[HN Gopher] RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to S...
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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
Author : sethops1
Score : 333 points
Date : 2025-12-04 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcworld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcworld.com)
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I feel we have a RAM price surge every four years. The excuses
| change, but it's always when we see a generation switch to the
| next gen of DDR. Which makes me believe it's not AI, or graphics
| cards, or crypto, or gaming, or one of the billion other
| conceivable reasons, but price-gouging when new standards emerge
| and production capacity is still limited. Which would be much
| harder to justify than 'the AI/Crypto/Gaming folks (who no-one
| likes) are sweeping the market...'
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Regardless of whether it is Crypto/AI/etc., this would seem to
| be wake-up call #2. We're finding the strangle-points in our
| "economy"--will we do anything about it? A single fab in
| Phoenix would seem inadequate?
| baiwl wrote:
| What will we do with that fab in two years when nobody needs
| that excess RAM?
| jacquesm wrote:
| There has never been 'an excess of RAM', the market has
| always absorbed what was available.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| Yeah right, tell that to Qimonda.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Sell it at lower prices. Demand is a function of price, not
| a scalar.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Tax write-off donations to schools and non-profits, too.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I suspect there will be a shortage of something else
| then...
|
| And regardless, you could flip it around and ask, what will
| we do in x years when the next shortage comes along and we
| have no fabs? (And that shortage of course could well be an
| imposed one from an unfriendly nation.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| If 'the West' would be half as smart as they claim to be
| there would be many more fabs in friendly territory. Stick a
| couple in Australia and NZ too for good measure, it is just
| too critical of a resource now.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| The west is only smart at financial engineering (printing
| money to inflate stocks and housing). Anything related to
| non-military manufacturing should be outsourced to the
| cheapest bidder to increase shareholder value.
| fullstop wrote:
| Micron is bringing up one in Boise Idaho as well.
| xzjis wrote:
| It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in
| what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority
| of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI
| and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or
| something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of
| OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more
| fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI
| within a few years, but reallocating it right now is
| detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members
| of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why is this downvoted, this is not the first time I've heard
| that opinion expressed and every time it happens there is more
| evidence that maybe there is something to it. I've been
| following the DRAM market since the 4164 was the hot new thing
| and it cost - not kidding - $300 for 8 of these which would
| give you all of 64K RAM. Over the years I've seen the price
| surge multiple times and usually there was some kind of hard to
| verify reason attached to it. From flooded factories to
| problems with new nodes and a whole slew of other issues.
|
| RAM being a staple of the computing industry you have to wonder
| if there aren't people cleaning up on this, it would be super
| easy to create an artificial shortage given the low number of
| players in this market. In contrast, say the price of gasoline,
| has been remarkably steady with one notable outlier with a very
| easy to verify and direct cause.
| zorked wrote:
| This industry has a history of forming cartels.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
| sharpshadow wrote:
| There is also the side effect of limiting people to run
| powerful models themselves. Could very well be part of a
| strategy.
| muvlon wrote:
| But we're not currently switching to a next gen of DDR. DDR5
| has been around for several years, DDR6 won't be here before
| 2027. We're right in the middle of DDR5's life cycle.
|
| That is not to say there is no price-fixing going on, just that
| I really can't see a correlation with DDR generations.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| The manufacturers are willing to quadruple the prices for the
| foreseeable future but not change their manufacturing quotes a
| bit.
|
| So much for open markets, somebody must check their books and
| manufacturing schedules.
| dgacmu wrote:
| In their defense, how many $20 billion fabs do you want to
| build in response to the AI ... (revolution|bubble|other
| words)? It seems very, very difficult to predict how long DRAM
| demand will remain this elevated.
|
| It's dangerous for them in both directions: Overbuilding
| capacity if the boom busts vs. leaving themselves vulnerable to
| a competitor who builds out if the boom is sustained. Glad I
| don't have to make that decision. :)
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| I don't think they're working at 100% capacity or don't have
| any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit
| stuff.
|
| Let's check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if
| they're artificially constraining the supply to jack up the
| prices on purpose.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer
| capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but
| all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just
| not up enough.
|
| For example:
| https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery
|
| "Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit
| shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the
| low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to a
| higher consumer-oriented revenue mix"
|
| (from june of this year).
|
| The problem is that the DRAM market is pretty tight -
| supply or demand shocks tend to produce big swings. And
| right now we're seeing both an expected supply shock
| (transition to new processes/products) as well as a very
| sudden demand shock.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| So it's also the perfect time to constrain the product
| flow to jack up the prices.
|
| They've been acting like a cartel for a long time now and
| somehow they never match the demand even after 18 months
| straight price increases. They already have the fab, the
| procedures, and everything, so stop acting like they're
| setting up a brand new fab just to increase throughput.
| fullstop wrote:
| > I don't think they're working at 100% capacity or don't
| have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low
| profit stuff.
|
| I have a family member who works in a field related to
| memory and storage fabrication. At the moment Micron, etc,
| are running these money printers full time and forgoing
| routine maintenance to keep the money flowing.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| What I said stands, let's check their books and
| manufacturing schedule to see if they're artificially
| constraining the supply.
|
| The fact that they're busy doesn't hide the fact that
| they're known to collude before, and they might even ship
| parts to phony resellers to keep the price high.
|
| What's next? A commodity memory chip is going to cost
| more than a cpu or gpu die?
| arijun wrote:
| If it's an AI bubble, it would be stupid to open new
| manufacturing capacity right now. Spend years and billions
| spinning up a new fab, only to have the bottom of the market
| drop out as soon as it comes online.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Assuming that opening a new fab is the only way to match the
| demand is simply asinine.
|
| You can ramp up production in limited capacity, make long
| term contracts, or pass the manufacturing rust to the buyer.
| When we needed a vertical stabilizer for a legacy aircraft we
| paid for an entire production like to be built just to
| manufacture two tails, so there are tons of ways to do this
| if you want to be competitive. But instead this is a cartel
| like market where manufacturers colluded before, so they're
| more likely to collude than spend billions doing anything.
|
| Just open their books and schedules with a competent auditors
| and see if they're artificially manipulating things or not.
| davey48016 wrote:
| Most of the things people say about efficient markets assume
| low barriers to entry. When it takes years and tens of billions
| of dollars to add capacity, it makes more sense to sit back and
| enjoy the margins. Especially if you think there's a non-
| trivial possibility that the AI build out is a bubble.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| We only need the memory manufacturers to not collude with
| each other, not even external pressure.
|
| You want to tame their cartel like behaviors? Just get into
| their books and it would be clear as day if they're
| artificially constraining the supply, and I'm not even
| talking about spending extra billions.
|
| You cannot manufacture something that modern life depends on
| and not get government scrutiny.
| filloooo wrote:
| Memory chips have always been a very cyclical business, that's
| why their stock prices remain relatively low despite a windfall
| happening.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| A commodity hardware that's on the price decline for decades
| just quadruples in price and nobody makes any form of long
| term investment or even contracts to take advantage of the
| situation? It's more likely to be a collusion than not.
| jsheard wrote:
| To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other
| is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their
| own chip division fight for placement in their own phones,
| constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips
| at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or
| even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in
| different variants of ostensibly the same device.
| morcus wrote:
| > two versions of the same phone with different processors
|
| That's hilarious, which phone is this?
| namibj wrote:
| Several high end Galaxy S's AFAIK.
| grincek wrote:
| This is the case as recent as of S24, phones can come with
| exynos or snapdragon, with exynos usually featuring worse
| performance and battery life
| petcat wrote:
| Basically every Galaxy phone comes in two versions. One with
| Exynos and one with Snapdragon. It's regional though. US
| always gets the Snapdragon phones while Europe and mostly
| Asia gets the Exynos version.
|
| My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of
| ways, but also cheaper.
| sgerenser wrote:
| In the past using Snapdragon CPUs for the U.S. made sense
| due to Qualcomm having much better support for the CDMA
| frequencies needed by Verizon. Probably no longer relevant
| since the 5G transition though.
| muvlon wrote:
| Not one phone, they did this all over the place. Their
| flagship line did this starting with the Galaxy S7 all the
| way up to Galaxy S24. Only the most recent Galaxy S25 is
| Qualcomm Snapdragon only, supposedly because their own Exynos
| couldn't hit volume production fast enough.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| The S23 too was Snapdragon only, allegedly to let the
| Exynos team catch some breath and come up with something
| competitive for the following generation. Which they partly
| did, as the Exynos S24 is almost on par with its Snapdragon
| brother. A bit worse on photo and gaming performance, a bit
| better in web browsing, from the benchmarks I remember.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The S23 was also Snapdragon-only as far as I know[1]. The
| S24 had the dual chips again, while as you say S25 is
| Qualcomm only once more.
|
| [1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-exynos-
| versus-snapd...
| numpad0 wrote:
| "Galaxy S II" and its aesthetics was already a mere
| branding shared across at least four different phones with
| different SoCs, before counting in sub-variants that share
| same SoCs. This isn't unique to Samsung, nor is it a new
| phenomenon, just how consumer products are made and sold.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II
| intrikate wrote:
| I might be out of date, but last I knew, it was "most of
| them."
|
| International models tended to use Samsung's Exynos
| processors, while the ones for the North American market used
| Snapdragons or whatever.
| lkramer wrote:
| To be honest, this actually sounds kinda healthy.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Sears would like to have a word about how healthy intra-
| company competition is.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Sears had horizontal market where all of it did basically
| the same thing. Samsung is a huge conglomerate of several
| completely different vertical with lots of redundant
| components.
|
| It makes absolutely no sense to apply the lessons from one
| into the other.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Sears had horizontal market where all of it did
| basically the same thing. Samsung is a huge conglomerate
| of several completely different vertical with lots of
| redundant components._
|
| Sears was hardly horizontal. It was also Allstate
| insurance and Discover credit cards, among other things.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ok. And if it did divide on the borders of insurance and
| payment services, the reorganization wouldn't have been
| complete bullshit and may even have been somewhat
| successful.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I think what the GP was referring to was the "new" owner
| of Sears, who reorganized the company into dozens of
| independent business units in the early 2010s (IT, HR,
| apparel, electronics, etc). Not departments, either;
| full-on internal businesses intended as a microcosm of
| the free market.
