[HN Gopher] Hold on to Your Hardware
___________________________________________________________________
Hold on to Your Hardware
Author : LucidLynx
Score : 545 points
Date : 2026-03-27 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xn--gckvb8fzb.com)
| camgunz wrote:
| I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive
| here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take
| money from data center builders _and_ consumers, just like pre-
| bubble.
| XorNot wrote:
| It's probably closer to the suppliers don't think this will
| last and are ramping slowly if at all so they're not left
| holding the bag.
|
| The US is headed for a cataclysmic crash at this point and it's
| not clear what will trigger it, but all those companies pushing
| underpriced tokens and Rust ports of existing tools by agents
| aren't going to survive it.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| Chip manufacturers are used to boom bust cycles and are always
| hesitant to bring on more capacity, since it costs billions to
| do so.
|
| They will let the hyperscalers buy their supply at a premium
| and wait for the bust. Then they will shift back to the
| consumer space.
|
| Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as
| dire as the article makes it out to be.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as
| dire as the article makes it out to be.
|
| At the same time, the article's argument that the value of
| personal computer ownership is only going to rise, in terms
| of the value of speech, not strictly in terms of the value of
| lunch, is important to call out.
|
| I'm glad I held on to my 2009 MacBook, for example, as it
| still functions today as an active part of my homelab, at an
| amortized yearly cost of practically the price of taking a
| nice steak dinner once a year.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I recall how in the 2010s RAM manufacturers were in crisis,
| as their margins were low and competition fierce - it got to
| a point where they started doing price fixing and got fined
| for it:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180513133803/https://www.techr.
| ..
|
| Prices went down again after that.
|
| To me this is just a temporary swing in the other direction -
| they're riding the gravy train while they can, because once
| it ends it's back to low prices.
| mememememememo wrote:
| In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead?
| Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can
| still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside
| these are very capable.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Maybe we'll finally get some good tools to make real productive
| work possible on phones.
| Angostura wrote:
| Like a large screen and a keyboard? Hello Mac Neo
| kingleopold wrote:
| I see they are offering to macos for iphone pro and ipad
| pro next years with subsc. ? or via upgrade with price I
| mean it's now possible more than ever
| mememememememo wrote:
| Hello HDMI adaptor and magic keyboard
| Angostura wrote:
| Wrong OS though.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Virtual desktop casting, a killer HID product, and what else
| do you need?
| pjc50 wrote:
| iOS is apparently going to have mandatory age gating, so likely
| that will come to Android as well.
| mememememememo wrote:
| I was trying to avoid the software side of this argument as
| it is a worm cannister. I was just musing from a hardware
| availability point of view.
|
| That said.... hopefully at least on Android side you can get
| a free (as in unchastified) OS to run on it.
|
| Until they come for the HW.
| layer8 wrote:
| You don't really own an iPhone in terms of being a computer.
| It's different for certain Android phones where you can install
| a custom OS. Those are also less powerful, however.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed
| if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be
| able to secure more capital.
|
| Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an
| open question.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think some players like xAi and Google can burn money for a
| long time. Google made $240B profit last year
| Shank wrote:
| > ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more
| capital
|
| If this does occur, unfortunately it isn't like any of the
| production capacity is going to immediately shift or be
| repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn't usable outside of
| datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic
| recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual
| availability of components again.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| yeah 3 years sounds reasonable to me, less than one asset
| depreciation cycle in business. Pain for you and me, but just
| a bump in the road for the accounts dept.
| lugu wrote:
| > If this does occur
|
| The capital from the gulf is already disrupted. It isn't
| anymore a matter of if or when.
| gzread wrote:
| My computer, and I think all threadripper systems, has
| registered ECC DDR5 RAM which I think is the same type used
| in AI datacenters. Well one half of it, the other half being
| HBM memory used on video cards, which is soldered to them and
| non-upgradeable. But the main system memory from a used AI
| server can become your main system memory.
| myself248 wrote:
| So that becomes the next question -- will we see an
| ecosystem of modifications and adapters, to desolder
| surplus and decommissioned datacenter HBM and put it on
| some sort of daughterboard with a translator so it can be
| used in a consumer machine?
|
| Stuff like that already exists for flash memory; I can
| harvest eMMC chips from ewaste and solder them to cheaply-
| available boards to make USB flash drives. But there the
| protocols are the same, there's no firmware work needed...
| duskdozer wrote:
| Aren't some people already doing this with consumer GPUs?
| ramon156 wrote:
| They would rent out the data centers, not sell it off
| keybored wrote:
| Owning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some
| people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea.
|
| You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three
| laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and
| purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because
| that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven
| software three years from now.
|
| Edit: That's an example. It goes beyond AI. and...:
|
| Liberty goes beyond that.
| falense wrote:
| I disagree. There is in fact a non-zero chance that we will get
| good enough models that are MOE optimized for desktop size
| hardware that can do a lot of the same things as the SOTA
| models. Im certainly crossing my fingers that the open-weights
| models continue improving. Engram from Deepseek for instance
| seems very interesting for a compute to memory offloading
| perspective.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s0czc4/round_2...
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| haha, all of a sudden I see a tab "waifu pillow" on Amazon, and
| think I have a split personality that runs searches in between
| consciousness shifts, and then I come back to a funny message.
| duskdozer wrote:
| uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:
| https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/
| This happened because of the following filter:
| ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN
| Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage
| sva_ wrote:
| What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains
| duskdozer wrote:
| Shrug. First time I'd seen this. If it displayed as the
| original text it would have been clearer.
| httpsterio wrote:
| In this case yes but it's meant as a punycode scam
| prevention where common Latin alphabet letters are swapped
| for similar looking alternatives.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It would make it hard to spot impostor domains like
| "news.usombinator[.]som" if it was. There's enough inertia
| for FQDNs to be strictly ASCII and any UTF-8(outside ASCII)
| in domain names to be felt unnatural for an URL, so most
| systems default to the raw "Punycode" xn-- scheme for all
| IDNs.
| shusaku wrote:
| Kind of an interesting history to this kind of url:
| https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html
| zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote:
| That whole feature is kind of paragraph 22. No legit/popular
| site uses it so users don't expect national characters in
| domain names, so no one actually hosts sites using "xn-"
| domains.
| lexlambda wrote:
| This is a filter added by you (or by an overzealous list
| maintainer), it does not happen by default or even with the
| provided additional filterlists.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Yeah, I remember going on https://filterlists.com/ one day
| all mad and just adding a ton because of how many ads and
| manipulative patterns I was dealing with
| barrkel wrote:
| I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a
| supply crunch forever.
|
| However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC
| hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
|
| Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace
| with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops
| are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you
| rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like
| smartphones pretty much always have been.
|
| I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96
| cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices
| spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local
| compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my
| computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a
| while.
|
| This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real
| workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do
| whatever I like with it.
|
| I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.
| picture wrote:
| It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall
| own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced
| supply crunch could go on indefinitely.
|
| Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the
| ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal
| use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM -
| should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital
| thing I made in the last five years?
|
| Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware
| (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.
| barrkel wrote:
| People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less,
| especially if they're in tech.
|
| The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more
| RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly
| faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to
| 128GB DIMMs.
|
| That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some
| local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference,
| or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep
| models cached for quick swapping.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that.
| And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your
| monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM
| inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever.
|
| I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems
| like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car
| when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly
| the same job.
| barrkel wrote:
| Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more
| for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI
| subscription, Claude Max subscription.
|
| It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in
| Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need
| to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep
| it in the basement next to the internet router anyway.
|
| The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with
| cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars
| in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with
| auto loan and cash purchase).
| sfn42 wrote:
| I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I
| checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially
| pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then
| not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a
| new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's
| even better is to not buy a new car, let some other
| sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at
| a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it
| a few years after that for not much less than you paid
| for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going
| for more than I paid.
|
| I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really
| good deal, but it's really not much different than buying
| new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it.
| A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see
| any reason to buy brand new.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/
|
| That's for everyone
| bluedino wrote:
| I've always went way over on RAM, for the most part. 32, 64,
| then 128GB of memory.
|
| Never really used it all, usually only about 40%, but it's
| one of those better to have than not need, and better than
| selling and re-buying a larger memory machine (when it's
| something you can't upgrade, like a Mac or certain other
| laptops)
| guessmyname wrote:
| > _I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of
| RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM
| prices spiked [...]_
|
| 768GB of RAM is insane...
|
| Meanwhile, I've been going back and forth for over a year about
| spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can't shake the
| feeling I'd never actually use that much, and that, long term,
| cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a
| single, non-upgradable machine anyway.
| barrkel wrote:
| Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated
| push. Can control of compute be far behind?
|
| It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret
| my decision.
|
| I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
| jusssi wrote:
| > Can control of compute be far behind?
|
| How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute
| for developing software. Any country locking up that
| ability too much will lose to those who don't.
| cesarb wrote:
| > How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled
| compute for developing software.
|
| I've read about companies where all software developers
| have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software,
| either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers
| with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or
| to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never
| leave the company's Citrix servers).
| balamatom wrote:
| Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance,
| this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"
| balamatom wrote:
| >You need uncontrolled compute for developing software
|
| Oh you sweet summer child :(
|
| You think our best and brightest aren't already working
| on that problem?
|
| In fact they've fucking _aced it_ , as has been widely
| celebrated on this website for _years_ at this point.
|
| All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy
| in, hahahaha.
|
| But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy
| in is in fact easiest.
|
| Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance
| economy (make desire mandatory again!).
|
| And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional
| lives the _barest semblance_ of meaning, of progress, of
| the self-evident truth of reason.
|
| And magic happens.
|
| ---
|
| To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need
| uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording
| music/shooting movies/etc)".
|
| That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
|
| Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-
| publishing industries that exist since before personal
| computing.
|
| Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or
| publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport,
| all employ millions of people; including many who seem to
| do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing
| people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese
| Brain experiment a great deal.
|
| Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what
| you know about "how to human"; their products were also a
| staple in the lives of your parents; and your
| grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole,
| anyway.
|
| ---
|
| Anyway, what do you think the _purpose_ of LLMs even is?
|
| What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated
| push to stop instructing the computer (with all the
| "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin
| to "build" software by _asking nicely_?
|
| Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's
| happening does not pertain only to software; also
| affected are prose, sound, video, basically all
| electronic media... permit yourself your _one_ unfounded
| generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to
| get where this is going?
|
| Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but _computing_
| (the individual activity) is politically sensitive:
| programming is a hands-on course in _epistemics_ ; and
| epistemics, in turn, teaches _fearless disobedience_.
|
| There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience
| remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding
| on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an
| accredited source to tell me what the hell _that_ would
| be.
|
| Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done
| screaming come join the resistance.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Just look at ITAR and the various attempts at legislating
| 3D printing and CNC machining of firearms parts to see one
| justification point of that.
| gzread wrote:
| > 768GB of RAM is insane.
|
| Before this price spike, it used to be you could get a
| second-hand rack server with 1TB of DDR4 for about
| $1000-2000. People were massively underestimating the
| performance of reasonably priced server hardware.
|
| You can still get that, of course, but it costs a lot more.
| The recycling company I know is now taking the RAM out of
| every server and selling it separately.
|
| Apple hardware is incredibly overpriced.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as
| well.
|
| I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is
| the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster
| locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU
| as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS
| models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going
| to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even
| thinking of 48 config because they already have those on 8%
| discounts/shipped by Amazon and I never hit that even on my
| workstation with 64 GB.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram
| as well.
|
| No, it won't. The power drain of merely refreshing DRAM is
| negligible, it's no higher than the drain you'd see in S3
| standby over the same time period.
| 3form wrote:
| Given the DRAM refresh is part of S3 standby, I'm afraid
| this is circular reasoning.
| cduzz wrote:
| I suspect this is one of those "it depends" situations;
| does the 128gb vs 64gb sku have more chips or denser
| chips? If "more chips" probably it'll draw a tiny bit
| more power than the smaller version. If the "denser"
| chips, it may be "more power draw" but such a tiny
| difference that it's immaterial.
|
| Similarly, having more cache may mean less SSD activity,
| which may mean less energy draw overall.
