Who needs computers anyways?
Just go outside and play with real people
Glad that I recently bought a bunch of storage so that I’ll be covered for a good amount of time.
Bought a new pc in October and I’m soooo glad I did
I got an old Nitro 5 with a rickity old 500gig hard drive. Will a Crucial BX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD be a good Christmas present for it?
Probably should get something while prices are somewhat more reasonable.
AI has taken more things since it’s big push to be adopted in the public sector.
Clean Air
Water
Fair electricity bills
Ram
GPUs
SSDs
Jobs
Other people’s art and writing.
There are no benefit to this stuff. It is just grifting.
Also free and fair elections. Fidesz published a clearly AI-generated document claiming it was a leak from current oppposition party Tisza, as a real program.
AFAIK this has already been a problem, you can find Samsung M.2 SSDs for cheaper than Samsung SATA SSDs at the same capacity, because their cloud customers have all flown past classic SATA/SAS for NVME U.2 and U.3, which is much more similar to M.2 due to NVME.
I was planning on adding a big SSD array to my server which has a bunch of external 2.5 SAS slots, but it ended up being cheaper and faster to buy a 4 slot M.2 PCIe card and buy 4 M.2 drives instead.
Putting it on a x16 PCIe slot gives me 4 lanes per drive with bifurication, which gets me the advertised maximum possible speed on PCIe 4.
Whether or not the RAM surge will affect chip production capacity is the real issue. It seems all 3 OEMs could effectively reduce capacity for all other components after slugging billions of dollars into HBM RAM. It wouldn’t just be SSDs, anything that relies on the same supply chain could be heavily affected.
Exactly this. Micron ended their consumer RAM. Sansung here is just stopping producing something that is arguably outdated, and has a perfectly fine, already more available, most often cheaper or equivalent modern replacement.
Aside: WTF are they using SSDs for?
LLM inference in the cloud is basically only done in VRAM. Rarely stale K/V cache is cached in RAM, but new attention architectures should minimize that. Large scale training, contrary to popular belief, is a pretty rare event most data centers and businesses are incapable of.
…So what do they do with so much flash storage!? Is it literally just FOMO server buying?
Storage. There aren’t enough hard drives, so datacentres are also buying up SSDs, since it’s needed to store training data.
since it’s needed to store training data.
Again, I don’t buy this. The training data isn’t actually that big, nor is training done on such a huge scale so frequently.
As we approach the theoretical error rate limit for LLMs, as proven in the 2020 research paper by OpenAI and corrected by the 2022 paper by Deepmind, the required training and power costs rise to infinity.
In addition to that, the companies might have many different nearly identical datasets to try to achieve different outcomes.
Things like books and wikipedia pages aren’t that bad, wikipedia itself compressed is only 25GB, maybe a few hundred petabytes could store most of these items, but images and videos are also valid training data and that’s much larger, and then there is readable code. On top of that, all user inputs have to be stored to reference them again later if the chatbot offers that service.
This bubble is going to become the entire market, isn’t it. Until it becomes too big to fail because 80% of the workforce is tied up in it. Then it is allowed to pop, costing the western world everything, all going into the pockets of the super rich, and we get to start over.
That’s the entire point. It’s a scam.
Then it is allowed to pop, costing the western world everything, all going into the pockets of the super rich, and we get to start over.
After the bailouts at the expense of the poor, of course.
it becomes too big to fail because 80% of the workforce is tied up in it
In 2008, banking sector and auto industry needed bailouts for the investor/financial class. Certainly, there was no need to layoff core banking employees, if government support was the last resort to keep the doors open AND gain controlling stake over future banking profitablity in a hopefully sustainable (low risk in addition to low climate/global destruction) fashion. The auto bailout did have harsher terms than the banking bailout, and recessions definitely harm the sector, but the bailouts were definitely focused on the executives/shareholders who have access to political friendships that result in gifts instead of truly needed lifelines, or wider redistribution of benefits from sustainable business.