|
| Each of these units were then given access to an internal
| "market" and directed to compete with each other for
| funding.
|
| The idea was likely to try and improve efficiency... But
| what ended up happening is siloing increased, BUs started
| infighting for a dwindling set of resources (beyond
| normal politics you'd expect at an organization that
| size; actively trying to fuck each other over), and
| cohesion decreased.
|
| It's often pointed to as one of the reasons for their
| decline, and worked out so badly that it's commonly
| believed their owner (who also owns the company holding
| their debt and stands to immensely profit if they go
| bankrupt) desired this outcome... to the point that he
| got sued a few years ago by investors over the conflict
| of interest and, let's say "creative" organizational
| decisions.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Yes, this is what I was referring to. I should have
| provided more context, thanks for doing so.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| to put a finer point on it, it wasn't just competition or
| rewarding-the-successful, the CEO straight up set them at
| odds with each other and told them directly to battle it
| out.
|
| basically "coffee is for closers... and if you don't sell
| you're fired" as a large scale corporate policy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That was a bullshit separation of a single horizontal cut
| of the market (all of those segments did consumer retail
| sales) without overlap.
|
| The part about no overlaps already made it impossible for
| them to compete. The only "competition" they had was in
| the sense of TV gameshow competition where candidates do
| worthless tasks, judged by some arbitrary rules.
|
| That has absolutely no similarity to how Samsung is
| organized.
| silisili wrote:
| This happened at a place where I worked years ago, but
| not as 'on purpose.' We were a large company where most
| pieces depended on other pieces, and everything was fine
| - until a new CEO came in who started holding the numbers
| of each BU under a microscope. This led to each
| department trying to bill other departments as an
| enterprise customer, who then retaliated, which then led
| to internal departments threatening to go to competitors
| who charged less for the same service. Kinda stupid how
| that all works - on paper it would have made a few
| departments look better if they used a bottom barrel
| competitor, but in reality the company would have bled
| millions of dollars as a whole...all because one rather
| large BU wanted to goose its numbers.
| HugoTea wrote:
| Nokia too
| itsastrawman wrote:
| The opposite, nepotism, is very unhealthy, so i think you're
| correct.
| hammock wrote:
| Not sure that the opposite of transfer pricing is nepotism.
| As far as I know it's far more common for someone who owns
| a lake house to assign four weeks a year to each grandkid ,
| than to make them bid real money on it and put that in a
| maintenance fund or something. Though it's an interesting
| idea, it's not very family friendly
| dgemm wrote:
| It's a forcing function that ensures the middle layers of a
| vertically integrated stack remain market competitive and
| don't stagnate because they are the default/only option
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| n/a
| crazygringo wrote:
| I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm? Or do you live
| somewhere where this is taught?
| fransje26 wrote:
| Yeah, makes absolute sense.
|
| A bit like Toyota putting a GM engine in their car, because
| the Toyota engine division is too self-centered, focusing to
| much on efficiency.
| cobalt60 wrote:
| You mean toyota putting bmw engine (supra). Your statement
| is contradicting as Toyota has TRD, which focuses on the
| track performance. They just couldn't keep up with the
| straight six perf+reliability when comparing to their own
| 2jz
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Buying a Supra is stupid. Either buy a proper BMW with
| the b58/Zf8 speed and get a proper interior or stop being
| poor and buy an LC500.
|
| Better yet, get a C8 corvette and gap all of the above
| for a far better value. You can get 20% off msrp on
| factory orders with C8 corvettes if you know where to
| look.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Isn't this how South Korean chaebols work?
|
| They operate with tension. They're supposed to have unified
| strategic direction from the top, but individual subsidiaries
| are also expected to be profit centers that compete in the
| market.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| That's really good business. Everyone is pushing to be the best
| rather than accepting mediocrity.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I worked with some supply chain consultants who mentioned
| "internal suppliers are often worse suppliers than external".
|
| Their point was that service levels are often not as
| stringently tracked, SLA's become internal money shuffling, but
| the company as a whole paid the price in lower output/profit.
| The internal partner being the default allows an amount of
| complacency, and if you shopped around for a comparable level
| of service to what's being provided, you can often find it for
| a better price.
| awongh wrote:
| This seems to be for chips put in phones in 2026? I thought these
| orders were booked further in advance, or is that only for
| processors?
| shevy-java wrote:
| AI companies must compensate us for this outrage.
|
| A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4,
| 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local
| price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or
| take.
|
| I want my money back, OpenAI!
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup.
|
| And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are
| demanding.
|
| If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for
| their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for
| _EVERY_ part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just
| as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road
| accessing it.
|
| Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for _their_ upgrades
| is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it
| (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).
| fullstop wrote:
| I bought 2x16 (32GB) DDR4 in June for $50. It is now ~$150.
|
| I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was
| looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what
| it was then.
|
| My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential
| areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will
| succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my
| electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.
| moregrist wrote:
| Usually the narrative for externalizing these kinds of costs
| is that the investment will result in lots of jobs in the
| upgrade area.
|
| Sometimes that materializes.
|
| Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our
| expensive infrastructure and we'll take all your jobs.
|
| It's a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV
| AI barons will have at the end of the day.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| This is important to point out. All the talk about AI companies
| underpricing is mistaken. The costs to consumers have just been
| externalized; the AI venture as a whole is so large that it
| simply distorts other markets in order to keep its economic
| reality intact. See also: the people whose electric bills have
| jumped due to increased demand from data centers.
|
| I think we're going to regret this.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Americans are subsidizing ai by paying more for their
| electricity for the rest of the world to use chatgpt (I'm not
| counting the data centers of Chinese models and a few
| European ones though)
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I am so glad I built my PC back in April. My 2x16gb DDR5 sticks
| cost $105 all in then, now it's _$480_ on amazon. That is
| ridiculous!
| basscomm wrote:
| I'm also glad I overbought RAM when I did my last PC upgrade
| in January, because who knows when I'll be able to do that
| again.
|
| The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was
| $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw
| the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though
| I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices
| were going.
|
| That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The
| entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Yeah I do regret not going 64GB when it was so cheap but
| honestly? 32 has been fine. I had already pushed the budget
| to future-proof critical things (mobo, PSU, CPU, etc.) and
| ram hopefully one day will drop to sane prices again. I
| doubt I'll feel the strain for 3-5 years if at all. It's
| mainly a gaming rig right now
| Uvix wrote:
| DDR4 manufacturing is being spun down due to lack of demand.
| The prices on it would be going up regardless of what's
| happening with DDR5.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The problem is further upstream. Capitalism is nice in theory,
| but...
|
| "The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn
| greedy." - Herbert Hoover, U.S. President, 1929-1933
|
| And the past half-century has seen both enormous reductions in
| the regulations enacted in Hoover's era (when out-of-control
| financial markets and capitalism resulted in the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression), and the growth
| of a class of grimly narcissistic/sociopathic techno-
| billionaires - who control _way_ too many resources, and seem
| to share some techno-dystopian fever dream that the first one
| of them to grasp the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
| trophy will somehow become the God-Emperor of Earth.
| nyeah wrote:
| It'll be fine.
| nickjj wrote:
| I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460
| (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M
| Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of
| fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700.
|
| I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current
| day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never
| have to upgrade.
|
| I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web
| development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing
| with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming
| is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs
| very well at 2560x1440.
|
| For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a
| generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference"
| thing.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt
| like flipping the "modern computer" switch overnight.
| Everything since has been incremental unless you're doing ML or
| high-end gaming.
| asenna wrote:
| I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a
| similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon.
| An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade
| -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but
| still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t,
| this is a whole different thing".
| wongarsu wrote:
| The M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great
| because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per
| dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you
| were after performance they were not exactly the best thing
| to get
| skylurk wrote:
| For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were
| always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better
| value if you cared about CPU performance.
|
| After the M1, my casual home laptop started outperforming
| my top-spec work laptops.
| kergonath wrote:
| > For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were
| always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better
| value if you cared about CPU performance.
|
| But not if you cared about battery life, because that was
| the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until
| about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not
| Intel's priority and it went south basically after
| Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped
| investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they
| were working on the M1 generation some time before it was
| announced.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's a lot more believable if you tried some of the other
| Wintel machines at the time. Those Macbook chassis were the
| hottest of the bunch, it's no surprise the Macbook Pro was
| among the first to be redesigned.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched
| Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional
| Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is
| working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's
| unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel
| (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs).
|
| It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans,
| random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that
| still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and
| mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is
| okay, at least. What a joke.
|
| Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci
| timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and
| handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the
| Lenovo choking on an IDE.
| ponector wrote:
| There will be not so big difference if you compare
| laptops in the same price brackets. Cheap PCs are crap.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > Cheap PCs are crap.
|
| Expensive PCs are also crap. My work offers Macbooks or
| Windows laptops (currently, Dell, but formerly Lenovo
| and/or HP), and these machines are all decidedly not
| 'cheap' PCs. Often retailing in excess of $2k.
|
| All my coworkers who own Windows laptops do is bellyache
| about random issues, poor battery life, and sluggish
| performance.
|
| I used to have a Windows PC for work about 3 years ago as
| well, and it was also a piece of crap. Battery would
| decide to 'die' at 50% capacity. After replacement, 90
| minute battery life off charger. Fan would decide to run
| constantly if you did anything even moderately intensive
| such as a Zoom meeting.
| pstadler wrote:
| This and high resolution displays, for me at least.
| wdfx wrote:
| The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when
| I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly
| labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.
| genewitch wrote:
| "Core" was/is like "PowerPC" or "Ryzen", just a name. Intel
| Core i9, for instance, as opposed to Intel Pentium D, both
| x86_x64, different chip features.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I've had this with gen5 PCIe SSDs recently. My T710 is so
| fast it's hard to believe. But you need to have a lot of data
| to make it worth.
|
| Example: > time du -sh . 737G .
| ________________________ Executed in 24.63 secs
|
| And on my laptop that has a gen3, lower spec NVMe:
| > time du -sh . 304G .
| ________________________ Executed in 80.86 secs
|
| It's almost 10 times faster. The CPU must have something to
| do with it too but they're both Ryzen 9.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence
| here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send
| 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a
| laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the
| CPU in the 10s of watts range.
| simlevesque wrote:
| There's over twice as much content in the first test.
| It's around 3.8gb/s vs 30gb/s if you divide both folder
| size and both du durations. That makes it 7.9 times
| faster and I'm comfortable calling this "almost 10
| times".