|
| If I had a chip to put on the roulette table of this
| "what if" I'd put it on the "it won't make a difference
| in the real world in any meaningful way" square.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I thought my Z620 with 128GB of RAM was excessive!
| Actually, HP says they support up to 192GB of RAM, but for
| whatever reason the machine won't POST with more than 128GB
| (4Rx4) in it. Flawed motherboard?
| FpUser wrote:
| My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16
| cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid
| around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when
| I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| Canadian Pesos?
| FpUser wrote:
| It is sarcasm. Our dollar which used to be on par with US
| is no more.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Jokes because the Canadian dollar's value isn't very high
| right now.
|
| See a $1100 GPU on eBay, but it's in the US? Actually a
| $1900 GPU.
|
| A colleague were just talking about how well he timed the
| purchase of his $700 24GB 3090.
| heffer wrote:
| Please, it's actually Cambodian Dollhairs or Canuckistan
| Pesos.
| seany wrote:
| With the way legislation is going these days, self hosting is
| becoming ever more important. RAM for zfs + containers on k3s
| doesn't end up being that crazy if you assuming you need to
| do everything on your own. (at home I've got 1 1tb ram
| machine, 1 512gb, 3x 128gb all in a k3s cluster with some
| various gpus about about a half pb of storage before ~ last
| sept this wasn't _that_ expensive to do)
| tristor wrote:
| > spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB.
|
| As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook
| Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not
| $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k
| going?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It could be a different country?
| sgarland wrote:
| Tangential, I bought a nearly identically-spec'd (didn't
| spring for the 8 TB SSD - in retrospect, had I kept it, I
| would've been OK with the 4 TB) model, and returned it
| yesterday due to thermal throttling. I have an M4 Pro w/ 48
| GB RAM, and since the M5 Max was touted as being quite a
| bit faster for various local LLM usages, I decided I'd try
| it.
|
| Turns out the heatsink in the 14" isn't nearly enough to
| handle the Max with all cores pegged. I'd get about 30
| seconds of full power before frequency would drop like a
| rock.
| tristor wrote:
| I haven't really had a problem with thermal throttling,
| but my highest compute activity is inferencing. The main
| performance fall-off I've observed is that the
| cache/context size to token output rate curve is way more
| aggressive than I expected given the memory bandwidth
| compared to GPU-based inferencing I've done on PC. But
| other than spinning up the fans during prompt processing,
| I'm able to stay peak CPU usage without clock speed
| reducing. Generally though this only maintains peak
| compute utilization for around 2-3 minutes.
|
| I'm wondering if there was something wrong with your
| particular unit?
| kace91 wrote:
| The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful
| computer limit you?
|
| My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops
| today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
|
| I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the
| usecases people are thinking of here.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer
| limit you?
|
| Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of
| course.
| mettamage wrote:
| This is the way
| tormeh wrote:
| For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a
| browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM
| left over for actual work.
| skydhash wrote:
| That's why I only run those on work computers (where they
| are mandated by the company). My personal computers are
| free of these software.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its
| horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact,
| running all that junk in a single chromium instance is
| quite a memory saver compared to individual electron
| applications.
| skydhash wrote:
| Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an
| email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for
| accessing stuff on someone else's computer.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| The only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no
| easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of
| music in a way that Spotify allows it.
|
| For the rest: I agree with you.
| h4ch1 wrote:
| lastfm is still a great way to discover music, countless
| times I've gotten great recs from a music neighbor.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Plex or Jellyfin client access.
| opan wrote:
| mpv + sshfs is the way.
| bluGill wrote:
| I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web
| sites. There are several options for my hourly weather
| update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found
| any that are light weight - I just need to know if it
| would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from
| work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Try Quickweather (with OpenMeteo) if you're on Android. I
| love it.
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ominous.quickweather/
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and
| am currently (literally this moment) making myself a
| Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a
| calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on
| my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in
| context it actually matters.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is
| 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me.
| Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Yr.no [1] is free, and available in English. Thanks to
| Norway. Apps available as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes
| and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the
| page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed.
| `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to
| idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.
|
| ("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost
| tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its
| sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
| Fnoord wrote:
| Yeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was
| toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today
| or some Firefox extension.
|
| You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates
| though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on
| filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That
| way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your
| whole homedir could benefit.
| daoistmonk wrote:
| FWIW: the Tab Stash extension has worked well for me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common
| denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost
| always inferior to what you could get if you had an
| actual native application built just for your platform.
| But we end up with web apps because web is more
| convenient for software developers and it's easier to
| distribute. Everything is about developer convenience.
| We're also quickly running out of software developers who
| even know how to develop and distribute native apps.
|
| And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop
| application" becomes a priority to developers, what do
| they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine
| with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't
| integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if
| the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal
| to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers
| simply do not care about making something good any more.
| There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for
| the developer". And of course the businesses producing
| software are all about that, because they are run by
| people with a business ethic of "make the product as
| cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad
| state of affairs.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| We have an open, universal application platform. That
| alone is something to celebrate.
| Zancarius wrote:
| It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue
| modern .NET apps are _almost_ as bad.
|
| I have an example.
|
| I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and
| tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and
| partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school
| class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse
| over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance,
| and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile
| versions lack many of the features available for desktop,
| but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for
| both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated
| since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps
| part of it is their push to include AI-driven features,
| no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think
| it's a growing combination of company priorities and
| framework choices.
|
| Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to
| be curmudgeonly!
| foobarian wrote:
| I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on
| today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto
| required to build apps?
| ryandrake wrote:
| We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or,
| we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes
| and approaches to software development.
| balamatom wrote:
| Real talk.
|
| Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of
| natural causes since the 2000s.
|
| That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what
| are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s
| era failed to transmit to the next generation of
| developers?
| kps wrote:
| There's no market for it.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of
| developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like
| to do native applications. Every time someone does those,
| a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda
| been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable.
| It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But
| also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and
| install applications unless it comes from an App Store.
| And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a
| requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And
| lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive
| experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn
| GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?
| asyx wrote:
| Yep. I graduated in 2017 and jobs were already mostly
| web. I'd love to work on native applications but nobody
| is hiring for that and of course because nobody is hiring
| for that I don't have a job like that and the Qt I learnt
| in university is not gonna get any more relevant over
| time but I don't have a good reason to keep that skill up
| to date and if I have to solve a problem I might as well
| write a TUI or CLI application because that's easier than
| Qt or whatever...
| QuiEgo wrote:
| It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say
| "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software
| in the current environment." I assume this is what's
| happening - people are trying to get their products in
| customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything
| else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's
| less about developers and more about business needs.
|
| Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market
| stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for
| 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product
| differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Seems like the perfect target for ESG.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more
| bloated to compensate. Or maybe it's vice versa.
|
| I wonder if there's a computer science law about this. This
| could be my chance!
| mjmas wrote:
| Is your name Wirth?
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Dangit! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride
| daveguy wrote:
| Sorry to burst your bubble:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
|
| Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than
| price). But close enough that when you said it, I
| thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also
| more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and
| demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given
| our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing
| supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the
| supply will bottleneck before the demand does.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Ah, so you think there's a point where actually bloat
| slows because we eventually can't keep up with demand for
| compute?
|
| I guess this might be happening with LLMs already
| teeray wrote:
| Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient
| software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful
| computing hardware.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a
| lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the
| cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-
| powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one
| has.
|
| I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using
| Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as
| it always was.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're
| full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more
| powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there.
| "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have
| 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird
| idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram
| just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use
| it but whenever an application does use it people whine
| about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow"
| it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but
| is there an actual problem? Crickets.
| gryfft wrote:
| "chrome uses 2gb of ram"
|
| these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of
| ram.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| Don't know about chrome, but Firefox has an about:memory
| special page that will let you know which tabs are using
| the most ram. Of all the sites I use, youtube is the only
| culprit. When I am done watching a video, I use the
| about:memory to kill the associated process (doesn't
| destroy the tab (in case I want to come back to it)). I
| assume it is all the javascript cruft.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many
| Electron apps _are_ extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is
| pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify
| sometimes finds a way to lag, when it 's just a freaking
| list of text.
|
| Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you
| can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no
| clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd
| figure your box is slow. But that's not even what
| happens. Maybe they would've been sluggish even using
| native frameworks. Teams seems to do 1M network round-
| trips on each action, so even if it was perfectly
| optimized assembly for my specific CPU it would probably
| make no difference.
| sfn42 wrote:
| Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason -
| the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps
| using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps
| using anything else. People complain about react too,
| react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as
| hell. It's just crappy devs.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, these applications are typically not slow _just
| because_ the use Electron (although it 's often a
| contributor). But the underlying reason why they are slow
| is the same reason why they are using Electron: developer
| skill.
| interf4ce wrote:
| The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM
| that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software
| frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same
| arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by
| the software that actually needs it, like video editing,
| data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short
| sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a
| vacuum with all system resources available to it. This
| mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days"
| just leads to worse and worse software design instead of
| programmers actually learning how to do things well.
| That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making
| software that minimizes its system footprint has become a
| niche instead of the mainstream.
|
| tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle.
| They're looking for their RAM to be available.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing
| games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and
| Spotify and a bunch of other crap.
|
| In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy
| slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself
| is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big
| deal if an app uses some memory.
| interf4ce wrote:
| You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps
| need RAM. There's no getting around that.
|
| The issue with Electron is that it encourages building
| desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes
| it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but
| it also means you've got front end web devs building
| system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're
| used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem.
| Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of
| a web browser, which adds overhead.
|
| In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a
| system slowdown because yet another app is running on
| Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume
| that all users can spare the memory.
|
| I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a
| practical one. I build software for a living and I think
| that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect
| to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the
| infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy
| apps make for a better user experience.
| hollerith wrote:
| The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no
| mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded
| (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a
| device's total power consumption) so if the device is
| running off a battery and is designed to keep device
| weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as
| practical), then battery life is not as good as it would
| be if the device had only 16gb.
|
| This is why the top model of the previous generation of
| the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM,
| bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17
| Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If
| Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any
| iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to
| most buyers, they would not have been serving their
| customers well.
|
| So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life
| or device weight for the duration of your ownership of
| any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want
| to having a good experience when running Electron apps on
| the device.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Lazy developers can make bad apps that waste RAM no
| matter what framework. But even conscientious developers
| cannot make an app with Electron that compares favorably
| to a native app. Electron _is_ inherently a problem, even
| if it isn 't the only one.
| duskdozer wrote:
| The web browser on my phone instantly gets killed the
| moment I switch to another app because it eats up so much
| ram.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I have no issues with browsers specifically having to use
| a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck
| software, basically it's own operating system. Same for
| video games or programs that do heavy data processing.
|
| The issue is with applications that have no business
| being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app
| is a program that runs in the background most of the time
| and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music
| players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's,
| where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.
| hollerith wrote:
| The people I trust to give good security recommendations
| (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I
| should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux)
| because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron
| app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does
| zero sandboxing.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a
| lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the
| cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-
| powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one
| has.
|
| > I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using
| Teams.
|
| If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or
| for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the
| ventilation channels (in other words: clean the fans)) is
| very important for the computer to actually achieve the
| performance that the hardware can principally deliver.
| bccdee wrote:
| That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario
| of computers being thin clients for other people's servers
| dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS,
| nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly
| eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term,
| modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper
| to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular
| npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good
| i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times
| under control at work.
|
| The constant increases in website and electron app weight
| don't feel great either.
| WillAdams wrote:
| 3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound
| --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a
| project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two
| 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level
| CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a
| ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should
| have tracked memory usage....)
| adregan wrote:
| Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it's
| so CPU bound? I don't have experience with CAD, so I'm not
| sure if it's due to entrenched solutions or something else.
| WillAdams wrote:
| My understanding is that the problems being worked on do
| not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in
| an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Is that by convention or is there a good reason that
| it's so CPU bound?
|
| A lot of commercial CAD software exists for a very long
| time, and it is important for industrial customers that
| the backward compatibility is very well kept. So, the
| vendors don't want to do deep changes in the CAD kernels.
|
| Additionally, such developments are _expensive_ (because
| novel algorithms have to be invented). I guess CAD
| applications are _not that incredibly profitable_ that as
| a vendor you want to invest a huge amount of money into
| the development of such a feature.
