Shareholders looking at employees "You are sacrifices we are willing to make."
[1] Profitable for me, assuming someone trains their AI on HN comments someday.
And of course if they burn natural gas for their power you get polluted air from your neighbors.
The solution here is for the producers of electronics to increase production, not to go around saying “using chips for AI is bad. Chips should be used for good things like playing video games.”
This is correct. Playing Final Fantasy XIV has done exponentially more good, and provided more value, than anything LLMs have ever produced. Thank you for your post.
And it likely will never happen, even an army of morbidly obese whales can't eat enough to cause scarcity.
Your analogy is just bad. The solution here is to find better analogies.
There's no way of knowing this - I see articles fairly often on HN of mathematicians (sometimes grad students or younger) solving problems where progress previously had stalled.
When RAM prices are increasing like a crypto currency we have a real societal problem.
Tangential but this is funny. Back in the early 90s, I did a lot of BASIC programming in the family computer, this was before we had Internet. I could spend hours.and hours in front of the computer doing stuff.
Fast forward to around 2010 I remember a distinct feeling one time the internet went off at home. Sitting in front of the computer and feeling that it was "useless" because it wasn't connected to the net.
We are getting to that point in coding apparently: 5-10 years ago, everyone programmed just by typing commands, looking at S.O. and thinking. Now, if we open our "IDE" and it doesn't have access to The Brain, we are left just standing there looking in awe at the machine.
Sign of the times...
I guess it feels less like a problem when you have that problem regularly and are forced to adapt. and I guess I'll just HAVE to switch to Pixel 10 when Pixel 11 comes out - the integrated Linux terminal right there is awesome. or maybe just get a MacBook like most around me did
The only hope is China spoils the party.
Something one could say about a high fever being a sign of the immune system working. There are obvious temporary and permanent risks to how the system works, and there are limits beyond which everything simply breaks down. It's best not to have a fever at all.
Well put. Indeed non-free market solutions typically rely on some impossible conditions, in your comparison that would be "just don't get sick". But people will get sick. You can't just "not have a fever at all".
Of course, my hallucination does not dismiss the possibility that we are in a bubble. Wasn't CSCO something like 200x PE during the dot com bubble? People see immense potential in an idea but don't know how to properly price it, and so we get what is seen as essentially infinite expected growth priced into companies and their products.
My $3k laptop has nearly the best components on the market right now. The problem is that it has a poor build (MSI) and is falling apart in a way that's not repairable. I looked into purchasing an equivalent-or-better laptop, and I couldn't find anything under $6 for essentially the same specs, and over $10k for a significant upgrade. Though I need my laptop for work, I decided just to ride it out till it's death.
The AI datacenters are making things more expensive and at the same time destroying existing electronics. All this is happening at the same time that the major OS vendors are locking down their operating systems and creating device attestation frameworks.
Whether it is a coordinated effort behind the scenes is irrelevant, the real outcome of all of this is that the average home tech prosumer will not be able to afford to maintain personal hardware that remains compatible with mainstream services.
In light of the consumer market RAM shortages, all the consumer devices will transition to thin client architectures that offload all their real compute to the centralized cloud. You will not be allowed to modify these devices, and there will be nothing you can modify them to do. They will have no ports, using wireless charging and wireless connectivity, and likely even any UART will be left off the board, if you can get them open at all. Like the Apple Watch or Airpods, they will not be built to be openable, and opening them will be an irreversibly destructive act.
You will not be able to buy these devices, they will only be available on a subscription basis. You will own nothing and be told you should be happy.
Online major digital services will only be compatible with these devices, offering no endpoints for third party devices to connect.
GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today.
Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
And right before that, was it dirt cheap? No? Slightly different scenario then.
> GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today.
They're even more now...
> Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
Nowhere near as expensive as they are now, nowhere near as high a jump in price in a short period of time as now. Plus, there was a defined end point of "flood over, back to normal." There is no "AI data center build out over, back to normal" in sight.