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| oops. I missed the size diff. that's a solid 8x. that's
| cool!
| ls65536 wrote:
| The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather
| the total number of files/directories that need to be
| traversed (and their file sizes summed).
| simlevesque wrote:
| I responded here, it's essentially the same content:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150030
| taneliv wrote:
| I believe you, but your benchmark is not very useful. I get
| this on two 5400rpm 3T HDDs in a mirror:
| $ time du -sh . 935G .
| real 0m1.154s
|
| Simply because there's less than 20 directories and the
| files are large.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I should have been more clear: It's my http cache for my
| crawling jobs. Lots of files in many shapes.
|
| My new setup: gen5 ssd in desktop: >
| time find . -type f | wc -l 5645741
| ________________________ Executed in 4.77 secs
|
| My old setup, gen3 ssd in laptop: >
| time find . -type f | wc -l 2944648
| ________________________ Executed in 27.53 secs
|
| Both are running pretty much non-stop, very slowly.
| jug wrote:
| I thought so too on my mini PC. Then I got myself my current
| Mac mini M4 and I have to give it to Apple, or maybe in part
| to ARM... It was like another SSD moment. It's still not spun
| up the fan and run literally lukewarm at most my office,
| coding and photo work.
| sneak wrote:
| Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing
| their job and making their income should have a $5k/year
| computer hardware budget _at a minimum_? I'm not saying to do
| what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year
| but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a
| few thousand dollars per year delta.
|
| I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade
| them often, because, why take even the tiniest risk that my old
| or outdated hardware slows down my revenue generation which is
| orders of magnitude greater than their cost to replace?
|
| Even if you don't go the overkill route like me, we're talking
| about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine
| which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.
|
| Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to
| make that revenue.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I don't spend money on my computers from a work or "revenue-
| generating" perspective because my work buys me a computer to
| work on. Different story if you freelance/consult ofc.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Yes? I think that's crazy. I just maxed out my new Thinkpad
| with 96 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD and even at today's prices,
| it still came in at just about $2k and should run smoothly
| for many years.
|
| Prices are high but they're not _that_ high, unless you 're
| buying the really big GPUs.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Where can you buy a new Thinkpad with 96GB and 4TB SSD for
| $2K? Prices are looking quite a bit higher than that for
| the P Series, at least on Lenovo.com in the U.S. And I
| don't see anything other than the P Series that lets you
| get 96GB of RAM.
| lionkor wrote:
| Typing this on similar spec P16s that was around 2.6k or
| so. So if you call anything under 3k simply 2k, then it
| was 2k.
|
| Thats in Germany, from a corporate supplier.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| You have to configure it with the lowest-spec SSD and
| then replace that with an aftermarket 4 TB SSD at around
| $215. The P14s I bought last week, with that and the 8 GB
| Nvidia GPU, came to a total of USD $2150 after taxes,
| including the SSD. Their sale price today is not quite as
| good as it was last week but it's still in that ballpark;
| with the 255H CPU and iGPU and a decent screen, and you
| can get the Intel P14s for $2086 USD. That actually
| becomes $1976 because you get $110 taken off at checkout.
| Then throw in the aftermarket SSD and it'll be around
| $2190. And if you log in as a business customer you'll
| get another couple percent off as well.
|
| The AMD model P14s, with 96 GB and upgraded CPU and the
| nice screen and linux, still goes for under $1600 at
| checkout, which becomes $1815 when you add the
| aftermarket SSD upgrade.
|
| It's still certainly a lot to spend on a laptop if you
| don't need it, but it's a far cry from $5k/year.
| ChromaticPanic wrote:
| That's crazy spend for anyone making sub 100K
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| It is crazy for anyone making any amount. A $15k desktop is
| overkill for anything but the most demanding ML or 3D work
| loads, and the majority of the cost will be in GPUs or
| dedicated specialty hardware and software.
|
| A developer using even the clunkiest IDE (Visual Studio -
| I'm still a fan and daily user, it's just the "least
| efficient") can get away without a dedicated graphics card,
| and only 32GB of ram.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| thats a crazy spend for sub-200k or even sub-500k
|
| you're just building a gaming rig with a flimsy work-
| related justification.
| kotaKat wrote:
| I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no
| way to move outward from where I currently live, show me
| where I'm gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my
| barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is
| "more" than the local average by only around $10-15k.)
|
| I'm struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all
| these prices have basically fucked me out of _everything_.
| I'm riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to
| go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of
| the entire industry at this point. I can't get hardware to
| learn, subscriptions to use, anything.
|
| Big Tech has made it unaffordable for _everyone_.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The bright side is the bust is going to make a glut of
| cheap used parts.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 8GB or 16GB of RAM is absolutely a usable machine for many
| software development and IT tasks, especially if you set up
| compressed swap to stretch it further. Of course you need
| to run something other than Windows or macOS. It's only
| very niche use cases such as media production or running
| local LLM's that will absolutely require more RAM.
| pqtyw wrote:
| > something other than Windows or macOS > 8GB
|
| No modern IDE either. Nor a modern Linux desktop
| environment either (they are not that much more memory
| efficient than Macos or windows). Yes you can work with
| not much more than a text editor. But why?
| Krssst wrote:
| One concern I'd have is that if the short-term supply of RAM
| is fixed anyway, even if all daily computer users were to
| increase their budget to match the new pricing and demand
| exceeds supply again, the pricing would just increase in
| response until prices get unreasonable enough that demand
| lowers back to supply.
| Clent wrote:
| This is a crazy out of touch perspective.
|
| Depending on salary, 2 magnitudes at $5k is $500k.
|
| That amount of money for the vast majority of humans across
| the planet is unfathomable.
|
| No one is worried about if the top 5% can afford DRAM.
| Literally zero people.
| vultour wrote:
| Yes, that's an absolutely deranged opinion. Most tech jobs
| can be done on a $500 laptop. You realise some people don't
| even make your computer budget in net income every year,
| right?
| sneak wrote:
| Most tech jobs _could_ be done on a $25 ten year old
| smartphone with a cracked screen and bulging battery.
|
| That's exactly my point. Underspending on your tools is a
| misallocation of resources.
| antiframe wrote:
| Yes, you don't want to under spend on your tools to the
| point where you suffer. But, I think you are missing the
| flip side. I can do my work comfortably with 32GB RAM,
| but my 1% a year budget could get me more. But, why not
| pocket it.
|
| The goal is the right tool for the job, not the best tool
| you can afford.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Overspending on your tools is a misallocation of
| resources. An annual $22k spend on computing is around
| 10-20x over spend for a wealthy individual. I'm in the
| $200-300k/year, self-employed, buys-my-own-shit camp, and
| I can't imagine spending 1% of my income on computing
| needs, let alone close to 10%. There is no way to make
| that make sense.
| pqtyw wrote:
| That's a bizarrely extreme position. For almost everyone
| ~$2000-3000 PC from several years ago is
| indistinguishable from one they can buy now from a
| productivity standpoint. Nobody is talking about $25 ten
| year old smartphones. Of course claiming that a $500
| laptop is sufficient is also a severe exaggeration, a
| used desktop, perhaps...
| nickjj wrote:
| I try to come at it with a pragmatic approach. If I feel
| pain, I upgrade and don't skimp out.
|
| ======== COMPUTER ========
|
| I feel no pain yet.
|
| Browsing the web is fast enough where I'm not waiting around
| for pages to load. I never feel bound by limited tabs or
| anything like that.
|
| My Rails / Flask + background worker + Postgres + Redis +
| esbuild + Tailwind based web apps start in a few seconds with
| Docker Compose. When I make code changes, I see the results
| in less than 1 second in my browser. Tests run fast enough
| (seconds to tens of seconds) for the size of apps I develop.
|
| Programs open very quickly. Scripts I run within WSL 2 also
| run quickly. There's no input delay when typing or
| performance related nonsense that bugs me all day. Neovim
| runs buttery smooth with a bunch of plugins through the
| Windows Terminal.
|
| I have no lag when I'm editing 1080p videos even with a 4k
| display showing a very wide timeline. I also record my screen
| with OBS to make screencasts with a webcam and have live
| streamed without perceivable dropped frames, all while
| running programming workloads in the background.
|
| I can mostly play the games I want, but this is by far the
| weakest link. If I were more into gaming I would upgrade, no
| doubt about it.
|
| ======== PHONE ========
|
| I had a Pixel 4a until Google busted the battery. It runs all
| of the apps (no games) I care about and Google Maps is fast.
| The camera was great.
|
| I recently upgraded to a Pixel 9a because the repair center
| who broke my 4a in a number of ways gave me $350 and the 9a
| was $400 a few months ago. It also runs everything well and
| the camera is great. In my day to day it makes no difference
| from the 4a, literally none. It even has the same storage
| space of which I have around 50% space left with around 4,500
| photos saved locally.
|
| ======== ASIDE ========
|
| I have a pretty decked out M4 MBP laptop issued by my
| employer for work. I use it every day and for most tasks I
| feel no real difference vs my machine. The only thing it does
| noticeably faster is heavily CPU bound tasks that can be
| parallelized. It also loads the web version of Slack about
| 250ms faster, that's the impact of a $2,500+ upgrade for
| general web usage.
|
| I'm really sensitive to skips, hitches and performance
| related things. For real, as long as you have a decent
| machine with an SSD using a computer feels really good, even
| for development workloads where you're not constantly
| compiling something.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and
| earn 100x that.
|
| 25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that
| much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a
| full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.
|
| I agree with the general principle of having savings for
| emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably
| include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they
| need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed
| towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the
| reality of very well-paid SV engineers.
|
| The soon to be unemployed SV engineers when LLM's mean
| anyone can design an app and backend with no coding
| knowledge.
| genewitch wrote:
| and you can code from an rpi / cellphone and use a cloud
| computer to run it so you actually don't really need an
| expensive PC at all
| Dibby053 wrote:
| >Most developers in the third world don't make that in a
| full year
|
| And many in the first world haha
| macNchz wrote:
| What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is
| self indulgence justified as << investment >>. I built a
| pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades
| since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of
| NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that
| time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for
| my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex
| dev environment, but I really don't know what I would have
| gotten out of replacing it every year since. It's still
| blazing fast.
