541–550 of 592 posts
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What country would be the stereotypical example you are thinking of? I fail to find any
From the US point of view only: Historically, most of Latin America. Very recently: why was Venezuela attacked by the US?
In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…
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> What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online. That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized…
> That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were simply unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment. It is for any normal person in relatively norma…
there might be a cultural difference between the old world and new world for what "at any price" means, but id take it to mean that to be at least spending $1M for it
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Taking a big, complex, already well optimised program like Chrome or the linux kernel and optimising the memory footprint is hard. But 90% of programs are just crappy web apps that nobody has even bothered to optimise at all. (Sometimes wrapped in electron or something.) If you go look, you often discover that 90% of the requests are useless, or at least could be combined. That 60% of bandwidth is used up by 3 high r…
It isn't that they are crappy web devs. It is that often the org paying for the development doesn't care. I am a web developer of over 20 years. I can create insanely optimised pages using nothing other than vanilla CSS and JS. I have been paid exactly once to do this. There is a site I built in 2023 that has a JS and CSS footprint of less than 100KB after GZip (large site). We even had the Go templates compiled when…
the engineering and leadership failure was at requirements time. why on earth would somebody pay for all that optimization without knowing about whats gonna be on the page first?
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So Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.
I vibe coded a library in Nim the other day (a language I view very much as a spiritual continuation of the Pascal/Modula line), complete with a C ABI. The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch. I then c…
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This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60... The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one. I couldn't even get a Raspberry PI (any model) for about a year. They were constantly out of stock. > That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon. How does that invalidate anything I said? As states in the art…
The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines. They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward. I keep t…
Last month I "panic bought" a $999 Macbook Mini (32G) so I could run small models, Image Generation, and Voice synthesis on it. I don't think I regret it yet, despite the fact that you can get a 16G for $599, which is honestly a much more efficient price per Gig. I think it is interesting that, at least thus far, Apple has chosen not to raise the price of their comps despite presumably the price of RAM going up multi…
People hate AI. This will make them hate it even more. Yet somehow the market has convinced/forced us to use their products even though we might not want to. A recent nationwide poll[1] shows AI has a poorer approval rating than ICE — ICE! — probably due to their overlords being "those" SV types. Everyday AI features are being shoved down our throats. I can't even choose to not install Gemini related apps on my Andro…
I purchased a Beelink Mini S12 for $160 in May 2025 on Amazon. It's now at $260.
In the U.S., some of it was tariffs, though.
been building a home server recently and the ram prices really caught me off guard. 32gb kits are almost double what they were last year