The death of Mac was already a discussion topic a few years ago, they only need do XCode on iPadOS or iCloud, Android Studio style.
Eventually ASML will get in same boat as all of the Western industries from shipbuilding and car manufacturing to everything else.
It may take one year or twenty, but law if it's a matter of national security for them, eventually they will get ahead.
I didn't say it was likely, but one of these two outcomes is possible.
they don't price gouge on other stuff from shenzhen really do
I also found out recently my matched, working 3d hardware from the '90s was worth more than my actual year-old medium-high end video card, so who knows!
/s for obvious reasons, except the rise in prices of 3dfx cards ffs (wtaf).
I don't have to imagine what it would be like under communism in order to see what it's already like under capitalism.
Yeah, things are going great over there
How is it possible for the steam machine to be under $1,000?
I don't see Valve doing it. Unlike an actual console they can't lock down the hardware. People would start buying Steam Machines then replace the OS or even resell the parts.
That would be highly unprofitable. A subsidized Steam Machine contains a 7600M equivalent. It'll probably have a great price for machine with a 7600M, but it'll be significantly more expensive than a machine with an iGPU. Non-gamers aren't going to pay extra for a machine with a 7600M. And gamers are likely buying Steam games even if they aren't using SteamOS. You can't rip out the 7600M to sell it.
Maybe someone can invent a universal system to allow CPU and GPU upgrades on a desktop computer.
I hope a repairable and upgradable Steam Machine would help more people dip their toes into it.
Valve also could have gone the Framework route of releasing a motherboard+CPU combo so you can upgrade later down the line just by swapping the board out.
I guess they can earn more money by soldering everything on the board and having you buy a completely new PC every time you want to upgrade.
Its obviously less reliable, but with read only OS with only occasional writes it will work just fine for decade.
Pray China figures out semiconductor manufacturing at scale. Of course, that will spell the end for <redacted>.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/is-apple-set-to-turn-to-china-...
Both were struck by US sanctions.
That's the whole list.
Yes demand is increasing, but I also think something is going on with many currencies. People do not want to hold them.
Additionally USD has really been falling globally.
https://wise.com/us/currency-converter/usd-to-all-rate/chart
~120 --> ~80 high to low past ~4 yrs. a loss of 30%
Waiting, in anticipation and horror, for the price of the frame.
The price raise doesn't seem terrible in this market. Affordability of most goods is pretty bad right now.
This is more than simply having demand high enough that RAM flies off shelves faster than it can be produced, where a future lull in demand and/or increase in production resolves or even over-corrects for the problem. The AI craze has caused several companies (most notably Crucial) to abandon consumer RAM entirely. At minimum, I think we can expect it to take several years before RAM prices fall back out of the clouds, let alone come anywhere close to what they were before.
After two years and two months it randomly started boot looping, so that's that.
Also check this out too https://dontkillmyapp.com/ because it was always a hassle to keep some apps running in the background, I had to navigate some bizarre menu hierarchies thanks to HyperOS (which makes TouchWiz look incredible by comparison).
embrace the agent.
you don't need the pleasure of playing beautiful fun video games. now you can command an agent - day & night.
& the agent then gaslights you.
that's the 'agentic' story being sold.
The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.
Really? Most people I know seem to have found the chatbots tremendously helpful. It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.
Ah yes that's certainly worth more than a steady job market, low inflation and affordable goods. Get real.
Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.
ChatGPT and Gemini offer enormous consumer value for free.
Give us replaceable batteries and the right to update our own operating systems and I think we can survive unaffordable RAM for decades if it comes to it.
If I never buy another GPU or console again, there’s more than enough quality gaming for several lifetimes available on older hardware and often very inexpensively.
I'm with you, but given that I have no control over any of them I wouldn't have minded that my luxury fun was still cheap. About a decade or so ago, I remember saying something like "We're in an odd period historically: if you except housing, healthcare, and education, everything else is _stunningly_ cheap by historical norms." I wasn't trying to discount the importance of those things, but it felt like there was at least some relief among the rising costs there. Now, it seems like "everything else" has caught up and it's simply that everything is expensive.