|
| Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single
| year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would
| probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of
| replacing it that many times.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Every hardware update for me involves hours or sometimes
| days of faffing with drivers and config and working round
| new bugs.
|
| Nobody is paying for that time.
|
| And whilst it is 'training', my training time is better
| spent elsewhere than battling with why cuda won't work on
| my GPU upgrade.
|
| Therefore, I avoid hardware and software changes merely
| because a tiny bit more speed isn't worth the hours I'll
| put in.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4
| build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get
| more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost
| would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU
| + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for
| that upgrade.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _This is self indulgence justified as << investment >>._
|
| Exactly that. There's zero way that level of spending is
| paying for itself in increased productivity, considering
| they'll still be 99% as productive spending something like
| a tenth of that.
|
| It's their luxury spending. Fine. Just don't pretend it's
| something else, or tell others they ought to be doing the
| same, right?
| kube-system wrote:
| I agree with the general sentiment - that you shouldn't pinch
| pennies on tools that you use every day. But at the same
| time, someone who makes their money writing with with a pen
| shouldn't need to spend thousands on pens. Once you have
| adequate professional-grade tools, you don't need to throw
| more money at the problem.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _I'm not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a
| $15k desktop every year_
|
| > _I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy_
|
| Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a
| laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool!
| Love that for you.
|
| Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you
| shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for
| doing their job and making their income should have a
| $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum?
|
| Yes. This is how we get websites and apps that don't run on a
| normal person's computer, because the devs never noticed
| their performance issues on their monster machines.
|
| Modern computing would be a lot better if devs had to use old
| phones, basic computers, and poor internet connections more
| often.
| hansvm wrote:
| Most people who use computers for the main part of their jobs
| literally can't spend that much if they don't want to be
| homeless.
|
| Most of the rest arguably shouldn't. If you have $10k/yr in
| effective pay after taxes, healthcare, rent, food,
| transportation to your job, etc, then a $5k/yr purchase is
| insane, especially if you haven't built up an emergency fund
| yet.
|
| Of the rest (people who can relatively easily afford it),
| most still probably shouldn't. Unless the net present value
| of your post-tax future incremental gains (raises,
| promotions, etc) derived from that expenditure exceeds $5k/yr
| you're better off financially doing almost anything else with
| that cash. That's doubly true when you consider that truly
| amazing computers cost $2k total nowadays without substantial
| improvements year-to-year. Contrasting buying one of those
| every 2yrs vs your proposal, you'd need a $4k/yr net
| expenditure to pay off somehow, somehow making use of the
| incremental CPU/RAM/etc to achieve that value. If it doesn't
| pay off then it's just a toy you're buying for personal
| enjoyment, not something that you should nebulously tie to
| revenue generation potential with an arbitrary 1% rule. Still
| maybe buy it, but be honest about the reason.
|
| So, we're left with people who can afford such a thing and
| whose earning potential actually does increase enough with
| that hardware compared to a cheaper option for it to be worth
| it. I'm imagining that's an extremely small set. I certainly
| use computers heavily for work and could drop $5k/yr without
| batting an eye, but I literally have no idea what I could do
| with that extra hardware to make it pay off. If I could spend
| $5k/yr on internet worth a damn I'd do that in a heartbeat
| (moving soon I hope, which should fix that), but the rest of
| my setup handily does everything I want it to.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I've bought hardware for work before
| (e.g., nobody seems to want to procure Linux machines for
| devs even when they're working on driver code and whatnot),
| and it's paid off, but at the scale of $5k/yr I don't think
| many people do something where that would have positive ROI.
| hansvm wrote:
| It's too late to edit, but I do have one more thought on
| the topic.
|
| From the perspective of an individual, ROI has to be large
| to justify a $5k/yr investment. HOWEVER, the general
| principle of "if something is your livelihood, then you
| should be willing to invest in it as appropriate" is an
| excellent thing to keep in mind. Moreover, at the scale of
| a company and typical company decisions the advice makes a
| ton of sense -- if a $1k monitor and $2k laptop allow your
| employees to context-switch better or something then you
| should almost certainly invest in that hardware (contrasted
| with the employee's view of ROI, the investments are tax-
| deductible and just have to pay off in absolute value, plus
| they don't have the delay/interaction with
| wages/promotions/etc introducing uncertainty and loss into
| the calculation) (the difference between a few hundred
| dollars and a few thousand dollars in total capital
| investment probably does have a huge difference in outcomes
| for a lot of computer-based employee roles).
| pharrington wrote:
| are you paid by the FLOP?
| neogodless wrote:
| Have you ever heard of the term "efficiency"?
|
| It's when you find ways to spend the minimum amount of
| resources in order to get the maximum return on that spend.
|
| With computer hardware, often buying one year old hardware
| and/or the second best costs a tiny fraction of the cost of
| the bleeding edge, while providing very nearly 100% of the
| performance you'll utilize.
|
| That and your employer should pay for your hardware in many
| cases.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| If you are consistently maxing out your computers performance
| in a way that is limiting your ability to earn money at a
| rate greater than the cost of upgrades, and you can't offload
| that work to the cloud, then I guess it might make sense.
|
| If, you are like every developer I have ever met, the
| constraint is your own time, motivation and skills, then
| spending $22k dollars per year is a pretty interesting waste
| of resources.
|
| DOes it makes sense to buy good tools for your job? Yes. Does
| it make sense to buy the most expensive version of the tool
| that you already own last years most expensive version of?
| Rarely.
| iberator wrote:
| Extremist point of view, and NOT optimal. Diminishing
| performance per $...
|
| Proper calculation is: cost/ performance ratio. Then buy a
| second from the list:)
| crote wrote:
| Sorry, but that's delusional.
|
| For starters, hardware doesn't innovate quickly enough to buy
| a new generation every year. There was a 2-year gap between
| Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000, for example, and a 3-year gap
| between Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000. On top of that, _most_ of
| the parts can be reused, so you 're _at best_ dropping in a
| new CPU and some new RAM sticks.
|
| Second, the performance improvement just isn't there. Sure,
| there's a 10% performance increase in benchmarks, but that
| does _not_ translate to a 10% productivity improvement for
| software development. Even a 1% increase is unlikely, as very
| few tasks are compute-bound for any significant amount of
| time.
|
| You can only get to $15k by doing something stupid like
| buying a Threadripper, or putting an RTX 4090 into it. There
| _are_ genuine use-cases for that kind of hardware - but it
| isn 't in software development. It's like buying a Ferrari to
| do groceries: at a certain point you've got to admit that
| you're just doing it to show off your wealth.
|
| You do you, but in all honesty you'd probably get a better
| result spending that money on a butler to bring your coffee
| to your desk instead of wasting time by walking to the coffee
| machine.
| kube-system wrote:
| > I've never been more fearful of components breaking than
| current day.
|
| The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a
| new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely
| didn't rely on Pentium processors.
|
| Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day
| minimum wage.
| kube-system wrote:
| I was an unemployed student then -- a generous family
| member gifted me my first Windows PC, and it cost about the
| same as a used car.
| briffle wrote:
| Yep, I had a Cyrix processor in mine during that time.
| Slackware didn't care.
| pixl97 wrote:
| It also worked as a very good space heater.
| adventured wrote:
| Except nobody earns the minimum wage today, it's less than
| 1/2 of 1% of US labor.
|
| The median full-time wage is now $62,000. You can start at
| $13 at almost any national retailer, and $15 or above at
| CVS / Walgreens / Costco. The cashier positions require
| zero work background, zero skill, zero education. You can
| make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping
| pizzas at Little Caesars.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Counterpoint: affording _average_ rent for a 1-bedroom
| apartment (~$1,675) requires that exact median full-time
| wage. $15 an hour affords you about $740 for monthly
| housing expenses. One can suggest getting two roommates
| for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would be missing
| the fact that this is very unusual for the last century.
| It 's more in line with housing economics from the early-
| to-mid 19th century.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs,
| like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars._
|
| Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!?
|
| Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159%
| change. Awesome!
|
| Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe
| skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a
| slightly more comfortable life.
|
| Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state
| tuation in 2025: $11,610. Wait a second! That's a 333%
| change. Uh oh.
|
| Should we do the same calculation with housing...? Sure,
| I love making myself more depressed. 1995: $114,600.
| 2025: $522,200. 356% change. Fuck.
| genewitch wrote:
| 1980 mustang vs 2025 mustang is what i usually use. in
| the past 12 years my price per KWh electricity costs have
| doubled.
|
| in the mid 90s you could open a CD (certificate of
| deposit at a bank or credit union) and get 9% or more
| APY. savings accounts had ~4% interest.
|
| in the mid 90s a gallon of gasoline in Los Angeles county
| was $0.899 in the summer and less than that any other
| time. It's closer to $4.50 now.
| mrits wrote:
| The BBQ place across the street from me pays $19/hour to
| be a cashier in Austin. Or the sign says it does anyways
| jfindper wrote:
| sweet! according to austintexas.gov, that's only $2.63
| below the 2024 living wage. $5.55 below, if you use the
| MIT numbers for 2025.
|
| As long as you don't run into anything unforseen like
| medical expenses, car breakdowns, etc., you can _almost_
| afford a bare-bones, mediocre life with no retirement
| savings.
| hylaride wrote:
| I don't disagree that there has been a huge issue with
| stagnant wages, but not everybody who works minimum wage
| needs to make a living wage. Some are teenagers, people
| just looking for part time work, etc. Pushing up minimum
| wage too high can risk destroying jobs that are
| uneconomical at that level that could have been better
| than nothing for many people.
|
| That being said, there's been an enormous push by various
| business groups to do everything they can to keep wages
| low.
|
| It's a complicated issue and one can't propose solutions
| without acknowledging that there's a LOT of nuance...
| jfindper wrote:
| > _but not everybody who works minimum wage needs to make
| a living wage_
|
| I think this is a distraction that is usually rolled out
| to derail conversations about living wages. Not saying
| that you're doing that here, but it's often the case when
| the "teenager flipping burgers" argument is brought up.
|
| Typically in conversations about living wages, people are
| talking about financially _independent_ adults trying to
| make their way through life without starving _while
| working 40 hours per week_. I don 't think anyone is
| seriously promoting a living wage for the benefit of
| financially _dependent_ minors.
