However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.

Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.

I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.

This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.

I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.

There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time.

The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom.

It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging.

The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <-> Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.

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 the pendulum is swinging the other way for the time being.

I hope that, wherever the current direction ends up, there are lessons that can be learnt about what we had, and somehow fumbled, such that there is motivation enough to get back there.

Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?

- https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/projects/

Their github repos:

- https://github.com/mrusme

They even built a BBS-style reader client that supports Hacker News:

https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem

I miss the days of the web being weird like this :-)

Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.

Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up

The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.

M1 Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are still good computers 5+ years after release.

Many games are still playable (and being released on!) the PS4, which is almost 12 years old.

The iPhone 15 pro has 8gb of RAM which will likely be sufficient for a long time.

Don't get me wrong, this whole parts shortage is exceptionally annoying, but we're living in a great time to weather the storm.

Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.

The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.

I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.

I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient.

The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?

It will be scarcity mindset from here on out; will always buy the top tier thing .

a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"

Think about it like this: Imagine the AI/Cloud/Crypto companies who are buying up all these compute and storage resources realize they now control the compute hardware market becoming compute lords. What happens when joe/jane six pack or company xyz needs a new PC or two thousand but cant afford them due to the supply crunch? Once the compute lords realize they control the compute supply they will move to rent you their compute trapping users in a walled garden. And the users wont care because they aren't computer enthusiasts like many of us here. They only need a tool that works. They *do not* care about the details.

They hardware lords could further this by building proprietary hardware in collusion with the vendors they have exclusivity with to build weaker terminal devices with just enough local ram and storage to connect to a remote compute cluster. Hardware shortage solved!

All they need to do is collude with the hardware makers with circular contracts to keep buying hardware in "anticipation of the AI driven cloud compute boom." The hardware demand cycle is kept up and consumers are purposefully kept out of the market to push people into walled gardens.

This is unsustainable of course and will eventually fall over but it could tie up computing resources for well over a decade as compute lords dry up the consumer hardware market pushing people to use their hoarded compute resources instead of owning your own. We are in a period where computing serfdom could be a likely outcome that could cause a lot of damage to freedom of use and hardware availability and the future ability to use the internet freely.

Newer graphics hardware is pointless to me. The expensive new techniques I find incredibly offense from an interactivity standpoint (temporal AA, nanite & friends). I run Battlefield 6 at 75% render scale with everything set to low. I really don't care how ass the game looks as long as it runs well. I much more enjoy being able to effectively dispatch my enemies than observe aesthetic clutter.

The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors. There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our environment.

So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!

    uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

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War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.

Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.

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 seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.

Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.

I’m doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured before “Attention is all you need“, than I could 5 years ago, when quantization techniques were implemented.

I’m holding on to my 32 bit machines.

Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved on.

Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their employees?

I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.

I would specifically add, whatever you have, or whatever you choose to buy, it would greatly benefit you to ensure a degree is Linux compatibility to ensure its lifespan can be extended further than the greed enthusiasts at MS, Apple, and Google would like you to. They will be facing the same declines in purchasing habits and are further incentivised to assert their ownership over what you might mistakenly consider your devices.

In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats almost 1.5 month salary in private sector

Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just dream for use never to fulfill

Phones and tablets only get replaced when they die.

Why should I throw away stuff that still works as intended?

Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product.

If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU

Cha cha cha ...

These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part of the stack.

Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet? So Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever? Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock valuations?

"This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full potential of our high-performance optical component solutions business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership position in high-performance optical components and modules which are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."

There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices.

Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.

whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it

But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in your local mall and piece them together into a working device. It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on, thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a mess.

Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot of sense any more.

Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices, because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.

Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session. The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.

The Trump/anti-America phase has gone on way longer than I thought but it won’t last forever.

Even if we have to wait for this old world cabal to die and fade away, time is still on our side.

Boomers are stupid for using time as a weapon.

I’m chillin. Waiting for people to die while growing my businesses.

Travel to a functional place off the beaten path to see nobody can really stop forward progress. Even in these places where time has stopped.

Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it.

This is pure Capitalism.

If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain.

But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged.

Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt.

And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them.

Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin.

AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.

You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now.

Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...:

Liberty goes beyond that.

- "Stare into this hole to verify your age.

- "Stick your finger in the box.

- "Ignore the pain to get your AI token bucks and unlock access to the shiny new attestation accelerated internet."

- "Sync ALL of your usernames and passwords into this secure enclave."

Every packet and data stream will be analyzed locally by the AI to determine the intentions and predict future behavior. The AI summarized behavior will be condensed into an optimized encoded table to be submitted hourly to the Central Nanny Overseer. I might be slightly exaggerating and a bit hyperbolic but it will be something in this spirit and people will sleep walk right into it.

My only question is which country will control the behavior of these chips.