We all have a little bit of control over at least housing and transport. Local politics determine land use, and municipalities in the US have consistently voted for more car dependency (leading to more expensive transport) and limited housing construction (leading to more expensive housing).
Local politics aren't really paid attention to, which results in any amount of participation and influence having a relatively large impact compared to state or federal politics.
What makes you think demand won't drive those prices up as well? And this is more than just gaming, the Steam Deck prices are increased due to the increase cost of general components like RAM, which impacts machines used to do work as well.
At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.
Currently, I'm feeling like it was a pretty wise move.
Never had such issue with a phone, but after Deck started feeling I missing that screen quality elsewhere.
Source: 99% of oleds cause terrible eye strain. Flicker affects people even when they don't realise it (studied for office workers during the CFL era iirc.)
But in general you're correct. When given a choice, I'll generally buy IPS when I can.
Apple and Google could do something about it if they wanted, even without changing supplier. They clearly don't think it's worth it. That's not surprising coming from Google but I admit I am surprised that Apple has no driver option to reduce flicker.
Most Chinese phone makers nowadays offer settings to reduce OLED flicker greatly, usually at the cost of color accuracy and/or a locked framerate.
Micron up 3% today, 76% last month, 292% last six months, 863% in the past year.
I bought Micron in mid-March when it dipped. I looked at SK Hynix last week with thoughts to buy, but it had gone up so much in the past month I figured too late. Nope, up 9% today.
Enshittification continues.
The Stream Deck?
Though I believe that name is taken already.
Steam Deck feels like one of the most disappointing pieces of hardware I have purchased. Def not worth at that price.
My main problem with it is that it doesn't have a simple clickable on/off switch, and takes FOREVER to turn on holy shit it's awful and feels unusable almost every time I try to use it
I have to leave it on sleep because otherwise it will never turn back on, and it brings me so much ire to interact with its stupid recessed pathetic excuse of a power "button"
I installed Artix Linux on my desktop computer, which is basically a branch of Arch Linux but with support for more initialization services, and it starts up a lot faster than my steam deck.
* Too big and heavy to hold without sitting and resting it on my lap, which is a horribly-unergonomic position with neck strain. Controls are widely-separated such that even with my giant sasquatch hands, it's hard to reach all the buttons. So many buttons on it that there's nowhere to hold it without accidentally pressing them (I accidentally turn it off every time I use it). Loud fan and hot air blowing out. Few games I like that work well without a keyboard and mouse. Even fewer that have readable text on the tiny screen. CPU/GPU too weak for many games. Almost no games targeting the platform so UX feels hacky. Honestly I don't know what the market for this is. I bought it to use in my RV and figured even if I didn't use it as a console, it'd be good connected to a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse, but a lot of titles don't work well under emulation, even after eliminating the hardware UX issues.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0253/3664/3635/files/641_e...
You would have to go out of your way to grip it in a way you could press it. You don't need to move your hand to lift it, it's controller shape after all. Or you can grip it along the bottom edge. And even gripping the top edge I just can't find a way you could accidentally hit it. It's flush.
The only time I've accidentally turned it on/off is when I've been clawing it out of the carrying case.
Edit: Wait, are you gripping the bottom and top edge at the same time, over the screen? Why? It's huge.
Did you find the OG Xbox "Duke" controller comfortable? I did. The Deck doesn't have the best layout IMO, but I don't have trouble reaching the buttons.
> readable text on the tiny screen
Definitely an issue, especially those over 40 - which, really, is sort of a major part of the expected market.
What I find to require contortion is maintaining a grip on the Deck while operating the front controls without simultaneously squeezing the paddles on the back or having such a loose grip that I risk dropping the thing. The paddles on the back are one of my biggest problems with the grip ergonomics in general.
