Hold on to Your Hardware

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/

by LucidLynx • 4 months ago

662 535 4 months ago

camgunz• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

9wzYQbTYsAIc3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

mememememememo3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Maybe we’ll finally get some good tools to make real productive work possible on phones.

Angostura2• 4 months ago

Like a large screen and a keyboard? Hello Mac Neo

9wzYQbTYsAIc3• 4 months ago

Virtual desktop casting, a killer HID product, and what else do you need?

pjc50• 4 months ago

iOS is apparently going to have mandatory age gating, so likely that will come to Android as well.

mememememememo3• 4 months ago

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.

layer83• 4 months ago

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.

CraigJPerry2• 4 months ago

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_2• 4 months ago

I think some players like xAi and Google can burn money for a long time. Google made $240B profit last year

Shank• 4 months ago

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.

CraigJPerry2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

If this does occur

The capital from the gulf is already disrupted. It isn't anymore a matter of if or when.

gzread2• 4 months ago

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.

ramon156• 4 months ago

They would rent out the data centers, not sell it off

tavavex5• 4 months ago

The thesis wouldn't be "completely derailed", just slightly delayed. The reasons why the powers above are pushing for that dystopian model aren't contingent on AI. If it all went away, we'd have a surge of hardware availability and a drop in prices, followed by the same trends - a slow transition to 'cheaper' remote computing wearing down the more expensive custom PC market, higher prices further reducing demand and creating a spiral until people who want personal computing are a niche market segment that becomes almost extinct. The result is still the same. Everyone will be using thin clients or computers that are more like smartphones or Chromebooks than modern PCs, with most services provided through the tightly-regulated internet via subscription services. It just would take us more time to get there.

zdc1• 4 months ago

The AI bubble feels like it's already starting to burst. Sooner or later the market will see that AI has improved productivity by 20% (or whatever figure) and realise it's much less than the 1000% improvement they've been pricing in.

keybored• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

duskdozer7• 4 months ago

    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_2• 4 months ago

What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains

duskdozer7• 4 months ago

Shrug. First time I'd seen this. If it displayed as the original text it would have been clearer.

shusaku2• 4 months ago

Kind of an interesting history to this kind of url: https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html

zvqcMMV6Zcr• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

duskdozer7• 4 months ago

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

barrkel8• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

barrkel8• 4 months ago

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.

9wzYQbTYsAIc3• 4 months ago

Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/

That’s for everyone

bluedino• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

barrkel8• 4 months ago

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.

gzread2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

FpUser2• 4 months ago

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

seany• 4 months ago

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)

tristor2• 4 months ago

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?

account425• 4 months ago

It's really not. I got 128 GB over 5 years ago and I paid far less than 20k for that PC.

torben-friis2• 4 months ago

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.

zozbot2346• 4 months ago

other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?

Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

swiftcoder• 4 months ago

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.

WillAdams4• 4 months ago

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....)

duskdozer7• 4 months ago

My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage

That's "non powerful" to you?

mbfg• 4 months ago

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.

wat100002• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

SergeAx• 4 months ago

other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? As a software engineer: 1) I need Docker to run some dependencies for my project: databases, caches, things like that 2) My IDE is quite a resource hog 3) I prefer my build process to be as fast as possible.

echelon5• 4 months ago

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.

zozbot2346• 4 months ago

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.

lpcvoid6• 4 months ago

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?

gessha• 4 months ago

Man, going to personal computing was a mistake, we should’ve stayed jacked to the mainframes /s

raincole• 4 months ago

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.

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

We won't be in a supply crunch forever.

This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut

m3nu• 4 months ago

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.

close042• 4 months ago

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.

bparsons• 4 months ago

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.

random32• 4 months ago

Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?

BizarroLand• 4 months ago

If they choke the consumer PC long enough the segment will die

shevy-java2• 4 months ago

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.)

bluGill5• 4 months ago

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.

SirMaster2• 4 months ago

The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.

kgeist• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

$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.

barrkel8• 4 months ago

Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless, it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.