| Tossrock wrote:
| That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically
| have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or
| PrusaSlicer.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's a very complex joint (which is why it's never been
| done before that I could find --- hopefully will be
| patentable), and the tool definition probably wasn't
| optimal, nor the CAM tool being used appropriate to the
| task, hence my working on developing the toolpaths more
| directly.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage
|
| That's "non powerful" to you?
| kace91 wrote:
| The opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade
| looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current
| flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800
| bucks.
| mbfg wrote:
| I've never have a personal computer that came even close to
| powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15
| minutes, is really annoying for instance.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'd love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project
| I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| > My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage,
| laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied
| with.
|
| Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and
| a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!
| Arcanum-XIII wrote:
| Simulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory,
| CPU, sometimes graphic card. Real time works also: huge data
| set in real time -- sensor for production line or
| environmental monitoring for example.
|
| For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app
| (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and
| it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot
| of use case.
| echelon wrote:
| Local is a dead end.
|
| Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace
| cloud compute.
|
| We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead
| try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights
| models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of
| models that will be able to compete.
|
| When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can
| stay within ~6months, we might be able to slow them down or
| even break them.
|
| If there was something 80-90% as good as Opus or Seedance or
| Nano Banana, more of the ecosystem would switch to open source
| because it offers control and sovereignty. But we don't have
| that right now.
|
| If we had really competitive open weights models, universities,
| research teams, other labs, and other companies would be able
| to collaboratively contribute to the effort.
|
| Everyone in the open source world is trying to shrink these
| models to fit on their 3090 instead, though, and that's such a
| wasted effort. It's short term thinking.
|
| An "OpenRunPod/OpenOpenRouter" + one click deploy of models
| just as good as Gemini will win over LMStudio and ComfyUI
| trying to hack a solution on your own Nvidia gaming card.
|
| That's such a tiny segment of the market, and the tools are all
| horrible to use anyway. It's like we learned nothing from "The
| Year of Linux on Desktop 1999". Only when we realized the data
| center was our friend did we frame our open source effort
| appropriately.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s.
|
| We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are
| proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-
| sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-
| based offload being worked on as of late you can even
| experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of
| course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference
| platforms for these too.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| > Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace
| cloud compute.
|
| Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming
| over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill
| a bit?
| nhecker wrote:
| In a similar vein: seek efficiency.
|
| I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that
| a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on
| commodity hardware at home will still consume far more
| energy per token than that of a frontier model running on
| commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to
| be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even
| close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where
| your compute heat could offset your heating requirements.
| But that gets harder to quantify.)
|
| Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local
| hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the
| case.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| But commodity hardware that's right-sized for your own
| private needs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than
| datacenter hardware that's intended to serve millions of
| users simultaneously while consuming gigawatts in power.
| You're mostly paying for that hardware when you buy LLM
| tokens, not just for power efficiency. And your own
| hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while
| paying for these tokens would require you to address
| these needs separately in some way.
| nhecker wrote:
| >And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related
| needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to
| address these needs separately in some way.
|
| ^ Fair. Yep, I agree the calculus changes if you don't
| have _any_ local hardware and you're needing to factor in
| the cost of acquiring such hardware.
|
| When I did this napkin math, I was mostly interested in
| the energy aspect, using cost as a proxy. I was
| calculating the $/token (taking into consideration the
| cost of a KWh from my utility, the measured power draw of
| my M1 work machine, and the measured tokens per second
| processed by a ~20BP open-weight model). I then compared
| this to the published $/token rate of a frontier
| provider, and it was something like two orders of
| magnitude in favor of the frontier model. I get it,
| they're subsidizing, but I've got to imagine there's some
| truth in the numbers.
|
| I wonder, does (or will) the $/token ratio fall
| asymptotically toward the cost of electricity? In my mind
| I'm drawing a parallel to how the value of mined
| cryptocurrency approximately tracks the cost of
| electricity... but I might be misremembering that detail.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I doubt it because you aren't going to get the
| utilisation that a commercial setup would. No point
| wasting tons of money on hardware that is sat idle most
| of the time.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If you're running agentic workloads in the background
| (either some coding agent or personal claw-agent type)
| that's enough utilization that the hardware won't be
| sitting idle.
| echelon wrote:
| Y'all aren't seeing the same future I am, I guess.
|
| - Our career is reaching the end of the line
|
| - 99.9999% of users will be using the cloud
|
| - if we don't have strong open source models, we're going
| to be locked into hyperscaler APIs for life
|
| - piddly little home GPUs don't do squat against this
|
| Why are you building for hobby uses?
|
| Build for freedom of the ability to make and scale
| businesses. To remain competitive. To have options in the
| future independent of hyperscalers.
|
| We're going to be locked out of the game soon.
|
| Everyone should be panicking about losing the ability to
| participate.
|
| Play with your RTXes all you like. They might as well be
| raspberry pis. They're toys.
|
| Our future depends on our ability to run and access large
| scale, competitive, open weights. Not stuff you run with LM
| Studio or ComfyUI as a hobby.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| I don't agree that we are being left behind with regards
| to AI, I believe it's simply not worth participating in.
| I hope it all comes crashing down.
| echelon wrote:
| That's not the right perspective to have.
|
| Also, the only thing crashing down will be the economic
| participation of everyday people if we don't have
| ownership over the means of creation. Hyperscalers will
| be just fine.
| gessha wrote:
| Man, going to personal computing was a mistake, we should've
| stayed jacked to the mainframes /s
| echelon wrote:
| Entire device categories, like smartphones, are locked
| down. That's our future.
|
| Here's my retort:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543367
| raincole wrote:
| We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a _demand_
| crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so
| much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It
| 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of
| pursuing realistic graphics for games.
|
| People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be
| affected much tho.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might
| not be affected much tho._
|
| They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be
| if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the
| architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the
| middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom
| chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality
| options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-
| end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a
| distinct market with an entirely different type of customers
| (here: DC vs. individuals).
| molszanski wrote:
| > We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
|
| This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost
| always followed by glut
| drecked wrote:
| I don't believe we are seeing the investments necessary
| that would indicate this will happen.
|
| Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory
| for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture
| more, they're shutting down their consumer divisions.
| They're just transferring their consumer supply to their
| B2B (read AI) supply instead.
|
| Thats likely because they don't expect this demand to last
| past a few years.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| If the demand lasts for a few years, I'm doubtful that
| all of the consumer capacity will come back.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up
| working out. Nothing else really needs serious local
| computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end
| games will probably stagnate for a while.
|
| Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and
| workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud
| model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are
| signs of progress.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed
| from usable performance.
|
| Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any
| modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out
| on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to
| mention most game devs are targeting an install base of
| $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the
| 5090 exists.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already
| can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From
| the developers' point of view there's not much point
| raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU
| hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.
| fmajid wrote:
| They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are
| understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected
| demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative,
| China's CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch,
| backed by the Chinese government, but that's not going to
| help until late 2027 at best.
| landl0rd wrote:
| How much capital would you invest in a capacity expansion
| for a trend that may or may not yet be durable? Now, how
| much would you invest when there are two major state-
| backed chinese entities that essentially aren't allowed
| to go bankrupt and have infinity money are competing with
| you?
| m3nu wrote:
| My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in
| mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We
| see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked
| at.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Unified hardware helps some and hurts some. See: same gpus
| for gaming and for AI.
| riskable wrote:
| If this ends up being true, desktop Linux adoption might
| make inroads. Windows apps run like crap on ARM and no one
| is bothering to make ARM builds of their software.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Because ARM Windows is locked down tightly. The same will
| interfere with Linux adoption on similar hardware.
| bit1993 wrote:
| All we need is for HDMI to be unlocked so it works on
| phones, or maybe VGA adapters that work on phones. And a
| way to "sideload" our own apps. Hackers please make this
| happen.
| nine_k wrote:
| The original Raspberry Pi was built around an overstock
| phone chip. Modern alternatives built around Rockchip and
| similar high-end phone chips venture into the territory of
| lower-end laptops. Aliexpress is full of entry-level
| laptops based on ARM phone chips (apparently running
| Android).
|
| This will likely extend further and further, more into the
| "normie" territory. MS Windows is, of course, the thing
| that keeps many people pinned to the x64 realm, but, as
| Chromebooks and the Steam Deck show us, Windows is not
| always a hard requirement to reach a large enough market
| segment.
| userbinator wrote:
| No, a set-top-box chip.
| adrianwaj wrote:
| This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W
| miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands
| could easily appear and even overtake the largest players.
| For example, have you seen this massive range of docking
| technology.
|
| https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks
| only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be
| a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being
| the largest cost component in the new era of all-in-ones.
| UGreen could be the next Apple as screens and processors
| snap-on to these hubs, in addition to their own range of
| power banks and SSD enclosures. Their quality is high too.
|
| In fact, I would go so far as to say we are entering a
| tinkering culture, and free-energy technologies are upon us
| as a response oppressive economic times. Sort of like how
| the largest leaps in religious and esoteric thought have
| occurred in the most oppressive of circumstances.
|
| People will reject their crappy thin clients, start
| tinkering and build their own networks. Knowledge and
| currency will stay private and concentrated - at least at
| first.
| nine_k wrote:
| RAM is going to be the most expensive component, I
| suppose.
|
| But indeed, once you have USB-C support on your device,
| you can connect all kinds of periphery through it, from
| keyboards to 4K screens. Standardized device classes
| obviate the need for most drivers.
| adrianwaj wrote:
| Yep. I was thinking that as crypto miners pivot into AI
| https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/jpmorgan-
| morgan... - there must also be a case for miners (anyone
| really) liquidating their hardware, including memory. So
| the price of memory has its own limits-to-growth - latent
| availability, but that's another topic.
| close04 wrote:
| > We'll have a demand crunch
|
| This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud
| helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for
| consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the
| vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to
| the cloud.
|
| I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in
| expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud
| gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a
| rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs
| even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with
| dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total
| control over customers this future could bring.
|
| Being entirely reliant on someone else's software _and_
| hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree
| of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
| HKH2 wrote:
| > I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in
| expectation of the massive influx of customers to their
| cloud gaming platform.
|
| Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger
| gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive
| experience.
| foobarian wrote:
| I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive
| some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these
| graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and
| admire this grass" :-D
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to
| me.
|
| Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so
| much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than
| relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current
| gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern
| self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy.
|
| But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam
| Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.
| balamatom wrote:
| > then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer
| behavior than megacorp conspiracy.
|
| Riddle me this: does anyone pursue a self-pwn
| _intentionally_?
|
| "Conspiracy theory" is just dehumanizer talk for falling
| prey to _business as usual_.
| close04 wrote:
| I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not
| sure where Roblox fits into what I said.
|
| The problem I describe is companies pushing towards the
| "rent" model vs. "buy to own". Nvidia was just an example
| by virtue of their size. Microsoft could be another,
| they're also eying the game streaming market. Once enough
| buyers become renters, the buying market shrinks and
| becomes untenable for the rest, pushing more people to
| rent.
|
| GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying
| GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming.
| Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce
| Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years
| of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's
| before counting electricity". All upsides, right?
|
| In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the
| datacenter market so would rather focus the available
| production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away
| from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back
| so future generations of GPUs would get more and more
| expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is
| the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming >
| shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step
| 1.
|
| Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular
| games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye
| candy. But what about all the other games that require
| beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and
| Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in
| recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own
| won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps
| doing that.
|
| The price hikes come only after there's no real
| alternative to renting. Look at the video streaming
| industry.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| > _Being entirely reliant on someone else 's software and
| hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some
| degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech
| world._
|
| It's also a nightmare from any sort of privacy perspective,
| in a world that's already becoming too much like a
| panopticon.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| As someone who has been buying computers for 40+ years,
| including the 1st gen 3dfx card, etc, this is where I NOPE
| out of the next upgrade cycle. I am not renting hardware.
| It's bad enough ISPs are renting modems.
| bparsons wrote:
| The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three
| large companies to corner the market on computing components,
| forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.
| random3 wrote:
| Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models
| have massive performance. What are we talking about here?
