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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

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51–60 of 328 posts

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#51
post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#52

This is the consequence of "I don't want to write this function myself, I'll get the plagiarism machine to do it for me"

And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you?

As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism.

Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#53
post #33
post #23

I built a new server this time last year. My board does 6 channel RAM so I bought 6x32GB ECC DDR5. $160 a stick at the time. Just for grins I looked up the same product number at the same supplier I originally bought from. $1300 apiece. One of the VMs running on that server is TrueNAS, with 4 20TB WD Red Pros. God help me if I have to replace a drive.

Best Buy is actively selling 2x8gb sticks of DDR4 3200 for $80 a stick. I was floored. Ten bucks a gig, $160 for the pack. We're fucking doomed .

Perhaps there is an incentive to go back to OS that can operate with 640KB RAM ... /s

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#54
post #33
post #23

I built a new server this time last year. My board does 6 channel RAM so I bought 6x32GB ECC DDR5. $160 a stick at the time. Just for grins I looked up the same product number at the same supplier I originally bought from. $1300 apiece. One of the VMs running on that server is TrueNAS, with 4 20TB WD Red Pros. God help me if I have to replace a drive.

Best Buy is actively selling 2x8gb sticks of DDR4 3200 for $80 a stick. I was floored. Ten bucks a gig, $160 for the pack. We're fucking doomed .

Ten bucks a gig is lower than what some DDR5 memory is selling at.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#55
post #28
post #7

Do they really think they will get some money from the AI ponzi scheme ? Well, at least they might still have a product to sell once the AI bubble pops, unlike with NVIDIA which does seem to kinda forgot to design new consumer GPUs after getting high on AI money.

They haven't forgotten, they've expressly decided to soft-pivot away from consumer GPUs. RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018… (oops, 2028. No time travel involved. Probably). If the bubble has burst by then.

> "apparently coming in 2018… maybe. If the bubble has burst by then."

Spoiler from the future: it hasn't. Get your investments in while you have time.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#56
post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

So what?

Why gamers must be the most important group?

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#58
post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

    Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber
The manfucaturing capacity expanded to meet the demand for new hardware doesn't (as much)

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#59
post #49

What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?

Hearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering.

And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#60
post #49

What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?

All the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.
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