Aurornis9• 4 months ago

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.

chmod7753• 4 months ago

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.

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

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.

TheRoque3• 4 months ago

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.

margalabargala6• 4 months ago

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.

danaris• 4 months ago

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.

barrkel8• 4 months ago

Single biggest problem with doing compute on a laptop is it stops when you shut the lid.

NoSalt2• 4 months ago

"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• 4 months ago

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.

barrkel8• 4 months ago

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.

snypher• 4 months ago

~%25 of mean US household income.

dmitrygr2• 4 months ago

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_one3• 4 months ago

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. :-(

clusterhacks• 4 months ago

"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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

You're responding to an LLM authored article that doesn't know anything. "Let that sink in for a moment."

randusername• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

wat100002• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram

account425• 4 months ago

Same, but that was over 5 years ago.

rkagerer• 4 months ago

Care to share some more detailed specs?

pedalpete• 4 months ago

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.

didgetmaster• 4 months ago

I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time.

Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!

shusaku2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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_Thor2• 4 months ago

Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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.

myself2482• 4 months ago

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.

adrianN3• 4 months ago

Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.

gobdovan• 4 months ago

I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not aware of this.

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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.

numpad03• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

mikewarot3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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).

sigio2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

bitwize2• 4 months ago

Wait, you type the code in directly? That's like a baby's toy!

jagermo• 4 months ago

I knew the time for my cable box would come!

aurareturn• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

sigio2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

WarcrimeActual2• 4 months ago

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.

numpad03• 4 months ago

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 EspaÃ±ol - YouTube", "FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange" }

tmtvl• 4 months ago

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).

Forgeties792• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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.

daveidol• 4 months ago

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.

doom2• 4 months ago

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.

bitmasher96• 4 months ago

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_fatal2• 4 months ago

there's no reason for companies to drop prices

Competition.

SirMaster2• 4 months ago

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.

pdimitar2• 4 months ago

One local store drops prices to clear stock and/or gain mindshare. Within a week, everybody else does.

Happened before, will happen again.

cmiles74• 4 months ago

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).

bluGill5• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

bombcar9• 4 months ago

This is the correct stance - even in the era of "total personal computer control" the vast majority of people were not in control - they had a friend or child or parent or IT department who was really in control, they were just along for the ride.

And a large number of those people jump at getting them an iPad instead of the perpetual tech support required.

This has been a thing for so long that the jokes were already old in 2005 - 21 years ago! https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/one-day-in-the...

threetonesun• 4 months ago

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-Jobo3• 4 months ago

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?

mattfrommars2• 4 months ago

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

_the_inflator• 4 months ago

Yes, I agree.

Windows PCs were essentially a hacker's paradise and almost all of my friends assembled their PC or let their PC get assembled by a friend.

There was so much variety in the components, in fact you carefully had to adjust mainboard and its chipset with the CPU and GPU as well as the RAM type. This was a lot of work, since all components had downsides and there were hidden gotchas, like for example the huge and looming CPU fan of later Intel CPUs.

If you not went for a large tower PC, you were essentially doomed. CPU fan and GPU could overlap, number of slots were a thing also whether there were enough host slots available.

Bus system, cable length, jumper settings - so many ways to make your hardware bite you.

But at least it felt even after many years as your system, that ran locally. There was a lot of protest, when Microsoft started online activation. This marked the inflection point at which autonomy of your system suddenly eroded. Also downloading huge driver updates in order to get your NVIDIA GPU working - you needed a permanent online connection which wasn't needed earlier.

dist-epoch• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

The market can remain irrational longer than the capacitors on my motherboard can resist bloating.

shevy-java2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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?

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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.

cheschire• 4 months ago

It’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.

layer83• 4 months ago

It would be nice for browser tabs and apps to reload less often.

elevation• 4 months ago

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.

wwweston2• 4 months ago

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.

TeMPOraL13• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Tell that to those who are still using Electron, TypeScript to create bloated desktop apps.

odst• 4 months ago

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...