|
| And, in any case, the solution could also be (totally, or
| in part) a reduction in expenses instead of increase in
| income.
|
| > _It 's a complicated issue and one can't propose
| solutions without acknowledging that there's a LOT of
| nuance..._
|
| That's for sure! I know it's not getting solved on the
| hacker news comment section, at least.
| hylaride wrote:
| > I think this is a distraction that is usually rolled
| out to derail conversations about living wages. Not
| saying that you're doing that here, but it's often the
| case when the "teenager flipping burgers" argument is
| brought up.
|
| If you're focusing on minimum wage, they tent to be
| highly coupled, though some jurisdictions have lower
| minimum wages for minors to deal with this.
|
| > Typically in conversations about living wages, people
| are talking about financially independent adults trying
| to make their way through life without starving while
| working 40 hours per week. I don't think anyone is
| seriously promoting a living wage for the benefit of
| financially dependent minors.
|
| Few minimum wage jobs even offer the option to work full
| time. Many retail environments have notoriously
| unpredictable shifts that are almost impossible for
| workers to plan around. I've heard varying reasons for
| this (companies like having more employees working fewer
| hours for flexibility down to avoiding people on the full
| time payroll means they legally don't have to offer
| benefits). The result is that minimum wage earners often
| have to juggle multiple jobs, childcare, and the negative
| effects of commuting to all of them.
|
| This also ignores many other factors around poverty, such
| as housing costs and other inflation.
|
| > That's for sure! I know it's not getting solved on the
| hacker news comment section, at least.
|
| For sure! 99% of people on HN haven't had to experience
| living long term off of it. I did for awhile in college,
| where outside of tuition I had to pay my own way in a
| large city (I fully acknowledge that this is anecdotal
| and NOT the same as poverty living). I only had to feed
| myself, not think about saving for the future, and I was
| sharing a house with other geeky roommates where we had
| some of the best times of our lives. I don't think we
| could have pulled that off in today's economic
| environment...
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Does the sign happen to have the words "up to" before the
| dollar amount?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're identifying the right problem (school and housing
| costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to
| an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you
| actually need is to get those costs back down.
|
| The easy way to realize this is to notice that the
| _median_ wage has increased by proportionally _less_ than
| the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle
| can 't afford school or housing either. And what happens
| if you increase the minimum wage faster than overall
| wages? Costs go up even more, and so does unemployment
| when small businesses who are also paying those high real
| estate costs now also have to pay a higher minimum wage.
| You're basically requesting the annihilation of the
| middle class.
|
| Whereas you make housing cost less and that helps the
| people at the bottom _and_ the people in the middle.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage)
| when what you actually need is to get those costs back
| down._
|
| I'm not really resorting to any solution.
|
| My comment is pointing out that when you only do one side
| of the equation (income) without considering the other
| side (expenses), it's worthless. _Especially_ when you
| are trying to make a comparison across years.
|
| How we go about fixing the problem, if we ever do, is
| another conversation. But my original comment doesn't
| attempt to suggest any solution, especially not one that
| "requests the annihilation of the middle class". It's
| solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch
| of meaningless numbers.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a
| bunch of meaningless numbers.
|
| The point of that comment was to point out that minimum
| wage is irrelevant because basically nobody makes that
| anyway; even the entry-level jobs pay more than the
| federal minimum wage.
|
| In that context, arguing that the higher-than-minimum
| wages people are actually getting still aren't sufficient
| implies an argument that the minimum wage should be
| higher than _that_. And people could read it that way
| even if it 's not what you intended.
|
| So what I'm pointing out is that that's the wrong
| solution and doing that rather than addressing the real
| issue (high costs) is the thing that destroys the middle
| class.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _implies an argument that the minimum wage should be
| higher than that._
|
| It can also imply that expenses should come down, you
| just picked the implication you want to argue against.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Exactly. When it's ambiguous at best it's important that
| people not try to follow the bad fork.
| reissbaker wrote:
| This will probably be an unpopular reply, but "real
| median household income" -- aka, inflation-adjusted
| median income -- has steadily risen since the 90s and is
| currently at an all-time high in the United States. [1]
| Inflation includes the cost of housing (by measuring the
| cost of rent).
|
| However, we are living through a housing supply crisis,
| and while overall cost of living hasn't gone up,
| housing's share of that has massively multiplied. We
| would all be living much richer lives if we could bring
| down the cost of housing -- or at least have it flatline,
| and let inflation take care of the rest.
|
| Education is interesting, since most people don't
| actually pay the list price. The list price has gone up a
| lot, but the percentage of people paying list price has
| similarly gone down a lot: from over 50% in the 90s for
| state schools to 26% today, thanks to a large increase in
| subsidy programs (student aid). While real education
| costs have still gone up somewhat, they've gone up much
| less than the prices you're quoting lead you to believe:
| those are essentially a tax on the rich who don't qualify
| for student aid. [2]
|
| 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
|
| 2: https://econofact.org/how-much-does-college-really-
| cost
| jfindper wrote:
| I have several qualms with how the real median household
| income is calculated, specifically the consumer price
| index.
|
| But I agree that tackling housing alone would be
| significant.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| In addition to the other comments, I presume the big box
| retailers do not hire for full-time positions when they
| don't have to, and gig economy work is rapidly replacing
| jobs that used to be minimum wage.
| yndoendo wrote:
| My uncle was running a number of fast food restaurants
| for a franchise owner making millions. His statement
| about this topic is simple, "they are not living wage
| jobs ... go into manufacturing if you want a living
| wage".
|
| I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like
| him to be terrible human beings.
| The-Bus wrote:
| If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a
| successful business. I, too, could become fabulously
| wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for
| $1 so I could resell them for $50.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage"
| jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up
| very recently.
|
| A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't
| need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue,
| now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and
| if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate
| it away.
| autoexec wrote:
| > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't
| need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue,
| now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances
|
| The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not
| teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees.
| The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working
| summer jobs is simply not reality.
|
| Anyone working for someone else, doing literally
| _anything_ for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to
| enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum.
| Any employer offering less than that is either a failed
| business that should die off and make room for one that
| 's better managed or a corporation that is just using
| public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor
| expenses.
| jfindper wrote:
| > _A teenager in his /her first job at McDonald's doesn't
| need a "living wage."_
|
| Wow, a completely bad-faith argument.
|
| Can you try again, but this time, try "steelman" instead
| of "strawman"?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't
| need a "living wage."
|
| Turns out our supply of underage workers is neither
| infinite, nor even sufficient to staff all fast food jobs
| in the nation
| kube-system wrote:
| A teenager is presumably also going to school full time
| and works their job part time, not ~2000 hours per year.
|
| If we build a society where someone working a full time
| job is not able to afford to reasonably survive, we are
| setting ourselves up for a society of crime, poverty, and
| disease.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Can we use the same argument for all of the businesses
| that are only surviving because of VC money?
|
| I find it rich how many tech people are working for money
| losing companies, using technology from money losing
| companies and/or trying to start a money losing company
| and get funding from a VC.
|
| Every job is not meant to support a single person living
| on their own raising a family.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| That's what VC money is for. When it comes to paying
| below a living wage, we typically expect the government
| to provide support to make up the difference (so they're
| not literally homeless). Businesses that rely on
| government to pay their employees should not exist.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| That's kind of the point, a mom and pop restaurant or a
| McDonald's franchise owner doesn't have the luxury of
| burning $10 for every $1 in revenue for years and being
| backed by VC funding.
|
| Oh and the average franchise owner is not getting rich.
| They are making $100K a year to $150K a year depending on
| how many franchises they own.
|
| Also tech companies can afford to pay a tech worker more
| money because you don't have to increase the number of
| workers when you get more customers.
|
| YC is not going to give the aspiring fast food owner
| $250K to start their business like they are going to give
| "pets.ai - AI for dog walkers"
| dpkirchner wrote:
| In that case they probably shouldn't be running a
| McDonald's. They aren't owed that and they shouldn't
| depend on their workers getting government support just
| so the owners can "earn" their own living wage.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Yet tech workers are "owed" making money because they are
| in an industry where their employers "deserve" to survive
| despite losing money because they can get VC funding -
| funded by among others government pension plans?
|
| I find it slightly hypocritical that people can clutch
| their pearls at small businesses who risk their own money
| while yet another BS "AI" company's founders can play
| founder using other people's money.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really
| a successful business.
|
| Let's consider the implications of this. We take an
| existing successful business, change absolutely nothing
| about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the
| local population increases and the government prohibits
| the construction of new housing.
|
| Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to
| pay higher rent, so they're making even _less_ than
| before and there is nothing there for them to increase
| wages with. Meanwhile the wages they were paying before
| are now "not a living wage" because housing costs went
| way up.
|
| Is it this business who is morally culpable for this
| result, or the zoning board?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There are certainly elements of this. And there are also
| elements like my city, where some of the more notable
| local business owners and developers are all _way too
| cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards
| (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events,
| fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs
| together and go on vacation together) which gives them
| greater influence.
|
| All that being said, though, Robert Heinlein said once:
|
| > There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in
| this country the notion that because a man or corporation
| has made a profit out of the public for a number of
| years, the government and the courts are charged with the
| duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in
| the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the
| public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported
| by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor
| corporations have any right to come into court and ask
| that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
| zzzeek wrote:
| in that case it should be completely uncontroversial to
| raise the minimum wage and help that .5% of labor out.
| yet somehow, it's a non-starter. (btw, googling says the
| number is more like 1.1%. in 1979, 13.4% of the labor
| force made minimum wage. this only shows how obsolete the
| current minimum wage level is).
| silisili wrote:
| 1990-1997 averaged >4% yearly compounded minimum wage
| hikes, which is probably about where it should have been.
| The late 90s to today has been <1.25%.
| immibis wrote:
| If you account for inflation it's actually higher than
| current minimum wage.
| morsch wrote:
| Are you sure? From what I can tell it's more like 500 USD RRP
| on release, boxed.
|
| Either way, it was the 90s: two years later that was a budget
| CPU because the top end was two to three times the speed.
| nickjj wrote:
| > The mid 90s was pretty scary too.
|
| If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too
| bad.
|
| You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in
| the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were
| machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.