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think
| the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is
| likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see
| manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases.
| Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive
| further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed
| motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but
| the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".
|
| The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down
| the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the
| vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big
| 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to
| Apple, too.)
|
| I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing
| wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
|
| Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC
| experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
|
| I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been
| a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now.
| My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I
| got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs
| Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| There are upsides here as well! I think of things like
| the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful
| computers will become nicer things as we trend away from
| the bucket-o-parts model.
|
| I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons
| you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose
| collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some
| standard to the point that they probably work together.
| tavavex wrote:
| What are the upsides? You just listed a few things that
| you subjectively like, but not why they should take over
| all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think
| of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are
| already widely available now without the need to hollow
| out the custom PC market.
|
| There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable
| components. An established standard means that small
| companies can start manufacturing components more easily
| and provide more competition. If you turn PCs into
| prepackaged proprietary monoliths, expect even fewer
| players on the market than we have now, in addition to a
| complete lack of repairability and upgradability. When
| you can't pick and choose the parts, you let the
| manufacturer dictate what you're allowed to buy in what
| bundles, what spare parts they may sell to you (if any)
| and what prices you will pay for any of these things.
| Even if you're not building custom PCs yourself, the
| availability of all these individual components is
| putting an intrinsic check on what all-in-one
| manufacturers can reasonably charge you.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels
| like taking a glimpse into a different world.
|
| We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops
| that last all day on battery and half of this comment
| section is acting like personal computing is over.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same
| thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other
| personal computing devices continue to be produced. The
| $600 laptop is not a PC.
| limagnolia wrote:
| Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not
| IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there
| hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
| addaon wrote:
| Two different populations -- those interested in
| computing, and those interested in computers.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows
| games) and/or with the performance I want.
|
| Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm
| sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for
| $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
| josephg wrote:
| They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro
| sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi
| linux running on them except for driver support. They
| look like fantastic machines.
|
| They're not ideal for all use cases, of course. I'm happy
| to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But
| they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways
| that matter.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful
| desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As
| cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago._
|
| I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years
| ago.
| underlipton wrote:
| You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-
| in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to
| cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X
| asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets
| doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's
| economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the
| priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until
| enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
| cmxch wrote:
| Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS
| chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.
|
| Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64
| cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were
| inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e
| was doable for 900-1500 USD.
|
| They're not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in
| between - server chip that can also make a stout
| workstation too.
| random3 wrote:
| x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David
| Patterson was a mistake to begin with.
| nine_k wrote:
| Looking at AMD's x64 server offerings, I don't see why
| that would go away.
|
| But I can imagine that it would become less prevalent on
| personal machines, maybe even rare eventually.
| leptons wrote:
| 8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a _budget laptop_. It
| 's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as
| "amazing" as it could be.
| faust201 wrote:
| The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack
| etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like
| getting rid of awful flash player).
|
| Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix,
| YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights
| tickets. That will be amazing.
|
| Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great
| performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's
| different issue)
| underlipton wrote:
| >(Same like getting rid of awful flash player).
|
| I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day
| for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the
| Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site.
| Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
|
| Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of
| the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who
| pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple
| could justify their walled garden for the few years
| before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to
| run a steam engine.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If they choke the consumer PC long enough the segment will
| die
| shevy-java wrote:
| > We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
|
| I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article,
| but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up
| enormously. Just compare them. That is fact.
|
| It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is
| there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer
| people can afford something because the prices are now much
| higher than before. Add to this the oil crisis Trump started
| and we are now suddenly having to pay more just because a few
| mafiosi benefit from this. (See Krugman's analysis of the
| recent stock market flow of money/stocks.)
| bluGill wrote:
| General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to
| normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term
| thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM
| factories.
| kgeist wrote:
| >we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging
| rapidly from consumer compute.
|
| I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x
| series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based
| such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores,
| artificially.
|
| Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as
| consumer hardware?
| girvo wrote:
| Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself... SM121 on the
| GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100
| hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10
| has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.
| motbus3 wrote:
| I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I
| think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and
| commodities is a power move.
|
| We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry
| in china, oil in middle east, etc...
|
| This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with
| money and/or power enough to tilt the scale
| windexh8er wrote:
| It's not a power move, it's a cartel and they've done this
| before. Gamers Nexus did a fantastic piece on how where we're
| at today is very similar to the DRAM price fixing and market
| manipulation just a couple decades ago [0]. This is the big
| players taking full advantage of an opportunity for profit.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF
| porkeynon wrote:
| $20k?
|
| People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there's
| this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games
| since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore.
| But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a
| used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just
| like the looksmaxxer.
| barrkel wrote:
| Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless,
| it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping
| pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node.
|
| How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5
| MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible
| performance for that price point?
|
| Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo
| platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are
| being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.
| chmod775 wrote:
| They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a
| mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is
| able to do.
|
| A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The
| difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not
| close.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but
| also not close.
|
| This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as
| fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
|
| For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained
| by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a
| big advantage.
|
| For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for
| single threaded work and comparable for multi threaded
| work.
|
| Anyone claiming laptop CPUs can't keep up with desktop CPUs
| hasn't been paying attention. The latest laptops are
| amazing.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen
| 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
|
| Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-
| count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
|
| I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't
| really care, but at least online available clang
| benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X,
| which released in 2024.
|
| Anything single threaded it should match or even edge
| ahead though.
|
| It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave
| behind consumer-grade hardware and compare
| professional/workhorse level CPUs like
| EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's
| just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for
| these kinds of workloads.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-
| count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
|
| The base M5 starts at 10 cores and scales to 18 cores.
| The performance is similar to high end dekstop consumer
| CPUs.
|
| > I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't
| really care,
|
| If you don't compile large codebases, why do you care
| then?
|
| I do compile large codebases and I'm speaking from
| experience with the same codebase on both platforms. Not
| "LOC/s" benchmarks
| chmod775 wrote:
| I don't compile _Linux_ or other large C projects on my
| M5 (why would I). The only thing I have numbers for on
| both desktop and mobile is your typical JS
| /TypeScript/webpack shitshow that struggles to keep a
| high core count CPU remotely busy. Might as well do that
| on the M5.
|
| There's a large C++ codebase I need to compile, but it
| can't compile/run on OSX in the first place, hence the
| desktop that I use remotely for that. Since it's also
| kind of a shitshow, that one has really terrible compile
| times: up to 15 minutes on a high powered Intel ThinkPad
| I no longer use, ~2 minutes on desktop.
|
| I could do it in a VM as well, but let's be real: running
| it on the M5 in front of me is going to be nowhere near
| as nice as running it on the water cooled desktop under
| my desk.
| barrkel wrote:
| For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3
| to 4x throughput of M5 max.
|
| And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is
| occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy
| software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I
| connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different
| machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and
| running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of
| hardware everywhere.
|
| And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has
| 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
|
| I would hope so, given that you can buy multiple M5
| laptops for the price of that CPU alone.
|
| I made a comment about how impressive the M5 laptops were
| above, so these comments trying to debunk it by comparing
| to $12,000 CPUs (before building the rest of the system)
| are kind of an admission that the M5 is rather powerful.
| If you have to spend 3-4X as much to build something that
| competes, what are we even talking about any more?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| They're ultimately laptops, you won't be able to squeeze out
| the same amount of performance from a laptop compared to a
| desktop, regardless of the hardware.
|
| If you haven't tried out a desktop CPU in a while, I highly
| recommend you giving it a try if you're used to only using
| laptops, even when in the same class the difference is
| obvious.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.
|
| For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they're not that
| different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also
| consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU.
|
| If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for
| normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven't used
| a recent MacBook Pro.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5
| desktop.
|
| What are the exact CPU models used here though? Since my
| point was about CPUs in the "same class", and it's really
| hard to see if this is actually the case here.
|
| And yes, I've played around with the recent Apple CPUs,
| all the way up to M4 Pro (I think, thinking about it I'm
| not 100% sure) and still I'd say the same class of CPUs
| will do better in a desktop rather than a laptop.
|
| If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare
| the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio,
| and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe
| smaller than other brands.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem,
| compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac
| Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference,
| albeit maybe smaller than other brands
|
| The same chip perform basically the same in the different
| form factors.
|
| For all of the definitive statements you're making in
| this thread, you don't seem to know much about Apple
| M-series silicon.
| TheRoque wrote:
| We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil
| and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries
| have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only
| downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more
| expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only
| possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available
| resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a
| geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries
| that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting
| to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is,
| we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil
| output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to
| remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
| TheRoque wrote:
| Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats,
| trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only
| for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been
| replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ?
| You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in
| that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like
| for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas.
|
| And even if we figured out how to electrify everything
| (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into
| resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.),
| nuclear fuel (uranium)...
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Keep your eye on butanol
| https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-
| butanol....
| margalabargala wrote:
| Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like
| power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles
| would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a
| minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more
| sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is
| easily possible.
|
| There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The
| doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are
| not based in reality.
| TheRoque wrote:
| The risk of copper shortage is a very well know fact
| https://press.spglobal.com/2026-01-08-Substantial-
| Shortfall-... You're into renewables, yet you can't grasp
| the fact that resources are limited on this planet ?
| That's peculiar.
|
| And I don't even understand your other points to be
| honest. What do you mean "consumer vehicles" ? Are you
| taking about individual's cars ? I'm not taking about
| that, these don't matter that much. I'm taking about
| trucks, boats, planes, the stuff actually shipping you
| your lifestyle.
| margalabargala wrote:
| It makes sense that you don't understand the other
| points. Based on how you approach conversation, I suspect
| it's an issue you run into frequently.
|
| Look up what it means to have a conversation in "good
| faith" vs in "bad faith" and you might learn something
| useful about conversation tools. For example, lying about
| what someone says and calling it "peculiar" is "bad
| faith".
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Malthusians has been sounding the alarm for longer than
| Protestant revivalists have been claiming the end of world
| is next month at lunchtime. If there is a predication
| market for such things, betting on any Malthusian is
| patently foolish.
|
| (Of course, I don't disagree with the notion that
| consumerism produces an extraordinary amount of worthless
| trash, but that's a different matter. The main problem with
| consumerism is consumerism itself as a spiritual disease;
| the material devastation is a consequence of that.)
| antisthenes wrote:
| People gloating about Malthusians being wrong keep
| forgetting that it only takes for them to be right ONCE
| in the entirety of human history and when they are -
| you'll be too busy trying to survive rather than posting
| on internet forums.
|
| The planet has a certain resource-bound carrying
| capacity. It's a fact of physics. Just because we aren't
| there yet as of (checks time) 2026-03-27, doesn't mean
| Malthusians are wrong.
|
| Although to be fair to the other side, I think with
| abundant renewable energy we'll be able to delay resource
| depletion for a very long time thanks to recycling (and
| lower standards of living of course).
| globalnode wrote:
| Hilarious how comments like this consistently get
| downvoted, theres a lot of special interest lurkers on this
| forum
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| There will be very dramatic growing pains with this switch,
| especially for A: nations manufacturing renewables but
| still running that manufacturing on oil and B: nations that
| face political and economic barriers for renewables.
|
| Also C: nations that are both A and B, needlessly causing
| oil volatility with unplanned military dickheadedness.
| Anamon wrote:
| Energy production is only part of the bill, though. The oil
| shortage is having an effect on a mind-boggling variety of
| consumer goods where crude oil is used in manufacturing.
| For many products we don't have good alternatives. A lot of
| oil is needed to build an electric car.
| danaris wrote:
| > Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's
| compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs,
| much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
|
| What are you _talking_ about?
|
| My laptops are, and always have been, primarily places where I
| do local computing. I write code there, I watch movies there, I
| listen to music there, I play games there...all with local
| storage, local compute, and local control (though I do also
| store a bunch of my movies on a personal media server, housed
| in my TV stand, because it can hold a lot more). My smartphone
| is similar.
|
| If you think that the vast majority of the work most people do
| on their personal computers is moving to LLMs, or cloud gaming,
| then I think you are operating in a pretty serious bubble.
| 99.9% of all work that most people do is still best done
| locally: word processing, spreadsheets, email, writing code,
| etc. Even in the cases where the _application_ is hosted online
| (like Google Docs /Sheets), the _compute_ is still primarily
| local.
|
| The closest to what you're describing that I think makes any
| sense is the proliferation of streaming media--but again, while
| they _store_ the vast libraries of content for us, the
| _decoding_ is done locally, after the content has reached our
| devices.