ProllyInfamous2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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

tavavex5• 4 months ago

Microcontrollers are great. But a lot of people who use them were bridged over by an interest in PCs, hardware or building something that interacts with something they already use. If free computing goes away, how long until the interest in microcontrollers slumps far enough for them to turn from fun, cheap commodities into expensive, proprietary, industrial devices?

flyinglizard• 4 months ago

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__alchemist2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

zozbot2346• 4 months ago

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.

bitmasher96• 4 months ago

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

bluGill5• 4 months ago

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.

jameshart2• 4 months ago

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.

jameshart2• 4 months ago

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.

upofadown3• 4 months ago

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.

1970-01-013• 4 months ago

Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.

einr4• 4 months ago

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

upofadown3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)

ahartmetz• 4 months ago

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 10k€.

I also do caching and distributed compilation with sccache.

antisthenes3• 4 months ago

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'.

upofadown3• 4 months ago

Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at least one actual hard drive...

bombcar9• 4 months ago

Hardware has a weird case of either dying pretty quickly or running forever, in my experience.

I think I can count on one hand the total number of drives I've ever had fail - and four of those were in the warranty period, back in the 90s-2000s.

M95D• 4 months ago

I have two Phenom II x6 - same generation as Athlon II. One desktop and one server.

The server ran non-stop for the first 10 years. Motherboard, a 790, failed and upgraded to 880G. One memory stick failed, replaced by lifetime warranty (Kingston) but the pair I received was slower CL9-10-9 vs. 9-9-9 for the failed one. After 10 years my router and a rk3288 SBC took most of it's jobs. I moved most of the hard drives (7x 2GB Seagate ST2000DL and 1 spare) into a DAS (SATA RAID enclosure) connected directly to the router where they are still running. None failed. The server bacame an offline backup. I started it weekly to sync. Last week I replaced it with a rk3588 ITX board - not because it failed, but because I wanted to explore / play with the new ARM CPU.

The desktop is also still working. I bought it second-hand a few years after the first. It was used at least 4h every evening and at least 10h every weekend. I'm still using it right now. One HDD failed - it was a 120GB PATA Seagate from ~2004 IIRC. No data loss, it was in RAID1. One GPU failed, a GTS 250, upgraded to GTX 970, still working. I'm going to keep using it for at least 5 more years, possibly more. Firefox no longer supports Win7 and I'm in the process of migrating to Linux. Total Commander (I'm a user since Win31) and file associations are holding me back. xdg-open is... absolutely horrible.

pmdr• 4 months ago

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.

darkwater2• 4 months ago

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?

duskdozer7• 4 months ago

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.

darkwater2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

rolandhvar2• 4 months ago

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?

bombcar9• 4 months ago

The difference is "datacenter equipment" has changed - it used to be large rack mount servers that, while a bit silly to run at home, at least could be done if you wanted to spend the power budget.

These are entire datacenters build for one thing - and they're water-cooled and integrated so tightly that it's unlikely you can do much with any parts or part of the setup.

The difference between buying an off-lease Dell server and trying to buy part of a supercomputer - which is what these really are. They're not datacenter; they're custom-built supercomputers.

rolandhvar2• 4 months ago

Yes I see, fair enough

dade_• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I feel like we will get out of the hardware constraints eventually.

pcblues• 4 months ago

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.

QuiEgo6• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

google and facebook are actively salivating at this possibility.

"don't create the torment nexus, etc."

cyberrock• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

the__alchemist2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.

c0decracker• 4 months ago

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.

saadn923• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.

josmar• 4 months ago

Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just Work™ flawlessly every time.

If anyone reading this has struggled with servers accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend NixOS.

esseph• 4 months ago

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.

saadn923• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

kelnos2• 4 months ago

Self hosting doesn't take as much effort as the cloud providers want us to believe.

I've been renting a VPS for 15-20 years from a small provider. It runs a webserver, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a bunch of other things, and I spend maybe an hour or two per month maintaining it. Add a few non-recurring hours if I want to set up something new or need to change something big.