| microtonal wrote:
| That's kinda like saying _the mid-20s were pretty scary too,
| minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000._.
|
| In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10,
| earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money.
| We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided
| to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we
| could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50
| or something like that and it was fine enough for him to play
| most DOS games. Heck, you could even run Linux (I know
| because I ran Linux in 1994 on a 386SX 25, with 5MB RAM and
| 20MB disk space).
| kube-system wrote:
| > That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary
| too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was
| $3000..
|
| A powerbook 5300 was $6500 in 1995, which is $13,853 today.
| kergonath wrote:
| > A powerbook 5300 was $6500 in 1995
|
| The TCO was much higher, considering how terrible and
| flimsy this laptop was. The power plug would break if you
| looked at it funny and the hinge was stiff and brittle. I
| know that's not the point you are making but I am still
| bitter about that computer.
| sejje wrote:
| Linux notoriously runs on worse hardware than almost
| anything, especially in the 90s
| trollbridge wrote:
| In the mid 90s mere mortals ran a 486DX2 or DX4.
|
| Pentium 60/66s were in the same price tier as expensive alpha
| or sparc workstations.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a
| generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference"
| thing.
|
| The last one were I really remember seeing a huge speed bump
| was going from a regular SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD... Around
| 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a
| NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite
| something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the
| SSD, so there's that too). Before that I don't remember when I
| switched from SATA HDD to SATA SSD.
|
| I'm now running one of those WD SN850X Black NVMe SSD but my
| good old trusty, now ten years old, Samsung 950 Pro is still
| kicking (in the wife's PC). There's likely even better out
| there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably
| priced.
|
| As for my 2015 Core i7-6700K: it's happily running Proxmox and
| Docker (but not always on).
|
| Even consumer parts are exceptionally reliable: the last two
| failures I remember, in 15 years (and I've got _lots_ of
| machines running), are a desktop PSU (replaced by a Be Quiet!
| one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop 's battery.
|
| Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason
| after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months,
| (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first
| gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I
| think Apple got their act together and came up with better
| screens in later models.
|
| Don't worry too much: PCs are quite reliable things. And used
| parts for your PC from 2014 wouldn't be expensive on eBay
| anyway. You're not forced to upgrade to a last gen PC with DDR5
| (atm 3x overpriced) and a 5090 GPU.
| genewitch wrote:
| fyi someone or something is downvoting your recent posts to
| oblivion, and i didn't see any obvious reason.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's motherboards that tend to fail the most. I had one fail
| this year, albeit for the first time.
| aposm wrote:
| A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine
| built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for
| about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in
| a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a
| Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still
| flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but
| I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork
| out double or triple the original cost for replacements...
| Cerium wrote:
| Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get
| corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell
| precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon
| 3.6ghz for about 300 usd.
|
| Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use
| ewaste.
| cestith wrote:
| At home some of my systems are ewaste from former employers
| who would just give it to employees rather than paying for
| disposal. A couple are eBay finds. I do have one highish-end
| system at a time specifically for games. Some of my systems
| are my old hardware reassembled after all the parts for
| gaming have been upgraded over the years.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite"
| home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial
| equipment, but still has some server-like qualities,
| particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it
| ended up becoming my main desktop.
| dotancohen wrote:
| My main desktop is temporarily a Dell server from around
| 2012 or so. Two were thrown out, each with two 2 GiB sticks
| of RAM, so I poached the other machine's RAM for a grand
| total of 8 GiB. I also threw in a small SSD for the /
| partition (/home is on the old HDD). The thing is dirt slow
| but I never notice, even YouTube video playback works fine.
| Even on hardware well over a decade old, Debian runs fine.
| vondur wrote:
| Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual
| Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB
| RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working
| pretty well.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| What are the limitations of machines like these?
| MrVitaliy wrote:
| Just performance when compared to current generation
| hardware. Not significantly worse, but things like DDR4
| ram and single thread performance show the signs of
| aging. Frankly for similar $$$ you can get a new hardware
| from beelink or equivalent.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Got it so basically it's one of those things you do if 1)
| the project interests you and/or 2) you get one dirt
| cheap and don't have high expectations for certain tasks
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Power usage is the main limitation of using these as a
| home server. They have a high idle power use.
| trollbridge wrote:
| One of the reasons I use these is because it's cold half
| the year and it's not hard to basically use to supplement
| the heat.
| arprocter wrote:
| On Dell you'll probably be stuck with the original mobo,
| and their SFFs don't take standard PSUs
| sevensor wrote:
| In favor of their SFFs, they get retired 10k at a time,
| so you might as well pick up a second one for spares.
| arprocter wrote:
| Not a bad call, although you'll probably need to upgrade
| the PSU to add a GPU (if you can find one small enough to
| fit the SFF case)
| snerbles wrote:
| I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding
| habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than
| enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will
| suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA
| domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by
| that game.
|
| On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes
| my day happier.
| bri3d wrote:
| Very bad performance per watt and higher maintenance
| needs. Bad performance per watt generally means a larger
| formfactor and more noise as well.
| gpderetta wrote:
| surely these will soon be scavenged for ram? Arbitrage
| opportunity?
| legobmw99 wrote:
| If they're DDR4 (or even DDR3), it has no value to e.g.
| OpenAI so it shouldn't really matter
| gpderetta wrote:
| The price of DDR4 is also going up!
| auspiv wrote:
| DDR4 prices are up 2-6x in the last couple months
| depending on frequency. High end, high speed modules
| (e.g. 128GB 3200MHz LRDIMM) are super expensive.
| legobmw99 wrote:
| Isn't that due to different reasons (like the end of
| production for older standards)? I recall the same
| happening shortly after manufacturing for DDR3 ceased,
| before eventually demand essentially went to 0
| jl6 wrote:
| Demand spills over to substitutes.
| noboostforyou wrote:
| But it's a cascading effect, OpenAI gobbled up all of
| DDR5 production to the point that consumers are choosing
| to upgrade their older DDR4 systems instead of paying
| even more to upgrade to a new system that uses DDR5. As a
| result, DDR4 ram is at a new all time high -
| https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
| ge96 wrote:
| Optiplex's used to be my go to the SFF, I had a 1050ti in
| there not crazy but worked for basic gaming
| zzzeek wrote:
| ive dealt a bit with ewaste kinds of machines, old Dells and
| such and have two still running here, the issue is they use a
| crapton of power. I had one such ewaste Dell machine that I
| just had to take to the dump it was so underpeforming while
| it used 3x more power than my other two Dells combined.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I have some Dell server with dual Xeons and 192GB RAM. It is
| NUMA but that's fine for Docker workloads where you can just
| associate them with a CPU.
|
| The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it
| runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay,
| not Newegg.
|
| I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage
| that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't
| natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2
| expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard
| bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-
| feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.
| forinti wrote:
| You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs.
|
| I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4
| with brand new motherboards.
|
| They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess
| that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an
| upgrade but their MBs gave in.
|
| You can get these for US$20-US$30.
| prmoustache wrote:
| As other mentionned, there are plenty of refurbished stuff and
| second hand parts that there isn't any risk of finding yourself
| having to buy something at insane prices if your computer was
| to die today.
|
| If you don't need a GPU for gaming you can get a decent
| computer with an i5, 16GB of ram and an nvme drive for usd 50.
| I bought one a few weeks ago ago.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not
| getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much
| for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day
| when I need to replace it.
| jakogut wrote:
| The Radeon RX 9070 XT performs at a similar level to the RTX
| 5070, and is retailing around $600 right now.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| No CUDA means not an option for me.
| jakogut wrote:
| What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| > What kinds of applications do you use that require
| CUDA?
|
| Molecular dynamics simulations, and related structural
| bio tasks.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Is the CUDA compat layer AMD has that transparently
| compiled existing CUDA just fine insufficient somehow or
| buggy somehow? Or are you just stuck in the mindshare
| game and haven't reevaluate whether the AMD situation has
| changed this year?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I haven't checkout out AMD's transparency layer and know
| nothing about it. I tried to get vkFFT working in
| addition to cuFFT for a specific computation, but can't
| get it working right; crickets on the GH issue I posted.
|
| I use Vulkan for graphics, but Vulkan compute is a mess.
|
| I'm not in a mindshare, and this isn't a political thing.
| I am just trying to get the job done, and have observed
| that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from
| a usability perspective.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I didn't talk about Vulkan compute.
|
| > have observed that no alternative has stepped up to
| nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.
|
| I'm saying this is a mindshare thing if you haven't
| evaluated ROCm / HIP. HIPify can convert CUDA source to
| HIP automatically and HIP is very similar syntax to CUDA.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| TY; will check those out.
| jakogut wrote:
| There's also ZLUDA, which can run llama.cpp and some
| other CUDA workloads already without any modification,
| but it's still maturing.
| adventured wrote:
| You could still easily build a $800-$900 system that would
| dramatically jump forward from that machine.
|
| $700 in 2014 is now $971 inflation adjusted (BLS calculator).
|
| RTX 3060 12gb $180 (eBay). Sub $200 CPU (~5-7 times faster than
| yours). 16gb DDR4 $100-$120. $90 PSU. $100 motherboard. WD
| Black 1tb SSD $120. Roughly $800 (which inflation adjusted
| beats your $700).
|
| Right now is a rather amazing time for CPUs, even though RAM
| prices have gone crazy.
|
| Assume you find some deals somewhere in there, you could do
| slightly better with either pricing or components.
| ls612 wrote:
| GPU prices are actually at MSRP now for most cards other than
| the 5090.
| bilegeek wrote:
| Problem is MSRP is also inflated, and Covid has locked that
| in. Arc Battlemage is the only exception I see.
| ls612 wrote:
| You've never been able to buy more GPU performance per
| dollar than you can today.
| kcb wrote:
| That's not very encouraging because that statement has
| been true most every day in computing for the past 50
| years. The rate at which the compute per dollar increases
| is what matters.
| square_usual wrote:
| You can still buy DDR4 for pretty cheap, and if you're
| replacing a computer that old any system built around DDR4 will
| still be a massive jump in performance.
| hnu0847 wrote:
| Don't all RAM manufacturers offer a lifetime warranty?
|
| That said, if the shortage gets bad enough then maybe they
| could find themselves in a situation where they were
| unable/unwilling to honor warranty claims?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've never heard of a lifetime warranty on anything in the
| enterprise space. Maybe consumer stuff, where it's just a
| marketing gimmick.
| chihuahua wrote:
| Oh, your RAM died? That means its lifetime ended at that
| moment, and so did the lifetime warranty. Is there anything
| else we can help you with today?
