Live data from Hacker News

Hold on to Your Hardware

xn--gckvb8fzb.com

491–500 of 559 posts

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#491

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.

> Many users will not want to risk

How "Many users" though?

I would argue that the segment of the market whose purchases incentivize personal responsibility on their PCs is outweighed by the segment of the market blowing their disposable income on tablets and smartphones who just want things to work and want whatever they see other people using on social media.

We both know which segment of the market the large companies want to win that battle. They want to sell rented compute resources through nothing but impossible-to-locally-administrate devices where every sensor spies on you and it's impossible to store any data or documents locally, let alone privately.

Even One Drive is pushing hard to literally erase your hard drive and only host your documents on their servers.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(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.

Safari was a crap browser. I mean, it still is, but it used to be, too.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?

16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller. What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hard…

16MB is less than a display buffer for a 4k display. It is never ever going to happen again just due to hardware realities.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#494

In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.

It's in Japanese Katakana - it's used for writing foreign words, names and sometimes is used to put emphasis on text.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#495

It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser. Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app. The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seein…

>Everything today is a web app.

Maybe it was a few years ago, I had to download a phone app just to try to restore delivery notifications on my Amazon echo. They no longer have a web interface to control it. Worse than that, I had to ask the AI to do it in said app.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#496
post #325

I wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of private property altogether. The question is who owns the means of production(computation) I suppose.

I have a small amount of hope that I'll live long enough to own a means of producing chips, thanks to Atomic Semi. The 3d printing, and home CNC machine advances of the past decade make it a lot easier to turn out a small doodad or replacement part at home.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#497

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…

> golden period of globalisation

The largest upward transfer of wealth in Earth's history.

> was able to bring us.

A useless race to the bottom.

> that can be learnt about what we had

Rebadged imperialism. If you constantly screw native populations out of the value of their resources you will lose everything you build with those resources. Literally the lesson: make fair deals or die.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the other browsers managed it fine. That sounds like a Safari problem. Which would be totally in line with Apple's modus operandi.

No, they didn't. It was straightforwardly unsafe and broken, the heaps of effort that went into supporting it were largely just to paper over that fact. It's no accident that the other browser vendors went along with dropping support so quickly after Apple did.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#500

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.

Compilers do, and AI models are making software more accessible than ever.
Post reply on HN