Self hosting is not hard. It's not scary. It's not a security nightmare. All of that is just FUD.

mwcz• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

saadn923• 4 months ago

thanks for sharing, will check it out!

jamesgeck0• 4 months ago

Or Headscale, which has the blessing of Tailscale and contributions from some of their employees. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

BLKNSLVR3• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

It is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from aliexpress, around 1-2€ each, and having in a week or two delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.

stuxnet79• 4 months ago

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.

alsetmusic4• 4 months ago

but America is increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand to benefit from.

We're a clown show and we don't deserve to have friends until we get our shit together.

themafia• 4 months ago

golden period of globalisation

The largest upward transfer of wealth in Earth's history.

was able to bring us.

A useless race to the bottom.

that can be learnt about what we had

Rebadged imperialism. If you constantly screw native populations out of the value of their resources you will lose everything you build with those resources. Literally the lesson: make fair deals or die.

BLKNSLVR3• 4 months ago

I entirely agree that the best, sustainable, and humanitarian parts of globalisation should be the ideal that's worked towards in the future.

The uber-profit-driven enrichment of a very small group of people at the cost of entire communities or even populations should be rewarded with, like you say, death.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

The overlay and page title changing worked really well, ffs, I was like "Why is my machine displaying a page with zuckerberg nudes" haha.

bombcar9• 4 months ago

So hard to find it again amongst all my infowars and Zuckerberg nudes tabs ... :D

tangotaylor• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Pidän kaksin käsin kiinni muistitikuista niinku.

Cha cha cha ...

commandlinefan• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Depressing...

cirelli94• 4 months ago

Okay but what about the icon and tab name changing and the pop-up about disabling javascript?!

joshstrange• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

antisthenes3• 4 months ago

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.

mikewarot3• 4 months ago

Everything today is a web app.

Maybe it was a few years ago, I had to download a phone app just to try to restore delivery notifications on my Amazon echo. They no longer have a web interface to control it. Worse than that, I had to ask the AI to do it in said app.

poolnoodle• 4 months ago

I've never seen a non-latin alphabet URL before, huh.

redbell• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

I thought it was going to be one of those emoji URLs at first but I was also surprised by that

tjpnz• 4 months ago

It's in Japanese Katakana - it's used for writing foreign words, names and sometimes is used to put emphasis on text.

kogasa240p2• 4 months ago

This site finally got me to disable javascript through ublock. 10/10!

n2j3• 4 months ago

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.

mikewarot3• 4 months ago

I have a small amount of hope that I'll live long enough to own a means of producing chips, thanks to Atomic Semi. The 3d printing, and home CNC machine advances of the past decade make it a lot easier to turn out a small doodad or replacement part at home.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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?

T-A3• 4 months ago

As much as 23.1GW of capacity is under construction globally, split across 831 sites. The Americas region hosts 17GW of this capacity, across 311 locations. Europe, Middle East and Africa or EMEA as well as the Asia Pacific (APAC) region trail significantly. APAC has marginally more ongoing construction, with 3.2GW across 283 sites versus EMEA’s 2.9GW across 258. The US alone hosts 15.9GW of ongoing construction.

https://about.bnef.com/insights/commodities/ai-data-center-b...

philip1209• 4 months ago

distracted by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

Velocifyer• 4 months ago

Why doesn't Hacker News render punnycode in domains?

bombcar9• 4 months ago

Because it's the simplest solution to punycode attacks - һасkеrnеwѕ.com is xn--krnw-43d5ac5g0ix2b.com but can you tell it from hackernews.com?

WarcrimeActual2• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

so… Hold on to Your Medical Devices. (And everything else with a chip in it.)

QuiEgo6• 4 months ago

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.

mattfrommars2• 4 months ago

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.

beloch• 4 months ago

The global memory shortage is something that will probably end, perhaps even soon. e.g. Google announced Turboquant[1] today. If as described, it would significantly reduce thirst for more RAM at data-centres. Even if it doesn't pan out, data centres aren't being built at the same rate as they're being financed due to the practical, but unavoidable, problem of finding enough power. Demand for memory may actually have a very real bottom that we hit soon.