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Pretty much all consumer RAM vendors offer a lifetime
| warranty. Not exactly a marketing gimmick.
|
| G.Skill, lifetime warranty: https://www.gskill.com/warranty
|
| Corsair, lifetime warranty: https://help.corsair.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360033067832-Warr...
|
| Kingston, lifetime warranty:
| https://www.kingston.com/en/company/warranty
|
| Teamgroup, lifetime warranty:
| https://support.teamgroupinc.com/en/support/warranty.php
| minusLik wrote:
| Hewlett Packard had a lifetime warranty on their network
| gear back in the day.
| acters wrote:
| I am still running an i5 4690k, really all I need is better GPU
| but those prices are criminal. I wish I got a 4090 when I had
| the chance rip
| genewitch wrote:
| intel arc b580 (i think that's the latest one) isn't
| obnoxiously priced but you're going to have to face the fact
| that your PCIE is really very slow. But it should work.
|
| if you want to save even more money get the older Arc
| Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX
| 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in
| had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i
| didn't know that.
|
| I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until
| the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i
| doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices
| going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a
| few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a
| bit.
| interloxia wrote:
| Note that some tinkering may be required for modern cards
| on old systems.
|
| - A UEFI DXE driver to enable Resizable BAR on systems
| which don't support it officially. This provides
| performance benefits and is even required for Intel Arc
| GPUs to function optimally.
|
| List of working motherboards
|
| https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBarUEFI/issues/11
| genewitch wrote:
| you need to enable rebar even for gaming? i had to enable
| rebar for pytorch usage (the oneAPI requires it iirc).
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| By older Arc, I presume you're referring to _Alchemist_ and
| not _Battlemage_ in this case.
|
| One of my brothers has a PC I built for him, specced out
| with an Intel Core i5 13400f CPU and an Intel Arc A770 GPU,
| and it still works great for his needs in 2025.
|
| Surely, Battlemage is more efficient and more compatible in
| some ways over Alchemist. But if you keep your expectations
| in check, it will do just fine in many scenarios. Just
| avoid any games using Unreal Engine 5.
| genewitch wrote:
| yeah i had an A770; it should be ~$200-$250 now on ebay,
| lightly used. It's, in my opinion, worth about $200, if
| it's relatively unused. As i mentioned, it's ~= RTX 3060
| at least for compute loads, and the 16GB is nice to have
| for that. But for a computer from the 4th gen i'd
| probably only get a A380 or A580; the A380 is $60-$120 on
| ebay.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I got a used M1 MacBook Air a year ago.
|
| By far the fastest computer I've ever used. It felt like the
| SSD leap of years earlier.
| davely wrote:
| About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the
| ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update
| from scratch.
|
| So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous
| amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine's DDR4
| RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so.
|
| I've been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this
| post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is
| currently $1200!!!
| VHRanger wrote:
| Same, I got 96GB of high end 6000MHz DDR5 this summer for
| $600CAD and now it's nearly triple at $1500CAD
| genewitch wrote:
| what are you doing with that old 5950x?
| phantasmish wrote:
| I'm worried about the Valve mini PC coming out next year.
|
| Instant buy $700 or under. Probably buy up to $850. At, like,
| $1,100, though... solid no. And I'm counting on that thing to
| take the power-hog giant older Windows PC tower so bulky it's
| unplugged and in a closet half the time, out of my house.
| KronisLV wrote:
| If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction
| of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals
| on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my
| main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580
| GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the
| 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant
| upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get
| particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues.
|
| Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high
| end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5
| prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not.
|
| I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded
| with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable
| prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580,
| or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson
| in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of
| incremental upgrades rather than making something really good
| for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on
| arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe
| at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as
| old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc
| B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and
| not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP,
| unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored
| it).
| snickerbockers wrote:
| >For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a
| generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference"
| thing.
|
| I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my
| linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far
| better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in
| general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only
| install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration
| doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the
| best one.
| Barathkanna wrote:
| When RAM gets so expensive that even Samsung won't buy Samsung
| from Samsung, you know the market has officially entered comic
| mode. At this rate their next quarterly report is just going to
| be one division sending the other an IOU.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Overleverage / debt, and refusing to sell at a certain price,
| are actually very different things though. OpenAI might be a
| tire fire, but Samsung is the gold pan seller here, and
| presumably has an excellent balance sheet.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Apple is going to be even more profitable in the consumer space
| because of RAM prices ? I feel like they are the only player to
| have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off
| guard, have good prices locked in enough in advance and suppliers
| not willing to antagonize such a big customer by backing out of a
| deal.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Apple software typically seems to give a better user experience
| in less RAM in both desktop and mobile.
|
| For the last 10+ years apples iPhones have shipped with about
| half the ram of a flagship android for example.
| Miraste wrote:
| They used to, but they've caught up. The flagship iPhone 17
| has 12GB RAM, the same as the Galaxy S25. Only the most
| expensive Z Fold has more, with 16GB.
|
| RAM pricing segmentation makes Apple a lot of money, but I
| think they scared themselves when AI took off and they had
| millions of 4GB and 8GB products out in the world. The Mac
| minimum RAM specs have gone up too, they're trying to get out
| of the hole they dug.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| People always make this argument. But could you please expand
| on what you think is actually in memory?
|
| code:data, by and large I bet that content held in ram takes
| up the majority of space. And people have complained about
| the lack of ram in iPhones for ages now, particularly with
| how it affects browsers.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| >the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to
| not get caught off guard What?
| Miraste wrote:
| Tim Cook is the Supply Chain Guy. He has been for decades,
| before he ever worked at Apple. He does everything he can to
| make sure that Apple directly controls as much of the supply
| chain as possible, and uses the full extent of their
| influence to get favorable long-term deals on what they don't
| make themselves.
|
| In the past this has resulted in stuff like Samsung Display
| sending their best displays to Apple instead of Samsung
| Mobile.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You make more money selling the good stuff. It's like this in
| just about every industry.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Why bother selling to regular consumers at all then? One or two
| big companies can have everything, and the rest of us can have
| nothing. And we will like it.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| In the 90s, Motorola Mobile used Cypress SRAMs and not Motorola
| SRAMs.
|
| Pricing.
| maxglute wrote:
| Kdrama on this when?
| monster_truck wrote:
| Based on my time working for Samsung this does not surprise me.
| The silos within fight against one another more than they ever
| bother to compete with anyone else
| meindnoch wrote:
| I've bought 2x16GB Samsung ECC RAM last week for $150.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Ironically that site was eating up my RAM. PC World has some
| issues, Chrome & Firefox.
| time4tea wrote:
| Dec 2023:
|
| 96GB (2x48) DDR5 5x00 PS260 today PS1050
|
| 128GB (4x32 ) DDR5 5x00 PS350 today PS1500
|
| Wut?
|
| Edit: formatting
| dehrmann wrote:
| ECC memory has been one of my better investments in the past
| two years, and now because of the crashes it might have
| prevented.
| bpye wrote:
| Kind of wish I went for 2x48GB last year, not 2x32GB. Oh well.
| khannn wrote:
| "The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory
| right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most
| people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that
| trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the
| extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu
| and that they were transitory.
| 542458 wrote:
| Surprisingly, apparently Americans average 279 eggs per year
| per person or 24 per month.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/28/why-ameri...
|
| (This is not a comment making any judgements about cost or the
| state of the economy, I was just surprised to find it that
| high)
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| cuz eggs are in breakfast sandwiches, are ingredients in
| pastries, act as binders in things like meatloaf or fried
| chicken, etc. etc.
| baud147258 wrote:
| Maybe if you include all the eggs in processed food like
| cookies or cakes and in restaurants or other catering
| operations you reach that number? And eggs consumed at home
| could still be around 12 per person?
| silisili wrote:
| That sounded high to me as well(probably because I rarely eat
| eggs), but then I remembered my parents who each eat two per
| day which isn't that uncommon I guess.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| The average person buys, what, 0 ram per month? Which cares.
| khannn wrote:
| The average person buys a phone amortized at 36 months minus
| trade-in value. So they do indeed buy ram every month but
| it's a line item on a phone bill.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Assuming an 8GB phone on average and 2x16GB DDR5 desktop
| sticks being ~$400, the average person then buys 0.25GB RAM
| per month at $3.125.
|
| If you want, you can add in a 16GB laptop every 36 months,
| tripling the total to 0.75GB and ~$10 a month. Still,
| that's multiple times less than the increase in egg price
| compared to the average consumption.
| khannn wrote:
| Apples and oranges comparison. RAM works forever while
| eggs only keep someone full for 4 to 6 hours. I'd
| honestly like to see the amount of time someone is full
| from eating eggs vs the average daily screen time vs the
| cost of both, lets say the service life of the phone is
| 36 months with the cost of the eggs averaged out for that
| three year period.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| There was also a lot of profiteering going on? This was talked
| about quite a bit? And it's still going on in other markets
| with other things like cars??
| khannn wrote:
| "Profiteering"? Truth is... the game was rigged from the
| start
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Sorry, we have to starve so the two dairy distributors can
| have another good quarter. I hear gruel is cheap, for now.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Eggs have traditionally been an extremely cheap protein staple.
|
| A typical pattern might be to have two eggs for breakfast (a
| whopping 120 calories), boiled eggs for lunch/snack (another
| 60-120 calories), and of course baking, but I will pretend that
| people don't bake.
|
| A more typical serving for an adult breakfast might be 3 eggs
| if not supplemented.
|
| For mom and dad and the little one, you're now at 35
| (2+2+1+2)x5 eggs per week. When your cost goes from $6 (2x18
| @3) to $16 (2x18@8) per week, you notice.
|
| Obviously the political discourse around this was not healthy.
| But eggs suddenly becoming a cost you have to notice is a big
| deal, and a symbol for all of the other grocery prices that
| went up simultaneously.
|
| If you're a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch
| with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real
| hardship when you're raising a family on limited income.
|
| The peak was actually closer to $8/dozen, my math has been
| conservative at every step, the situation is worse than I
| describe.
| khannn wrote:
| Parents in the US don't feed their kids eggs for breakfast,
| it's majority cereal or breakfast bars. Maybe some yogurt but
| that's almost always upper middle class or above.
|
| "If you're a typical HN user in the US you might be out of
| touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a
| real hardship when you're raising a family on limited
| income.".
|
| Skill issue. Oatmeal is very cheap and filling. The
| aforementioned yogurt. Nothing, yeah nothing, because the
| average person is obese here and nothing is exactly what they
| need for breakfast. A piece of fruit like the perennial
| classic banana for breakfast. Complaining about egg prices
| comes from the camp of "I tried nothing and nothing worked".