|
| It doesn't matter if a cutting-edge AI-optimized server can
| perform 10, 100, or 1000 times better than my laptop at any
| particular task: if the speed at which my laptop performs it is
| faster than I, as a human, can keep up (whatever that means for
| the particular task), then there's no reason not to do the task
| locally.
| NoSalt wrote:
| > _" I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop"_
|
| This absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type
| of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to
| yourself?
| distances wrote:
| I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the
| last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones,
| and tablets is way under 20k.
|
| I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy
| reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than
| buying a top system once.
| NoSalt wrote:
| I haven't purchased a new computer in, at least, 10 years.
| I take pride (i.e., I have a sickness) in purchasing used
| laptops off eBay, beefing them up, and loading Debian on
| them. My two main computers are a Dell E5440 and a Lenovo
| ThinkPad T420. I, too, am a software developer, but
| [apparently] not as much of a rock star software developer
| at this gentleman. :-D
| barrkel wrote:
| Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more
| like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop.
| I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of
| different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good
| performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines.
| All sorts really.
|
| I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a
| garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack
| them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in
| and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to
| work on my bikes.
|
| Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a
| garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to
| leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put
| all my tools.
|
| The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be
| renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data
| back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing
| them down.
|
| YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my
| experience.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's
| compute
|
| Are you kidding? Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf
| that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD &
| intel desktop never could or did.
|
| Most applications don't make aggressive use of the SIMD
| instructions that modern x86 chips offer, thus you get this
| impression. :-(
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Users do not care why the perf they get is what they get.
| What good is AVX2048 if nobody uses it?
| clusterhacks wrote:
| "I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . "
|
| This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew
| up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching
| on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my
| occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what
| I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar
| investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque
| wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be
| stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . .
| .
|
| I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight
| models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have
| hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not
| simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.
| throwawaytea wrote:
| Professional mechanics might do that, but a home mechanic can
| get very far one one $200 set, and then another $300 spent
| over years buying several useful things for each project.
|
| I've replaced transmissions, head gaskets, and done all work
| for our family cars for two decades based on a Costco
| toolkit, and 20 trips to the autoparts store or Walmart when
| I needed something to help out.
|
| Maybe I'm being a little forgetful that yes I bought a jack,
| and Jack stands, and have a random pipe as a breaker bar, and
| other odds and ends. But you can go very far for $1k as a
| DIYer.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You're responding to an LLM authored article that doesn't know
| anything. "Let that sink in for a moment."
| randusername wrote:
| This will be me. Bestowing upon my descendants a collection of
| Mighty Beanz, a few unkillable appliances, and the best
| consumer computing hardware the early 2020s could buy.
|
| And I fear they will be equally confused and annoyed by
| disposing of all of them.
| nayuki wrote:
| > Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping
| pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node.
| Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's
| compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs,
| much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
|
| It really feels like we're slowly marching back to the era of
| mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Maybe the
| democratization of hardware was a temporary aberration.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I think you're probably right, but I'm not so confident the
| supply crunch will end.
|
| Tech feels increasingly fragile with more and more
| consolidation. We have a huge chunk of advanced chip
| manufacturing situated on a tiny island off the coast of a
| rising superpower that hates that island being independent.
| Fabs in general are so expensive that you need a huge market to
| justify building one. That market is there, for now. But it
| doesn't seem like there's much redundancy. If there's an
| economic shock, like, I dunno, 20% of the world's oil supply
| suddenly being blockaded, I worry that could tip things into a
| death spiral instead.
| efficax wrote:
| i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram
| rkagerer wrote:
| Care to share some more detailed specs?
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think the thin-client/flat-client is a pendulum that swings
| every few years.
|
| Main-frame (thin) -> PC (fat) -> Internet/Cloud (thin) ->
| Mobile (fat) -> AI (thin)
|
| I expect this to continue until the next technology transition.
|
| In each of these shifts, and there have been others, things are
| not completely fat or thin, more of an in-between state but
| leaning to local vs cloud.
| shusaku wrote:
| > These days, the biggest customers are not gamers, creators, PC
| builders or even crypto miners anymore. Today, it's hyperscalers.
| ... > These buyers don't care if RAM costs 20% more and neither
| do they wait for Black Friday deals. Instead, they sign contracts
| measured in exabytes and billions of dollars.
|
| Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their
| employees?
| lmz wrote:
| Micron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to
| consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer
| brand for RAM I don't think?
| dust42 wrote:
| Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip
| production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is
| just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to
| get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying
| chips in huge volumes but also because production will be
| hampered.
|
| Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI
| and the helium.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve
| now
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my
| daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay
| off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.
| halapro wrote:
| Same energy as "buy bitcoin" in 2011
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately bitcoins don't leak from storage tanks _on
| their own_.
| myself248 wrote:
| That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks
| out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even
| meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are
| dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't
| matter whether the drive is powered on or off.
|
| Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing
| spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll
| probably run for decades. Not so with helium.
| adrianN wrote:
| You just have to put your hard drive in a pressure vessel
| filled with helium.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| It's helium all the way down
| adrianN wrote:
| Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never
| produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.
| gobdovan wrote:
| I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in
| cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not
| aware of this.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to
| meter, we can get helium from _somewhere_. Mine it from LNG
| sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from
| the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except
| that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.
| adrianN wrote:
| There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that
| complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a
| steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power
| plants, unfortunately.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I can't say I agree with the conclusion, but I commend
| you for the concise and poetic description of what most
| power plants fundamentally are.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it
| might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term
| supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the
| amount of protons in an atom.
|
| There are several challenges, not least of which is
| storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our
| current helium storage solutions on earth because it's so
| light. Our national reserves are literally in underground
| caverns because it's better than anything we can build.
| Space just means any containment system will need to work
| in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.
| kibwen wrote:
| The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means
| that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too
| cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall
| below the price of mining, that creates a market
| opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted
| electricity is the product.
| Arch485 wrote:
| I think that's only because electricity is the
| bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck,
| crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware,
| mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the
| bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the
| GPUs themselves.
| PokestarFan wrote:
| I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about
| this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive
| pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert
| between physical currency that would drive down a lot of
| demand.
| andor wrote:
| Fusion power that uses steam turbines to convert heat into
| electricity will be more expensive than solar/wind
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Only if we first colonize the Solar System, so land
| becomes too cheap to meter too.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much
| neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become
| He? Or would that make radioactive He?
| Findecanor wrote:
| > Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For
| the AI and the helium.
|
| Whenever I read about fusion, I get reminded of a note in the
| sci-fi book trilogy The Night's Dawn. In that story, the
| introduction of cheap fusion energy had not cured global
| warming on Earth but instead sped it up with all the excess
| heat from energy-wasting devices.
|
| What matters is not what we don't have, but how we manage that
| which we _do_ have.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
| mikewarot wrote:
| Helium is 5 parts per million of the atmosphere. It should be
| possible to extract it, and thus never run out.
|
| Doing some googling yields an estimated cost of about $25,000
| per kg. I can see why extraction from wells is preferred.
| jleyank wrote:
| Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and
| the current version. Don't upgrade without a specific need. None
| of the "progress" is actually helpful to hackers and I'm not sure
| it's even helpful to typical users. There's enough information
| being given to and slurped by others, don't make it more
| effective.
| compounding_it wrote:
| In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I
| have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display
| to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k
| television.
|
| The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade
| that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7
| 4K).
| sigio wrote:
| At the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and
| still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting
| there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat
| rare/expensive.
| archargelod wrote:
| My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of
| RAM. It's enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps
| video just fine.
|
| For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but
| I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some
| puzzle games e.g. TIS-100.
|
| Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the
| terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron
| mess.
|
| It's enough for everything I need, and I don't see a reason to
| ever upgrade. Unless my hardware starts failing, of course.
| bitwize wrote:
| Wait, you type the code in directly? That's like a baby's
| toy!
| wwweston wrote:
| I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case
| there are readers who don't take it that way:
|
| * someone has to write language specifying a program,
| natural language or programming.
|
| * a programming langugage is a handle with specific
| properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it's
| a popular handle won't change that it's far more than a
| toy.
| jagermo wrote:
| I knew the time for my cable box would come!
| aurareturn wrote:
| Capitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving
| resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be
| insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying
| iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI.
|
| There could be a swing in the future where people will demand
| local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable
| local AI devices.
|
| Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained
| forever such that prices for personal devices will always be
| elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this
| from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new
| hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and
| why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
| defraudbah wrote:
| I refuse, I'll buy when I need to and can hold on for a few
| months if prices become insane. This means I'll spend less on
| hardware then what I could, if I wanted to buy max mpro or latest
| framework I just will not, because prices are too mad and g o for
| a cheaper version.
|
| whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it
| sigio wrote:
| For laptops, I always spring for the lowest amount of ram +
| hdd/ssd, and then instantly upgrade this from local after-
| market sources. However, this wouldn't work for apple devices
| (Hence I don't own any Apple devices).
|
| For example, my current Thinkpad T14-gen5, was bought with 8GB
| ram and 256GB NVME, and then upgraded to 64GB ram and 2TB NVME,
| for the same price as 16G/512G would have cost at Lenovo. And
| then I still have the 8GB/256GB to re-use/re-sell.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| As the old saying goes: _" This too will pass."_
|
| Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for
| companies who don't see their stock price as their product.
|
| If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure
| new players will arise picking up their slack.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU
| imtringued wrote:
| I just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware.
| I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog
| and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment
| after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept
| opening it over and over again, then I realized that it
| completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the
| title contained the world "nudes" with a faked amazon favicon)
| and when you reopen the tab, it shows you a black overlay with a
| message intended to induce shock if you ever bother to read it (I
| didn't read past the first sentence so I don't know what it was
| actually about).
|
| Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its
| not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your
| attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser
| history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my
| browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session.
| The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.
| jaen wrote:
| It doesn't write anything _extra_ to the browser history. How
| about actually checking before exaggerating. If you are
| bothered by a single wrong title with the right URL, well... I
| think something else is wrong.
|
| You are also completely speculating on the intent. Less drama
| please.
| fishbacon wrote:
| The pop-up is about disabling javascript, to avoid this kind of
| website doing this kind of thing.
|
| I thought it was clever. But it also seems ham-fisted, and in
| poor taste.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| The author also maintains https://disable-javascript.org/,
| which the pop-up links to. And has the exact script + titles
| used.
|
| > You may want to consider linking to this site, to educate
| any script-enabled users on how to disable JavaScript in some
| of the most commonly used browsers. The following code uses
| scare tactics to do so.
|
| > When added to your website, it will change the icon and the
| title of your website's tab to some of the most unhinged
| things imaginable once the user sends your tab to the
| background. Upon re-activation, the script will display a
| popover to the user informing them about the joke and
| referring them to this initiative.
| WarcrimeActual wrote:
| It's not clever when people use HN at work. It's a complete
| erosion of user trust and could legitimately get someone
| fired. You think HR wants to hear oh no it was an object
| lesson in not using javascript. That's why I was searching
| for nudes on the work computer when I shared my screen at
| that meeting, not realizing some moron had programmatically
| changed the tab name when I clicked off. This domain needs
| banned. It's not operating in good faith, or in touch with
| the reality of the damage it could be doing.
| numpad0 wrote:
| list of tab titles from https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js
| for entertainment:
|
| { "Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job -
| Online Course", "Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug
| cartels?", "The internet used to be fun", "am I boring - Google
| Search", "what is punycode - Google Search", "arguments for HN
| comment - Google Search", "how to hack coworker's phone -
| Google Search", "censorship on hacker news - Google Search",
| "rust programming socks - Google Shopping", "Adult
| entertainment clubs - Google Maps", "Pick up lines suggestions
| - ChatGPT", "Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT",
| "The Flat Earth Society", "Amazon.com: taylor swift merch",
| "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "/adv/ - topple government - Advice
| - 4chan", "r/wallstreetbets on Reddit", "Infowars: There's a
| War on For Your Mind!", "birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo",
| "Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow", "The Anarchist Cookbook
| by William Powell | Goodreads", "Fifty Shades of Grey |
| Netflix", "jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search", "zuckerberg
| nudes - Google Image Search", "bigfoot nudes - Google Image
| Search", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube",
| "Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube", "Linus
| goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus Tech Tips - YouTube",
| "MrBeast en EspaA+-ol - YouTube", "FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange"
| }
| tmtvl wrote:
| I grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year
| old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs
| of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and
| get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years
| (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an
| SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether
| or not it will actually last).