However, there is another reason to look after and hang onto to certain types of products long-term.

Tariffs.

If the trade barriers that the Trump administration has put up remain long-term, it fundamentally changes what can be built. High volume items (like RAM) are the least likely to be affected. Low-volume, high performance items are what are threatened. Say you're building a very specialized, very low demand item that's simply-the-best. You're probably going to source the best components and materials from several countries, build it in one place, and then ship it globally. You amortize the cost of tooling, etc. across the entire global market.

If a few countries throw up trade barriers, as the U.S. has done, your material costs go up and your access to markets decreases. People on the other side of those trade barriers may suddenly not be able to afford your products. Supply gets more expensive and demand drops. What was marginally profitable in the old world order becomes uneconomic in the new order. Such items aren't going to be magically on-shored to the U.S.. They're just not going to be made anymore.

If you own something that's niche and barely profitable to make, that's what you should look after and take care of, because more of it might not be made for a while if trade barriers don't come back down.

----------

[1]https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-effici...

mrinterweb• 4 months ago

If turboquant can reliably reduce LLM inference RAM requirements by 6x, suddenly reducing total RAM needs by 6x should have a dramatic shift on the hardware market, or at least we can all hope. I know 6x is the key-value cache saving, so I'm not sure if that really translates to 6x total RAM requirements decrease for inference.

T-A3• 4 months ago

Google announced Turboquant[1] today

Most commentators seem to have missed that the TurboQuant paper was posted in April 2025:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874

So it's been public knowledge for almost year, and internal Google knowledge for longer. Did Google reduce its capital expenditure plans over the past year? Let's ask Google:

Google is expecting to see a capex of between $175-185 billion in 2026, approximately double that of 2025.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-estimates-...

gchamonlive• 4 months ago

In time we'll have a surplus of machines lying unused in datacenters.

Then maybe you won't be able to buy a computer, but you'll be able to buy a server on a datacenter for half the price of one. Yours, one that if you wanted you could drop by the datacenter and ask for it. But you won't because you wouldn't be able to do nothing with it. It's only useful in the server rack, so you'll buy it and leave it there, maybe after one or two years, depending on contract, you'll have to pay rent, but it'll be incredibly cheaper than buying a pc and hosting yourself.

I don't know. Or maybe it's just a temporary shortage and we are just overreacting.

kaiwenwang• 4 months ago

Really strikes me as hyperbole, because the article overestimate the solidity (as opposed to leakiness) of the real world and companies and their willingness to create such a feudal society.

The author with his custom designed website would be a much better spot to implement such a rent hardware scheme compared to the likes of HP.

chka• 4 months ago

This is already happening. Most VPS providers have raised prices 15-20% (last month I got emails from Hetzner & OVH even some tiny budget ones). The $5/month VPS that every self-hoster relies on is becoming very quuickly the $7-8/month VPS and that's before the memory shortage really hits.

danw1979• 4 months ago

I think you could choose to believe that “the industry’s priorities have fundamentally changed” or you could choose to believe in the economics of supply and demand.

bombcar9• 4 months ago

I understand why HN shows the raw domain, but I feel it'd be more ... appropriate if they also showed the "correct" domain - マリウス

rldjbpin• 4 months ago

while one should make the most of our electronics, the theory behind the article's headline is fuelled by fear-mongering most of us are jaded by.

personally been stretching the most life out of my machines. particularly because there has been some supply-demand "issue" happening ever since i could afford to.

my previous computer was a laptop without any tensor cores. it was bought right on the onset of lockdown-related supply chain issues. i was ok to stretch it beyond the better half of a decade before it died on me.

now had to build a computer out of necessity while paying 5x for ram. it took a lot to suppress the internal rationalisation of waiting it out for overall costs to improve. but in this decade, they almost never have!!

stepping back, we forget to appreciate how the cost of computing against cost of living have been so good to us for almost two decades. now thanks to opportunistic greed and real issues, it is coming back to the older times. one could still, for the price of a month's rent*, afford a decent computer which can last years.

Hold on to Your Hardware

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