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I agree, but for some reason there's huge mental inertia to
| the foods we eat day to day.
|
| Paying more for staples that you've eaten your whole life
| (especially in a boiled frog way) is much more
| time/energy/mentally cheaper than experimenting with how
| you and your kids might like a bowl of oatmeal prepared.
|
| That said, if you're having trouble making ends meet and
| you have kids, you don't have much of a choice.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| The quintessential out of touch HN comment.
| khannn wrote:
| I have friends with kids, have siblings with kids, and
| indeed did grow up in the US. Ate cereal growing up with
| maybe some eggs on the weekend. My siblings feed their
| kids exactly what I described. My friends feed their kids
| the same. I have no idea how that is out of touch, but I
| grew up lower-middle class and that's my lived
| experience.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| It's more how you said it than what you said.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| I grew up similarly but regularly had eggs for breakfast,
| at least some of the time. Usually on toast. When eggs
| are cheap, that is competitive with cereal or pop tarts.
|
| I would have hoped that better access to nutrition
| information would have led to parents making better
| choices. Absolutely insane that they're still choosing
| desserts for breakfast every day instead of high quality
| Whole Foods like eggs.
| et-al wrote:
| Aside from yoghurt, you've only listed carbs. Sure oatmeal
| has protein (and fiber), but not as much as eggs.
| stuffn wrote:
| > Complaining about egg prices comes from the camp of "I
| tried nothing and nothing worked".
|
| Eggs are one of the highest protein-per-calorie, nutrient
| dense foods you can purchase. Up until recently it was
| cheaper than almost any other staple. When I was growing up
| (admittedly during a time everything was relatively cheap)
| my family ate a lot of eggs. We had spreads, we had eggs
| for breakfast, and eggs were incorporated into dinners in
| one way or another. I'm not the only one. I don't know
| anyone born in my cohort that didn't eat eggs regularly.
|
| > Oatmeal is very cheap and filling
|
| Also completely devoid of the same level of nutrition as
| eggs and requires supplementation.
|
| > it's majority cereal or breakfast bars.
|
| While true this is an education issue not a cost issue. We
| still have at least 3 generations of people having children
| that were raised in the "eggs are horrible for you" times,
| including myself.
|
| > Nothing, yeah nothing, because the average person is
| obese here and nothing is exactly what they need for
| breakfast.
|
| The average person is obese because of the relative ease of
| cheap, high calorie, fillers and good options being more
| expensive. The price of eggs increasing compounds this.
| However, I would wager most adults are obese because of the
| high calorie starbucks, fast food, and snacks. Not because
| of cereal for breakfast.
|
| > A piece of fruit like the perennial classic banana for
| breakfast.
|
| Demonstrably worse for you than both cereal and eggs. Once
| again, defeating your point and STILL demonstrating more
| expensive eggs makes nutritionally worse options the only
| option.
| me551ah wrote:
| It is absolutely the worst time to be a gamer. First it was the
| GPU prices that went up and NVIDIA started to focus on their
| enterprise cards more and more RAM prices. I don't think I've
| seen the price of computer components go up so much.
| qwertox wrote:
| I had planned to build a new workstation this fall, all the parts
| were in the list. but seeing the ram go from 300EUR (96 GB) to
| 820EUR, in-stock for 999EUR, in under a month made me decide that
| i will continue using that laptop from 2019 for maybe another 1.5
| years.
|
| It's a ridiculous situation and these companies, whoever they
| are, should be somewhat ashamed of themselves for the situation
| they're putting us in.
|
| That goes specially for those MF at OpenAI who apparently grabbed
| 40% of the worldwide DRAM production, as well as those sold in
| stores.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I really wanted to build a new PC this year, which is obviously
| not happening anymore. But I do have 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from my
| laptop that I'm not using, after I upgraded to 64GB a while back.
| Now I wonder if I can build a tiny PC around those? Does anyone
| make motherboards that support DDR5 laptop memory?
| ineedasername wrote:
| A bunch of the NUC models use laptop RAM, and often have
| barebones kits. Looks like ASUS has a decent range of kits and
| prebuilt, but you may be able to find boards. If you want
| something expandable, look for the "Pro" and "Extreme" range. I
| had one of the first gaming-oriented NUC's a while back, Hades
| Canyon, highly capable.
| bakugo wrote:
| https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X600TM-ITX/index.asp
|
| Can't find it for sale, though. There's also a barebones mini-
| PC:
|
| https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20X600%20Series/i...
| max-leo wrote:
| Minisforum offer a Mini-ITX board with a 16-core Zen4 AMD CPU
| soldered on for under $400. The AM5 socket version of that same
| CPU alone is over 500. It uses SO-DIMM DDR5 so might be an
| interesting option in your case. (Yes, it is a mobile CPU but
| it has the same amounts of L2/L3 Cache as the AM5 chip, just
| clocked 300MHz slower)
|
| https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-motherboard
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| There are adapters that convert the laptop memory for desktop
| motherboards. So that's an option too.
| blindriver wrote:
| I bought 64 GB DDR4 RAM for $189 in 2022. The exact same memory
| is now almost $600 on Amazon. How can this not impact PC sales
| and the sale of other electronics?
| layer8 wrote:
| It will. Manufacturers who didn't get good supply contracts in
| time might be forced to leave the market.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Once the AI bubble pops there will be smoking deals on RAM (and
| everything else).
| Shank wrote:
| This is going to be a serious problem. We've had smart devices
| percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines
| to fridges. That's all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At
| what point does this become a national security issue? People
| need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will
| cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the
| supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
| tippa123 wrote:
| This is to be expected from any large corporation. In my
| experience, this sort of infighting leads to low morale and
| wastes a significant amount of energy that could be directed
| somewhere far more productive.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| It's unfortunate that we will soon not have computers because it
| is not profitable enough. Alas. Too bad the market is so
| efficient.
| dmix wrote:
| I'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary
| shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one
| where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing
| new gets built without extreme careful planning.
|
| AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things
| will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go
| back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for
| this not to scale up.
|
| Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being
| built all of a sudden but it will adapt.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| >AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and
| things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips
| and go back to normal as always. There's too much money
| involved for this not to scale up.
|
| What will they do when people continue to not pay for this
| crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh,
| nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with
| trillions of dollars...
|
| >Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being
| built all of a sudden but it will adapt.
|
| Which data centers?
| dmix wrote:
| > Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are
| gambling with trillions of dollars...
|
| I pay for 3 different AI products and every person on my
| team is paying for at least one. Just because some
| enterprise sales teams rushed to oversell some half-baked
| AI products they duct taped together doesn't mean there
| isn't a huge market.
|
| > Which data centers?
|
| Microsoft
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-
| world... Anthropic
| https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-
| construction... Twitter
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-
| twitte... CoreSite https://www.coresite.com/news/coresite-
| launches-ny3-data-cen...
|
| Meta, Google, and Oracle are scaling theirs up too
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Well well well. From an anti monopoly standpoint isn't it
| interesting that each business is doing what it should for its
| own best interests rather than special deals because they're
| under the same umbrella?
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I love how I've seen a bunch of responses that amount to "do
| you really need that much RAM anyway?" Unreal.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I am sooooooooooooooooooooooo glad I bought a 6000Mhz 2x16 kit
| before all this nonsense started.
|
| I'll be honest, I have 0 confidence that this is a transient
| event. Once the AI hype cools off, Nvidia will just come up with
| something else that suddenly needs all their highest end
| products. Tech companies will all hype it up, and suddenly
| hardware will be expensive again.
|
| The hardware manufacturers and chip designers have gotten a taste
| of inflated prices and they are NOT going to let it go. Do not
| expect a 'return to normal'
|
| Even if demand goes back to exactly what it what, expect prices
| to for some reason be >30% higher than before for no reason - or
| as they would call it 'market conditions'.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| I'm now glad I bought 128GB of DDR4 when building a new dual
| purpose server-gaming PC two years ago. The RAM is now worth way
| more than the rest of the parts combined.
|
| I wonder how this will impact phone prices.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Seriously concerned for the future of consumer electronics right
| now.
|
| Next up: Nvidia exits the consumer hardware space and shifts
| fully to datacenter chips.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Apple has the opportunity to do something really funny and
| radically increase the base RAM configurations of all their
| unified memory/CPU/GPU chips. Intel/AMD builders would struggle
| to meet the price/capacity points.
| koolala wrote:
| Don't they have to pay the same crazy prices? What gives them
| the opportunity?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| They already overprice their memory, so they have a lot more
| headroom.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to
| run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that
| can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface.
|
| In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned
| as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was
| pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be
| a middle ground between 64k for a craptastic text-only email
| client and a 1Gb OS / Browser / Webmail combo that could probably
| run that DOS TSR in an emulator as an attachment to a short
| email.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| You have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across
| three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating
| systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to
| hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months.
|
| You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React
| and React Native.
|
| And none of your customers will complain because the people
| with money to spend are rocking 12GB of RAM on their phone.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Yo, your comment makes it seem like AI deserves this memory and
| chrome does not...
| ralferoo wrote:
| I'm not surprised this is happening in a massive group of
| companies. I once worked for a smallish company with 400 staff,
| with basically one product, but different teams - backend,
| frontend, database, QA, sales, etc... If you were ever speaking
| to someone from a different team for more than 15 minutes, it had
| to be put into your weekly timesheet so your time could be cross-
| billed to the other department.
|
| Obviously the net effect was to silo all the different
| departments so that nobody really knew how the entire product
| worked, except the few smokers who'd regularly go outside and
| smoke for 15+ minutes and chat to whoever else was around.
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