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Built my PC last April and also did 32gb. Almost did 64 since
| ram was so cheap at the time too, but hey live and learn I
| suppose ha
| bluejay2387 wrote:
| The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes".
| That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary
| computing device that they don't even have full control over now
| (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending
| over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to
| install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many
| people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume
| content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company
| they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where
| its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you
| computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I
| have no idea if that is what ends up happening.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer
| device now didn't have a computer back then
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but
| now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs
| or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized
| for mobile-first.
|
| (A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos,
| documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on
| "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the
| end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not
| just RAM.)
|
| It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone
| to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and _I haven 't used my personal laptop
| since then_, not once. I have a separate company laptop for
| work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out
| that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on
| personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am,
| with my primary compute device I don't have full control over
| - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and
| haven't fully processed it yet.
| nhecker wrote:
| Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB
| DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly
| astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop,
| if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get
| there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The
| tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))
| audunw wrote:
| > Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops
| but now mostly use their phones, because outside of
| specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are
| heavily optimized for mobile-first.
|
| It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things
| we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with
| the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery
| store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we
| didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period
| of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)
|
| When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell
| into two categories:
|
| 1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many
| more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like
| the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just
| works" experience where you have limited control over the
| device.
|
| 2. Some parents would use it for
| work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most
| people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really
| changed there.
|
| There is now a lot more work where you do the work on
| services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's
| back to the original point: that's in many cases just not
| something we could do with old home computers. Like, my
| doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from
| anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before,
| and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based
| infrastructure.
|
| Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is
| arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to
| e.g. AS/400 machines and such.
|
| > It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my
| phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal
| laptop since then, not once.
|
| I do agree, I am in a similar situation.
| nhecker wrote:
| (edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment &
| observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as
| argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You
| just got me thinking about how that situation might have
| been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)
|
| > [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a
| prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't
| possible before [...]
|
| I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less
| instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax
| and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch)
| a telegram and telegraph?
| bluGill wrote:
| In a lot of ways the cloud is better than my personal
| computer, even if I'm on it.
|
| There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets
| me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and
| screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can
| live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or
| desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me
| share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can
| be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house
| because sharing files between computers is so much better
| than only being able to work on one (or using floppies).
| The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world:
| it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone
| else's problem to keep the software updated.
|
| There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers
| also have annoyances. However for most things it is
| conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to
| fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)
| daveidol wrote:
| Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched
| to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now
| only uses her phone and tablet.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro
| ~2014... only to eventually discover it _largely unused_
| when we were probating her properties.
|
| iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one
| perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).
| doom2 wrote:
| I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it
| pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because
| supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases
| to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for
| companies to drop prices now that consumers have become
| accustomed to them.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| My primary concern is for next generation hardware.
|
| Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality
| CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions
| of ram faster than DDR5?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > there's no reason for companies to drop prices
|
| Competition.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough
| that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the
| market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money
| printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did
| last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.
| saulpw wrote:
| How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies
| can build a memory fab?
| margalabargala wrote:
| In both cases, more than 1!
| SirMaster wrote:
| Then why did they drop prices the last few times prices
| spiked like this?
|
| RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall
| it was at an all-time low.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.
|
| Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can
| be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer
| support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls).
| But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good
| number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't
| care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs
| low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).
| bluGill wrote:
| Rental seems to be about corporate laptops. Companies just
| want things to work at a predictable cost. They are already
| replacing laptops after 5 years even if they work. They are
| already replacing a few laptops that break in less than that
| 5 years. In short they are already renting the laptops, they
| are just paying the price upfront and then using accounting
| to balance it out. Rental just moves the accounting, but
| otherwise nothing changes.
|
| For consumers who don't replace their laptops on a schedule
| it makes less sense.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Being in control of your own computing device was always a
| niche. The vast majority of people are not interested in
| computing itself, only in the output. For that majority, this
| is fine.
|
| The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For
| example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have
| little control over, I set up my own home server using a
| refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I
| don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a
| refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own
| services there.
|
| As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying
| their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill
| that niche.
| threetonesun wrote:
| The framing here is wrong, I think. My iPad has a lot of
| software on it that I use for music production, it all runs
| locally. Yes I had to install it through Apple's app store but
| I could disconnect it from the Internet and expect it to, at
| this point, work as long as the software on almost any piece of
| hardware it replaces.
|
| Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with
| applications that primarily exist on servers that I have no
| control over, and it would be nearly worthless if I
| disconnected it from the Internet. Your central point is right,
| the economics are concerning, but I think it's been a ship
| slowly sailing away that we're now noticing has disappeared
| over the horizon.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| If you have to pass the bouncers vibe check to get in, and
| your dancers have to pay him a 30% tax to work there, do you
| own the strip club or does the bouncer?
| mattfrommars wrote:
| Yah but browser and computing are so much powerful, who needs
| to install software on their machine when web app and apps
| store is sufficient for general consumers
| dist-epoch wrote:
| I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is
| supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most
| productive (in terms of Capital) usage.
|
| Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the
| most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it.
|
| This is pure Capitalism.
|
| If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain.
|
| But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but
| then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your
| RAM is utterly deranged.
|
| Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it
| productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than
| you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value
| from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets
| will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go
| bankrupt.
|
| And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism.
| It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive
| customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing
| to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI
| market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market,
| Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them.
|
| Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI
| companies are the fittest by a large margin.
|
| AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We
| are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you
| either become Compute or you will fade away.
| forinti wrote:
| The market can remain irrational longer than the capacitors on
| my motherboard can resist bloating.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Fear mongering hysteria.
| shevy-java wrote:
| AI companies driving RAM prices up is, in my opinion, theft from
| the common man (and common woman). Sure, you can say that in
| capitalism, those who pay more benefit the most, but no system,
| not even the USA, has a purely driven capitalistic system. You
| still have transfer money, public infrastructure and what not. So
| private companies driving up the prices, such as for RAM, is IMO
| also theft from common people. And that should not happen. It can
| only happen when you have lobbyists disguised as politicians who
| benefit personally from helping establish such a system. The same
| can be said about any other prive-upwards scaling that is done
| via racketeering.
| meindnoch wrote:
| I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time
| for us to make software... less bloated?
|
| Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes,
| and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?
| guardian5x wrote:
| Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize
| that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain
| by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, _of
| course_ if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-
| optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely
| usable as they are today.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM
| than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces
| the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly,
| websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it
| extends the usable life of current hardware.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Sure, but the price increase will be less, because less
| ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will
| decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better
| then last years (but now we can run more/better software!)
|
| Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the
| market conditions are.
| cheschire wrote:
| It's the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to
| the initial entry device.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing
| everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.
| 3form wrote:
| Of course, as long as we're in the dreamland, most of
| these security upgrades do not actually require a
| hardware upgrade.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Technically no (except for the gradual performance drop
| they introduce, + occasional TPM bullshit), but of course
| in practice, companies see this as a choice of spending
| money on back-porting security fixes to a growing range
| of hardware, vs. _making money_ by not doing that and
| forcing everyone to buy new hardware instead.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without
| issues. While it's admittedly near the end of its life
| (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose
| it for Linux), I'm expecting the next one to also last a
| decade or longer.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| So is my wife, her laptop is still decent today, but
| doesn't support Win 11. I'm not worried about Microsoft
| as much as certain other competitors killing it -
| similarly to how she was forced to update to Windows 10
| in the first place because, one day, out of the sudden,
| _her web browser_ decided to refuse running on Windows 7.
| layer8 wrote:
| It would be nice for browser tabs and apps to reload less
| often.
| elevation wrote:
| 16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual
| Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz
| 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that
| uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller.
|
| What do I gain if more developers take this approach?
| Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery
| drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in
| between hardware refreshes. Improved security posture due to
| orders of magnitude less SLOC. Improved reliability from
| decreased complexity.
| wwweston wrote:
| Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications
| that _need_ the RAM for raw function. Maybe that's CAD, maybe
| that's A /V production, maybe it's a context window.
|
| It's been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our
| constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal
| economic functions is not necessarily what markets will
| generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps
| aren't optimizing for user resources.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's crazy talk. What will you ask for next? Add
| functionality to make apps at least as good/capable as they
| were in the 1990s and early 2000s? And then? Apps that
| _interoperate_? Insane.
|
| More seriously _and_ more ironically, at the same time, we 've
| now reached a strange time where even non-programmers can vibe-
| code better software than they can buy/subscribe to - not
| because models are _that_ good, or programming isn 't hard, but
| because enshittification that has this industry rotten to the
| core and unable to deliver useful tools anymore.
| rvz wrote:
| Tell that to those who are still using Electron, TypeScript to
| create bloated desktop apps.
| odst wrote:
| I was on LinkedIn last night, and someone posted their new
| SAAS. The website was basically a calendar where you could log
| what you did each day of the month. I checked my memory usage,
| and that site was using 1GB of memory. They were also charging
| $100 for it...
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Among my favorite _failed dorking around_ experiences is pre-
| Raspberry, when the Arduino was still hobby-level equipment.
| This was over a decade ago...
|
| With only a few kilobytes of code, you could send a UDP packet
| directly to your phone, with an app you "wrote" with just a few
| lines of code (to receive, _without auto-confirmation_ ).
| mmackh wrote:
| We are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If
| expand our definition of computers outside of screens and
| traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so
| much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram |
| storage).
|
| The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you
| to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio
| IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors.
| There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of
| sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our
| environment.
|
| So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and
| locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing
| for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be
| less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!
| functional_dev wrote:
| you are right! Power management improvements are what really
| enable these form factors... being able to run a wifi sensor on
| a coin cell for a year makes applications possible that were
| unthinkable just a few years ago
| flyinglizard wrote:
| It's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I
| shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought
| was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved
| those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a
| half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on
| GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less.
|
| But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I
| don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a
| consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in
| your local mall and piece them together into a working device.
| It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient
| model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on,
| thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space
| but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a
| mess.
|
| Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming
| consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more
| advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot
| of sense any more.
|
| Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices,
| because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people
| are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant
| meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have
| the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with
| these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Yea; I believe this is unprecedented. This is the firs time
| I've observed this regression in GPU price/ performance. That
| 4090 is still top-tier, and now costs more than when it was
| new.
| rswail wrote:
| A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or
| two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are
| ramping up production of _consumer_ RAM /SSDs because they see a
| market opening as the existing producers move to selling to
| enterprise/hyperscalars.
|
| There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM
| production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the
| time.
|
| The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost _exactly_ like the
| dotcom boom.
|
| It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the
| developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media
| production space. More focused and vertical market AI is
| emerging.
|
| The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <->
| Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer
| RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening
|
| Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall
| RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with
| expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually
| help all that much.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Chinese firms won't have the exact same problems as anyone
| else. Some problems will be the same but not all.
|
| * Chinese firms finance through different banks and investors
| than current ram producers
|
| * A company with a mission statement of consumer ram won't
| have their supply outbid by data centers
|
| * Chinese manufacturing has more expertise in scaling then
| any other manufacturing culture
| bluGill wrote:
| The biggest problem in expanding for everyone else is they
| don't trust the market to exist for long enough to be worth
| paying for a new factory so they are not investing in it. The
| Chinese might be small, but they think the market will exist
| and are investing. Will they be right or wrong - I don't
| know.
| jameshart wrote:
| The fact that there's been a massive expansion in the
| nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a
| smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn't mean
| the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.
| jameshart wrote:
| The effects of the AI hyper scaling boom on the commodity
| hardware and energy markets are very much _not_ like the dot
| com boom.
|
| Outside of the obvious economic effect of the dot com boom -
| the creation of near infinitely scalable high margin online
| businesses - there was a secondary effect on consumer
| electronics, with a massive growth in demand for networked
| devices; there was then much more of a balance between the
| hardware growth in the network infrastructure and data center
| worlds as well as in desktop and mobile.
