colonial America. During the 1800s, scores of millions of people came to the US with little more than a suitcase. They went into the middle class, and some into the wealthy. We know this because:

1. Average height increased throughout the 1800s

2. Life expectancy increased throughout the 1800s

3. Plenty of photos and paintings of towns that consist of middle class housing

> The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.

That's what Marx claimed. I've had many jobs. In none of them was I ever in conflict. It was a negotiated relationship, where I provided labor and expertise in exchange for money. I've also been a boss, and if you ever have been you'd know you had no power over your employees. They only work for you because they want to. When they stopped wanting to, they simply disappear, and there's not a thing I could do about it.

In the US, every worker has the power to walk away and start their own business. The wealthy in America did not come from wealthy immigrants, they came from poor immigrants.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#483

Post by WalterBright »

hackyhacky wrote: post #331
WalterBright wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism began when Thag, who was a good hunter, brought home two dinosaur steaks. His buddy Grog was a lousy hunter, but was good at making spears. Thag traded a dinosaur steak for a new spear.

That's commerce, not capitalism. Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.

Um, Grog had the spear.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#484

Post by wing-_-nuts »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #469
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, now ask someone from a nordic country about how best to balance capitalism with regulation and social safety nets. I think you'd get a very different answer.

Step 1: start with a vast reservoir of oil revenue and a culturally-homogeneous population

I must have missed the fact that sweden, denmark, and finland had vast oil reserves. Also Sweden's population is now ~ 20% immigrants.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#485

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #166
hackyhacky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

> Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.

I was just watching "Shock and Awe", a documentary on Amazon, about the development of electrical theory and products.

It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries.

Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money?

Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money?

And so on and so forth.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#486

Post by nullpoint420 »

simonw wrote: post #2

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

Agentic workflows and computer use. You still need regular servers for the agents to use.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#487

Post by WalterBright »

tardedmeme wrote: post #232
WalterBright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capitalism is the driver of equality? Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

Capitalism incentivizes risk taking because the payoff is enormous - the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later. The problem: there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now. The other problem: when the reward is so great, you do everything to get ahead…

> the most successful risk takers get to own the world 50 years later.

Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?

> there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.

Did you know that Hackernews is run by wealthy people who fund startups?

What illegal things did Bezos do to get rich? Jobs? Gates? Musk?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#488

Post by WalterBright »

tardedmeme wrote: post #233
WalterBright wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

Like what? Will they be profitable?

I started my own software business with no capital.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#489

Post by Kim_Bruning »

crazygringo wrote: post #436
pjdesno wrote: post #427

Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch: "The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisf…

That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal. You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be? Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we ar…

> You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be?

Couldn't possibly happen with railroads!

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/crisis...

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#490

Post by WalterBright »

account42 wrote: post #202
WalterBright wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in We all make different choices, and so have different consequences. For example, I squandered the proceeds of a business deal on a new car. If I'd bought MSFT instead, I could have bought 100 new cars.

So what you're saying is that we all just need to become better gamblers? That doesn't exactly scream functional society to me. Besides, this can't work for everyone - if you get 100 cars without an equivalent amount of more work put in then someone else has to do that work without being properly compensated for it.

Gambling: the ROI math means you lose money

Investing: the ROI math means you make money

> So what you're saying is that we all just need to become better gamblers?

It means take advantage of the free education you received. Make an assessment of what you enjoy and what you are good at. Select an opportunity in the intersection of those two endeavors.

People start businesses every day in America.

> Besides, this can't work for everyone

Wealth is not zero sum. If you create wealth, that does not mean someone else must be worse off.

Post reply on HN