63 pointsby inigyou2 hours ago13 comments
  • Schlagbohrer17 minutes ago
    Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).
    • prodigycorp7 minutes ago
      can u provide some context? what is this trying to solve and how does it solve it? very curious.
      • codeulike4 minutes ago
        Its a way to make sure the delivery takes place. A code is sent to recipient and recipient only gives it to the delivery person once item is handed over. Delivery person cant mark item as 'done' without the code. I've seen Uber Eats do the same thing sometimes.
        • stingraycharles2 minutes ago
          What’s wrong with a signature?
          • jacobwga few seconds ago
            It's to prevent theft by the delivery person or by the wrong recipient
  • pu_pe6 minutes ago
    This will have general inflationary consequences for consumer products (phones, consoles, laptops, etc.). On top of current uncertainties regarding oil and fertilizers, I think 2% inflation in the US and Europe would be a very optimistic target.
  • chvid28 minutes ago
    I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory.

    (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)

    • vdfs4 minutes ago
      > (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)

      Why? High demand and low supply is very good for shareholders and make indexes go up, their goal is not to meet demand, they want exponential qurartly revunes

  • guessmynamean hour ago
    • zarzavat30 minutes ago
      Note to the momentarily shocked: this is in Canadian dollars.
  • amelius35 minutes ago
    How am I going to buy a computer that connects to AI datacenters now?
  • tostian hour ago
    All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
    • tveita15 minutes ago
      https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html

      Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.

      Now RAM in the cloud, now you're really paying the Java premium.

    • jbverschoor32 minutes ago
      Thanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)
      • gaigalas13 minutes ago
        Recipe for delicious pizza:

        1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.

        2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.

        Sounds efficient.

        • inigyou9 minutes ago
          The grease is vaporised and gives permanent chronic asthma to one randomly chosen Memphis resident.
    • ameliusan hour ago
      Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
      • pjc50an hour ago
        Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.
    • rock_artistan hour ago
      That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.

      Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.

      What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.

      • eru17 minutes ago
        You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.

        Moore's law is alive and well.

  • WithinReasonan hour ago
    This hopefully helps mitigate the risk of putting more production capacity in place, which the Big 3 were not willing to do so far.
    • pjc5044 minutes ago
      At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large.
      • inigyou30 minutes ago
        That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.
        • londons_explore14 minutes ago
          Fail to deliver, and they get bankrupted...

          Do deliver and they don't get paid because the buyer purchased with money that doesn't exist.

          Lose-lose situation!

          • inigyoua few seconds ago
            But they don't get bankrupted, because it's an ordinary year for them, only with different customers.
      • nixon_why6942 minutes ago
        Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.
      • eru15 minutes ago
        What kind of default risk?

        What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.

        • pjc5010 minutes ago
          > willfully collapsing nominal GDP

          What on earth are you talking about?

          The credit risk was a very real problem; Kaupthing, Anglo Irish, RBS, Lehman etc.

  • an hour ago
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  • PeterStueran hour ago
    Isn't scalping illegal in some countries?
    • inigyouan hour ago
      Buying and selling at market price is rarely illegal. I think in the USSR it might be?
      • chupasaurus37 minutes ago
        It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.
    • actionfromafaran hour ago
      Isn't scalping a term used for tickets? Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

      It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

      • dspillett12 minutes ago
        > Isn't scalping a term used for tickets?

        It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).

        > Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

        As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.

        > It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

        [and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]

        I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.

      • GoblinSlayer30 minutes ago
        Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.
      • AussieWog93an hour ago
        I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.
        • user4392810 minutes ago
          And if anything, I believe progress has been accelerating.

          A year ago the SOTA was GPT-5/Opus 4.1/Gemini 2.5 Pro, two years ago Sonnet 3.5.

          Looking at Opus 5 for SOTA performance and GPT 5.6 Luna for a viable cheap alternative, AI is much more capable now.

          Honorable mention: GPT 5.6 Sol on Cerebras, capacity limited to a few customers, is supposedly serving 750 tok/s.

          Compared to 90 tok/s for non fast mode 5.6 Sol, 56 tok/s for Opus 5, and 190 tok/s for 5.6 Luna.

          I am very curious about the next generation of models, GPT-6/Astra is rumored to launch still in August. Not sure what is the state of Anthropic's next Fable checkpoint.

          If these models also deliver significant improvements, I really do not see how one could seriously still argue among the lines of AI being a scam, and the demand not being there to support the size of the investments.

  • gaigalas17 minutes ago
    The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me.
    • AdamN4 minutes ago
      The lines that would have made consumer-level stuff are being reduced in favor of the higher profit margin/demand products. That means more supply of those other products (but still not enough) and lower supply of the consumer-level stuff (driving up prices).
  • an hour ago
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  • AmbroseBierce22 minutes ago
    Turns out AI-maxxing implicates citizens-minning.
  • xg1517 minutes ago
    How to fight the war on general computation:

    Method 1: Spend decades pushing elaborate technical standards for locking down bootloaders, try to convince society why we need device attestation and hardware-bound keys, gradually establish devices without root access as the norm, get into constant skirmishes with free software and privacy advocates, get drawn into unpleasant political quagmires, etc etc

    Method 2: Just buy up all the RAM...