|
| The AI boom's hardware impact is much more skewed, as this
| article details.
| upofadown wrote:
| This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is.
| Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from
| 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3
| GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source
| thinks it could run Windows 10.
|
| The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant
| here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It
| really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy
| as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based
| system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based
| system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it
| ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring
| there is no real reason for anyone else to care.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new
| computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every
| session.
| einr wrote:
| 65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to
| a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W
| difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the
| system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly.
| Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh.
|
| 0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year
| cjs_ac wrote:
| In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently
| capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a
| total yearly cost of PS72.77. Much higher than in the US,
| but still much cheaper than a new PC.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| PS72.77 is more than enough for a PC:
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for
| shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700
| Tiny with much better performance in both power and power
| consumption.
| einr wrote:
| I guess. It's hardly an open-and-shut case of "throw your
| old computer away!" though, especially when this is a
| worst-case scenario of running a desktop computer at full
| blast 24/7 without it ever going into sleep mode or being
| turned off, and when you don't know what the user's needs
| are. Maybe a mini-PC with basically no expansion just
| won't really work for them?
| Aurornis wrote:
| PC power draw at the wall is different than TDP. Idle power
| goes to a lot of components.
|
| Even CPU TDP is not an accurate measure. My latest AMD CPU
| will pull more than it's rated "TDP" under certain loads.
| einr wrote:
| Yup. But from the OP, all the information we have is the
| CPU model, and the GP decided that was enough to say it
| should be thrown in the trash for power inefficiency, so
| I thought it was enough for some bad math.
|
| (FWIW, searching for the CPU model brings up an old
| review where the full system they're testing pulls 145W
| under some amount of load. While that's not nothing, it's
| also not outrageous for a desktop PC that does the
| desktop PC things you require of it.)
| intrikate wrote:
| Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity,
| although they're both measures of energy.
|
| TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy
| your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep
| the unit within operational temperatures. It does not
| directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in
| operation.
| nehal3m wrote:
| It's close enough. Computers mostly make heat with some
| math as a distant second.
| einr wrote:
| I know, but it should be roughly correlated and only
| serves as comparison for wildly inaccurate napkin math
| anyway.
| upofadown wrote:
| An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W
| idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly
| compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate
| of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.
|
| New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a
| lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year
| hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live
| in a cold climate and the heating season is something like
| half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for
| gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a
| quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD
| hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I
| don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer
| would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.
|
| [1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/athlon-ii-x2-250-vs-
| ath...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Or C++. I buy fairly fast computers to compile stuff.
| Generally top of the line desktop hardware because
| Threadripper isn't as much better as it's more expensive (and
| annoying to cool!), so the next price point that makes sense
| is a highly clocked (because single thread also matters) Epyc
| for like 10kEUR.
|
| I also do caching and distributed compilation with sccache.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Did any of the components fail over time?
|
| HDD/SSD?
|
| Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years
| later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.
| upofadown wrote:
| Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at
| least one actual hard drive...
| pmdr wrote:
| I've seen comments on here before that went somewhere along the
| line of "adults don't care about RAM prices." HN is no stranger
| to siding with the oppressors.
| darkwater wrote:
| > For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden
| age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity
| and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable.
|
| I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286
| processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was
| already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted
| "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing
| space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago.
| There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD
| prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing
| tech became more efficient.
|
| The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the
| perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10
| years ago?
| duskdozer wrote:
| Do you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is
| how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10
| years, largely due to the web.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly
| capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for
| PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the
| software support worked like in the x86 world.
| vladde wrote:
| when you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the
| page changes to something _weird_ , but really legit looking.
|
| a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google",
| "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You
| Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"
| foolserrandboy wrote:
| It actually gives you warning in an overlay first that the
| favicon would change if you open a new tab. I did and I got
| "zuckerberg nudes"
| Izkata wrote:
| Went to try it out myself and the very first one I got was the
| HN icon and "The internet used to be fun".
| pissinwind wrote:
| Everything about tech and economy slowing is 1000% man made.
|
| The Trump/anti-America phase has gone on way longer than I
| thought but it won't last forever.
|
| Even if we have to wait for this old world cabal to die and fade
| away, time is still on our side.
|
| Boomers are stupid for using time as a weapon.
|
| I'm chillin. Waiting for people to die while growing my
| businesses.
|
| Travel to a functional place off the beaten path to see nobody
| can really stop forward progress. Even in these places where time
| has stopped.
| abmmgb wrote:
| I actually think the central thesis is thought provoking, we have
| shifted far away from locally installed shit to remote data
| centre access, this was initially driven by cloud-based
| initiatives and now spiralling upwards by AI. For any
| researchers, hackers, builders wanting to play with locally
| installed AI, hardware could become a bottleneck especially as
| many machines, such as the beloved Macs, are not upgradable
| 2716057 wrote:
| As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership
| there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst
| scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for
| fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it
| becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities.
|
| The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been
| better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary
| consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up
| to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very
| different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.
| pjerem wrote:
| > As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership
| there will be businesses willing to sell it to them.
|
| That's not true at all.
|
| There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small
| screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or
| Android.
|
| But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial
| investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this
| market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those
| niche.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| In the last month 20-30% of oil supply 30% gas supply and 30-40%
| of fertilizer production has been destroyed and could take any
| where from 8 months to 5 years to come back online. Governments
| are acting as everything is okay so that there is no panic but we
| have crossed the point of no return even if the war ends today
| food & energy shortages are over the horizon. If you can get an
| ev, solar heat pumps, battery storage etc get it now today as
| fossil fuel based energy prices are going to go through the roof.
| I see similarities to when covid hit people kept looking at
| things happening in other countries and not preparing for the
| shit to hit their own cities and countries.
| rolandhvar wrote:
| So what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new
| hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when
| replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market
| for the enthusiasts?
| dade_ wrote:
| https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nortel-Completes-Acquisit...
|
| Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an
| unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet? So
| Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients
| building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever?
| Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock
| valuations?
|
| "This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full
| potential of our high-performance optical component solutions
| business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This
| acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership
| position in high-performance optical components and modules which
| are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."
| pjmlp wrote:
| I have been holding for my hardware for decades, some of my
| private hardware traces back to 2009.
|
| Phones and tablets only get replaced when they die.
|
| Why should I throw away stuff that still works as intended?
| grahammccain wrote:
| I feel like we will get out of the hardware constraints
| eventually.
| pcblues wrote:
| I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a
| glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and
| memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch
| of data centres get pulled down.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| Unfortunately, data center computers are not something you can
| just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors,
| and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They
| use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and
| so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs.
| A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max
| and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never
| going to be useable by consumers.
|
| If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity
| for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long
| drought of supply.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| I have often imagined writing a book, roughly "Fahrenheit 451 but
| with computers instead of books". Imagine a world you do not buy
| an iPhone- one is assigned to you at birth, a world were
| "installing software" on "a computer you own" are not just
| antiquated or taboo, but unthinkable.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| google and facebook are actively salivating at this
| possibility.
|
| "don't create the torment nexus, etc."
| cyberrock wrote:
| I think Mr Bradbury would remind you his book was about how
| passive entertainment (the "parlor") slowly eroded books for
| decades before the actual book burnings, not the state just
| suddenly banning them.
|
| In that sense, I suppose you could still make it work. Our
| society celebrated surrendering ownership of media to iTunes
| and Steam for our convenience, whittled down online content
| that didn't make us feel good, limited which applications we
| could install on our phones in the name of security and
| privacy, and eliminated our anonymity to save the kids. At this
| point, removing the hardware is the least surprising step,
| because as Captain Beatty says, "if you don't want a house
| built, hide the nails and wood."
|
| Or perhaps you were thinking of Brave New World.
| Bender wrote:
| It is a good article but I am holding onto my hardware for other
| reasons. I predict it will not be long until all hardware has a
| set of Nanny chips that are named and marketed so that even
| people here on HN will argue on behalf of having them. It will be
| some _" Secure enclave AI accelerated Super Mega Native
| Processing Underminer"_ and will start off _securing_ and
| accelerating something or a set of somethings but will eventually
| tie into age verification, censorship and a Central Nanny Agency
| that all countries will obey.
|
| _- "Stare into this hole to verify your age._
|
| _- "Stick your finger in the box._
|
| _- "Ignore the pain to get your AI token bucks and unlock access
| to the shiny new attestation accelerated internet."_
|
| _- "Sync ALL of your usernames and passwords into this secure
| enclave."_
|
| Every packet and data stream will be analyzed locally by the AI
| to determine the intentions and predict future behavior. The AI
| summarized behavior will be condensed into an optimized encoded
| table to be submitted hourly to the Central Nanny Overseer. I
| might be slightly exaggerating and a bit hyperbolic but it will
| be something in this spirit and people will sleep walk right into
| it.
|
| My only question is which country will control the behavior of
| these chips.
| selectively wrote:
| This is just brainrot garbage. The idiotic stuff you see
| YouTubers saying. Why is this at the top of HN? Bots, I assume?
| the__alchemist wrote:
| It is wild thinking how a few years ago, I didn't buy a 4090
| direct from nvidia because "$1600 (USD) is too much to pay for a
| graphics card; if I need a better one, i'll upgrade in a few
| years. (Went with 4080, which is substantially slower and was
| $1200) Joke's on me!
|
| It will be scarcity mindset from here on out; will always buy the
| top tier thing .
| altcognito wrote:
| Part of this is that memory companies recognize that nobody is
| going to enforce antitrust law for the forseeable future, so
| collusion to raise prices is the norm now.
| xyst wrote:
| Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don't
| give a shit about optimization.
| c0decracker wrote:
| They do, at least a lot of us do I would say. But not everyone
| is at liberty to dedicate (still very expensive) time of a
| software engineer to eek out better memory footprint when it is
| cheaper to "just throw hardware at it" in many cases.
| saadn92 wrote:
| The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical
| point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past
| year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my
| stack depended on someone else's servers.
|
| Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead
| of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud
| storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it just
| requires caring enough to set it up
| gregoriol wrote:
| You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a
| managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by
| someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times
| that, because you can't know all the details of making so many
| tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some
| point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you
| backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.
|
| So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could
| easily be your time spent with friend or family.
| Carrok wrote:
| I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is
| minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a
| stable OSS docker image.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to
| parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud
| platform takes more ongoing work.
|
| I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my
| family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a
| server sitting at our cottage for our media library),
| alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.
|
| Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the
| nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall;
| need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet
| has been down since a power outage, so those backups are
| behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot
| to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new
| router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw
| alerts at me
|
| I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a
| homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still
| needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be
| fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the
| failure mode is more likely to be something like your
| account getting compromised, rather than a hardware
| failure).
| itchynosedev wrote:
| A hidden cost of self-hosting.
|
| I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use
| daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me,
| though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time
| consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS
| server failing would have the biggest impact, however.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have
| one server where a failure would cause issues: it's
| connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage,
| and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That
| would only cause Jellyfin to stop working--the other
| services that have lower storage needs would continue
| working, since their storage is replicated across
| multiple nodes using Longhorn.
|
| Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it
| does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware
| failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating
| filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had
| a failed node because some services didn't come back up
| until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster
| (looks like there are various projects to automate this--
| I should look into those).
| josmar wrote:
| Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just
| Work(tm) flawlessly every time.
|
| If anyone reading this has struggled with servers
| accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend
| NixOS.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| Agreed. NixOS + Tailscale is 99% there for me. Using Claude
| Code to deal with whatever other package I need built with
| nix while I'm working on $day_job things helps get me to a
| fully working system. Besides the fact that running
| containers via podman or docker (your choice) is super easy
| via a NixOS config.
|
| Combine that with deploy-rs or similar and you have a very
| very stable way to deploy software with solid rollback
| support and easy to debug config issues (it's just files in
| the ./result symlink!)
| esseph wrote:
| There are a lot of people that have made a lot of money and
| careers because developers in particular don't want to know
| or don't care to know how to manage this stuff.
|
| They need to get over it.
|
| Pick up some Ansible and or Terraform/tofu and automate away.
| It can be easy or as involved as you want it to be.
