501–510 of 515 posts
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> For the skeptical ones The words after this point make you less convincing, not more, as they only serve to confirm the egregious slippery slope of your reasoning.
Do you call any negative prognosis based on extrapolation of an observable downward trend a slippery slope?
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> If you happily sell apples for $1 and see a hungry person walking towards you, must you raise the price? if you happily sell apples for $1 and now there are VC-funded companies who need a ton of apples to produce some dubious crap and can pay you $5 per. And you are the only company selling apples. what you should do is keep selling $1 apples to retail customers and charge corporations as much as they accept. you i…
But what do you suppose the corporations do with the apples you’re selling to them? Adding a degree of separation doesn’t change what you’re doing, and you’re not morphing into Robin Hood. To be clear, I’m not taking a fully altruistic position. I’m just tired of price hikes on things, from apples to memory, being blamed on the weather rather than openly understanding that it’s a person wanting more money. “I can’t a…
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> If you happily sell apples for $1 and see a hungry person walking towards you, must you raise the price? if you happily sell apples for $1 and now there are VC-funded companies who need a ton of apples to produce some dubious crap and can pay you $5 per. And you are the only company selling apples. what you should do is keep selling $1 apples to retail customers and charge corporations as much as they accept. you i…
The issue with that solution is that in order to sell to retail customers, they sell to other large corporations, which they think are going to sell to retail customers. Guess what happens when they find out, you are charging other corporation higher prices.
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Do you call any negative prognosis based on extrapolation of an observable downward trend a slippery slope?
Your observations don't show a trend and your extrapolation is not sound.
My point was to make a joke about state-issued phones but also make sure it doesn't read as an absurd, easily dismissible claim, because it's a real possibility.
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I hear what you're saying but memory ultimately is not infrastructure, it's a commodity that's shipped over infrastructure. The arguments for infrastructure being managed more tightly by the government is because it's a natural monopoly that everything depends on. Memory isn't a natural monopoly, if we found ourselves in a spot where we all depend on 3 companies then that's not a law of nature, we need more companies…
The government interferes with many commodities. Food, oil, rare-earth elements, sugar, airplane frames, etc
Memory absolutely fits both these criteria.
As for the net public good weighing, at the end of the day the question would be if it would be more economically efficient to mass produce memory with a managed price structure (i.e. US agrees to buy X amount at $Y regularly).
Which turns into whether having an anchor buyer allows the producer to economically create (and continually run) more production capacity than they would otherwise.
It feels like for semiconductors, the planet as a whole would benefit from maximizing production to floor cost.
Granted, AI infra mania current times is an anomaly, as was internet build-out.
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The government interferes with many commodities. Food, oil, rare-earth elements, sugar, airplane frames, etc
All of these have the feature that you can produce them more economically-efficiently at scale AND that boom-bust cycles can be catastrophic for producers. Memory absolutely fits both these criteria. As for the net public good weighing, at the end of the day the question would be if it would be more economically efficient to mass produce memory with a managed price structure (i.e. US agrees to buy X amount at $Y regu…
I put "food" and "airplane frames" in the "worth it for state intervention" category personally. Memory is obviously not food, the question is whether it is airplane frames at this point in time. Maybe? I'd give it a solid 55/45 maybe. But we shouldn't sponsor korean/taiwanese companies, so what's the plan for an American memory company?
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Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper. I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers…
I build and/or service all of my PCs, servers and laptops. I never had a single component die on me. I still have my first 128GB Samsung SSD serving as a boot drive in my NAS. Sometimes I buy used parts. Sometimes I sell used parts. I never had any problems with DOA parts no matter if new or used. I'm always careful with static electricity (no sweaters, carpets, cats etc near components). Maybe I'm just lucky or mayb…
Though if a component dies due to ESD from an imperceptible spark then the manufacturer skimped on ESD testing
One unit of HBM capacity consumes roughly the wafer capacity that could have produced three units of DDR5 capacity. HBM dies need to be larger than ordinary DRAM dies because of how the final packaging works. > As discussed previously, the ramp of HBM production will constrain industry supply growth in non-HBM products. Industrywide, HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given n…
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Not that I'm advocating for this with RAM, but another tried and true solution for necessary goods with limited supply is rationing. This is what got everyone through WW2, for example.
Rationing works when there are alternative goods available. Spam instead of steak, in your example. One of the most difficult shortages during WW2 was rubber, because there was no (known, at the time) comparable alternative. With GPUs, rationing would have the same effect as a lottery -- you either get to run AI, or you don't.