| saadn92 wrote:
| yes, I do agree with that sentiment, there are times when I'm
| spending way too much time restarting a service that went
| down, but it doesn't take as long as it used to, especially
| with AI assistance nowadays. If I'm spending too much time on
| it, then I'm also probably learning something along the way,
| so I don't mind spending that time.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| This point is oversold.
|
| Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays
| for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this
| work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to
| have it done for you.)
|
| Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the
| base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs),
| and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.
|
| Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you
| actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not
| the services themselves.
|
| Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can
| choose whether I really want to make that update to latest,
| and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.
|
| ---
|
| Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided
| routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated
| in literally years. They do ok.
| mbeex wrote:
| Much easier with AI. Went from Webhosting all-in package +
| NAS to Hetzner Storage Share and a separate Emailprovider
| (Runbox). After a short time I dumped the Nextcloud instance
| and moved on to a Hetzner VPS with five docker containers,
| Caddy, proper authentication and all. Plus a Storage Box.
| Blogging/Homepage as Cloudflare Pages, fed by Github, domains
| from CF and porkbun, Tailscale, etc., etc. ad nauseam, NAS
| still there.
|
| Most of this I didn't for many years because it is not my
| core competence (in particular the security aspects).
| Properly fleshed-out explanations from any decent AI will
| catapult you to this point in no time. Maintenance? Almost
| zero.
|
| p.s. Admittedly, it's not a true self-hosting solution, but
| the approach is similar and ultimately leads to that as well.
| mwcz wrote:
| Depending on someone else's servers isn't that different from
| depending on someone else's software, which unfortunately we
| all must do. Unfathomable reams of it, with a growth curve that
| recently went vertical. I guess the crucial difference is that
| someone else's servers can be taken away in a flash, while
| someone else's (FOSSl software can't.
| utopiah wrote:
| > with Tailscale for private access
|
| FWIW might want to check https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy to
| remove yet another managed elsewhere piece of your setup.
| saadn92 wrote:
| thanks for sharing, will check it out!
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Or Headscale, which has the blessing of Tailscale and
| contributions from some of their employees.
| https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the
| article, but it feels tangentially related:
|
| I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden
| period of globalisation was able to bring us.
|
| I hope that that level of international trade and economic
| cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and
| religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the
| future, but it seems the pendulum is swinging the other way for
| the time being.
|
| I hope that, wherever the current direction ends up, there are
| lessons that can be learnt about what we had, and somehow
| fumbled, such that there is motivation enough to get back there.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I hope that that level of international trade and economic
| cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and
| religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the
| future
|
| Me too, but without all the slavery this time please. It'll
| never work if some actors are willing to abuse their workforces
| to keep prices low as they do.
| 3abiton wrote:
| It is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from
| aliexpress, around 1-2EUR each, and having in a week or two
| delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| > I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden
| period of globalisation was able to bring us.
|
| Not everyone benefited. Market globalism wasn't particularly
| kind to the global south, and the specific mandates that the
| WTO enacted on countries in latin america / africa (Washington
| Consensus) greatly increased local wealth disparities despite
| visibly growing GDP for a time.
|
| America profited handsomely because for most of the past 30
| years, it was where the (future) transnational conglomerates
| were based. These companies stood to benefit from the opening
| up of international markets. Now that these companies are being
| out-competed by their asian counterparts, instead of going back
| to the drawing board and innovating they are playing the
| "unfair trade practices" card and of course the current
| administration is on-board with it.
|
| Globalisation is not going anywhere, but America is
| increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand
| to benefit from.
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| The overlay and page title changing worked really well, ffs, I
| was like "Why is my machine displaying a page with zuckerberg
| nudes" haha.
| tangotaylor wrote:
| I'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department
| of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud
| because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and
| R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive
| Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and
| GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons
| more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence.
|
| War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-
| compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery
| robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla
| Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of
| compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know
| researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.
|
| Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to
| reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware
| together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like
| PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power,
| etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
| lenova wrote:
| Oh man, I've come across this person's blog before and I love it,
| not just because of the personalization/personality they've put
| into the site's design, but because of all of the random CLI/TUI-
| based tools they've developed. Examples:
|
| - https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/projects/
|
| Their github repos:
|
| - https://github.com/mrusme
|
| They even built a BBS-style reader client that supports Hacker
| News:
|
| https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
|
| I miss the days of the web being weird like this :-)
| taikahessu wrote:
| Pidan kaksin kasin kiinni muistitikuista niinku.
|
| Cha cha cha ...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing
| had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to
| learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of
| hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when
| personal computing became a reality, programming exploded -
| anybody could learn it with a modest investment.
|
| I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era
| where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It
| will become harder and harder to learn to program just because
| it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary
| equipment.
| rla3rd wrote:
| What a bunch of BS. The price of a commodore 64 from 1980's is
| over $4K in todays dollars. $4K buys a pretty decent workstation
| these days.
| politelemon wrote:
| > If you need a new device, buy it;
|
| I would specifically add, whatever you have, or whatever you
| choose to buy, it would greatly benefit you to ensure a degree is
| Linux compatibility to ensure its lifespan can be extended
| further than the greed enthusiasts at MS, Apple, and Google would
| like you to. They will be facing the same declines in purchasing
| habits and are further incentivised to assert their ownership
| over what you might mistakenly consider your devices.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Depressing...
| cirelli94 wrote:
| Okay but what about the icon and tab name changing and the pop-up
| about disabling javascript?!
| joshstrange wrote:
| Picture of the overlay: https://cs.joshstrange.com/ZTg30SPn
|
| The favicon changes every time you switch away to something
| different with various tab names (ranging from porn, to right-
| wing news, to 4chan and I'm sure more).
|
| All this author has convinced me to do is block their website.
|
| I also don't agree at all with the premise of the article so I
| don't imagine I'm going to be missing much by not seeing this
| site again.
| sigbottle wrote:
| _semantic_ decentralization (not just AWS owning thousands of
| data centers and having their own distributed interoperability
| problems), standards, and regulations.
|
| These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like
| selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the
| "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about
| any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of
| said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part
| of the stack.
| G_o_D wrote:
| Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity.
|
| In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb
| seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats
| almost 1.5 month salary in private sector
|
| Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices
| goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying
| they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just
| dream for use never to fulfill
| MisterTea wrote:
| To the people saying "The shortage wont last forever." - Yes, you
| might be right. However, such a supply crunch creates a perfect
| vacuum for rapidly change to fill in the vacuous hardware
| landscape of computing and shift the balance of power.
|
| Think about it like this: Imagine the AI/Cloud/Crypto companies
| who are buying up all these compute and storage resources realize
| they now control the compute hardware market becoming compute
| lords. What happens when joe/jane six pack or company xyz needs a
| new PC or two thousand but cant afford them due to the supply
| crunch? Once the compute lords realize they control the compute
| supply they will move to rent you their compute trapping users in
| a walled garden. And the users wont care because they aren't
| computer enthusiasts like many of us here. They only need a tool
| that works. They *do not* care about the details.
|
| They hardware lords could further this by building proprietary
| hardware in collusion with the vendors they have exclusivity with
| to build weaker terminal devices with just enough local ram and
| storage to connect to a remote compute cluster. Hardware shortage
| solved!
|
| All they need to do is collude with the hardware makers with
| circular contracts to keep buying hardware in "anticipation of
| the AI driven cloud compute boom." The hardware demand cycle is
| kept up and consumers are purposefully kept out of the market to
| push people into walled gardens.
|
| This is unsustainable of course and will eventually fall over but
| it could tie up computing resources for well over a decade as
| compute lords dry up the consumer hardware market pushing people
| to use their hoarded compute resources instead of owning your
| own. We are in a period where computing serfdom could be a likely
| outcome that could cause a lot of damage to freedom of use and
| hardware availability and the future ability to use the internet
| freely.
| Kiboneu wrote:
| The other side of this is that we can still make software more
| efficient, and make better use of the old hardware than we had
| ever thought possible.
|
| I'm doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured
| before "Attention is all you need", than I could 5 years ago,
| when quantization techniques were implemented.
|
| I'm holding on to my 32 bit machines.
|
| Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good
| reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of
| up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and
| we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved
| on.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I am still rocking that 5700XT 50th anniversary edition. I see no
| reason it won't make it to 2030 at this point. There was a moment
| where I thought it was dying, but it was a combination of dust
| and a shader bug in BF6 that caused the concern. I've also got a
| 1080ti in case of disaster.
|
| Newer graphics hardware is pointless to me. The expensive new
| techniques I find incredibly offense from an interactivity
| standpoint (temporal AA, nanite & friends). I run Battlefield 6
| at 75% render scale with everything set to low. I really don't
| care how ass the game looks as long as it runs well. I much more
| enjoy being able to effectively dispatch my enemies than observe
| aesthetic clutter.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of
| the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead
| to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be
| a browser.
|
| Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want
| to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed
| using a web app.
|
| The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even
| seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained
| for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity
| browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone.
| It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's
| beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.
|
| Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Yeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as
| everything is done via browser.
|
| Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now.
|
| On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and
| securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60%
| of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM.
|
| I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that
| resource usage is.
| poolnoodle wrote:
| I've never seen a non-latin alphabet URL before, huh.
| redbell wrote:
| In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked
| website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in
| the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is
| the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.
| moichael wrote:
| I thought it was going to be one of those emoji URLs at first
| but I was also surprised by that
| kogasa240p wrote:
| This site finally got me to disable javascript through ublock.
| 10/10!
| n2j3 wrote:
| I wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am
| sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of
| private property altogether. The question is who owns the means
| of production(computation) I suppose.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I was about to upgrade because I'm using a Thinkpad t480, I
| decided to optimize my computer instead. I run i3 and a couple of
| native apps and chromium web apps run fast enough. And some
| kernel and other tweaks + gamemode in arch make gaming better.
|
| I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.
| solomonb wrote:
| I'm not saying we are in one, but isn't a RAM shortage like this
| is exactly what one would expect at the early stages of a take
| off scenario?
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| I very much would like to know how much of this presumably
| ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going
| to end up being released back to the market when the dust
| settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all
| this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data
| centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in
| construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we
| actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-
| of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money
| they got towards the future projects?
| philip1209 wrote:
| distracted by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
| Velocifyer wrote:
| Why doesn't Hacker News render punnycode in domains?
| WarcrimeActual wrote:
| It's super cool that this site changes the tab name to NSFW
| phrases when you switch off of it, and then pops up a rambling
| chastisement to turn of JS in your browser. Even cooler when I
| use HN to legitimately keep up with tech news at work and it does
| it on my work computer where I share my screen in meetings.
| Domain blocked. Don't erode user trust for your crusade. Moron.
| focusgroup0 wrote:
| Not to mention Age Verification / KYC being baked into every
| future OS and device. Buy and hodl to have a hope of independent,
| censorship-resistant computing in the future.
| evanwolf wrote:
| so... Hold on to Your Medical Devices. (And everything else with
| a chip in it.)
| QuiEgo wrote:
| On the plus side, we've reached the end of Moore's law and are
| living in an amazing age of personal computing devices.
|
| M1 Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are still good computers 5+ years
| after release.
|
| Many games are still playable (and being released on!) the PS4,
| which is almost 12 years old.
|
| The iPhone 15 pro has 8gb of RAM which will likely be sufficient
| for a long time.
|
| Don't get me wrong, this whole parts shortage is exceptionally
| annoying, but we're living in a great time to weather the storm.
| mattfrommars wrote:
| As someone who has been in the line of PC building, the entire
| "build your own" industry has been in a decline. And this "RAM
| apocalypse" is pretty much nail on the coffin.
|
| Enterprise business from small, medium to large get laptops or
| use mobile application and online SAAS.
|
| There entire PC industry is for enthusiasts and tiny segment of
| the worlds computing needs. The laptop variation has already been
| eating into PC market.
|
| In today's world, it's just not practical to own a PC unless you
| are gamer. And for gamers, it's just better to get console. And
| for developers, their is more money to be made selling games on
| console then PC.
|
| In the end, from business, to revenue generation stand point,
| custom PC industry is just a legacy of old computing world. As I
| type this, custom PC is more of a "marketing segment" for Nvidia
| for example to upsell Nvidia cloud offering - i might be
| stretching too far - but that basically is the point.
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