The point, is that workforce is a “talking point” with no actual relevance in bailouts/too big to fail. That entire stock market wealth is concentrated in the sector, and that we have to all give them the rest of our money (and militarist backed surveillance freedom) or “China will win” at the only sector we pretend to have a competitive chance in, is why our establishment needs another “too big to fail moment”. We’ve started QE ahead of the crash this time.
Work force is relatively small in AI sector. Big construction, but relatively low operations employment. It displaces other hiring too.
the shoe event horizon.
The leak comes after another report detailed that Samsung has raised DDR5 memory prices by up to 60%.
MF… And why they wind down SSD production this time? Last time was 2 years ago, because the SSD prices were low and they wanted to raise them (which happened).
Because AI is better for €€€
May all bankrupt when the bubble bursts.
we all know as soon as big bad chip daddy comes back with a big discount everyone not in this thread (and even some that are) will spread their cheeks and beg for more.
humans are dumb greedy little assholes that have zero willpower. that’s why it’s so easy to manipulate us.
Crap, I really wanted to buy a new external HD for my home server setup sometime soon.
HDDs should be fine. No?
I suppose so, it just takes forever to transfer files.
Until next month when they cancel those too
Yet another chapter in the fucking AI craze started up by them fucking techbros.
Also, someone forgot that in some places in the world, people have to use older PCs with SATA drives. That, until their discontinuation announcements, Crucial and Samsung SATA drives were several tiers better than, say, those cheapo Ramsta drives.
Discontinuing outdated tech has nothing to do with AI. SATA SSDs need to be retired. NVME is superior and widely available.
I remember when 8TB SATA SSD was $350
I take issue with this forced distinction they are making
Micron, like Samsung and SK Hynix, already supplies memory chips directly to third-party brands such as G.Skill and ADATA. Even without Crucial-branded kits, Micron DRAM continues to reach consumers through other manufacturers, meaning overall supply remains largely unchanged.
Nobody ever officially suggested the Crucial supply was likely to shift to the other manufacturers for consumers. On the contrary people expect this to be a step towards a general redistribution of manufacturing capacity towards HBM for parallel compute products.
By comparison, Samsung exiting SATA SSDs removes an entire class of finished consumer products from one of the world’s largest NAND suppliers. Tom argues that this is why the Samsung move is “worse” for consumers: it directly affects how many drives are available, not just who sells them.
If you wanted you could make the same argument as for Micron. Who says the Samsung NAND couldn’t be bought by other OEMs to make consumer SSDs. It’s just as possible as the Micron supply shifting to other OEMs who make consumer RAM sticks.
To me neither are likely. The manufacturing capacity both companies are pulling from the consumer market in both cases is going to go to the higher profit margin parallel compute server market. Neither is worse than the other, they are both equally bad news for us consumers.
On the contrary people expect this to be a step towards a general redistribution of manufacturing capacity towards HBM for parallel compute products.
That is where much of the overall wafers are going. But that would be happening regardless of whether the Crucial brand is around or not. Even if Crucial was still a thing going forward, those same wafers would still be going towards HBM.
I think he hit the nail on the head when he said that Crucial being cancelled is just a symptom of our shit market, not one of the causes. It makes zero difference.
Who says the Samsung NAND couldn’t be bought by other OEMs to make consumer SSDs
His point is that Samsung (the manufacturer) is scrapping production, not that Samsung (the consumer brand) is stopping selling products that otherwise are still being produced and sold under different brand names.
Stopping production of something sold under many brands is obviously a lot worse than a brand stopping sales of something that other brands will still sell (albeit in lower quantities in previous years due to HBM production being ramped up at the cost of DDR5).
As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what’s the big deal of them dropping the SATA protocol from their consumer devices?
There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn’t any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips.
It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.
As a consumer, 6 or 7 years ago it definitelly made sense to get a Samsung SATA drive because they were actually some of the fastest in the market, but these days even shitty-shit no-name brand has SATA devices with 580MB/s read speeds (and, if large enough, similar write speeds) which is near the theoretical maximum of SATA3 and M.2 devices supporting PCI4 x16 offer several times the speeds of that.
What if we get a lack-of-new-computers-crisis before the AI-bubble bursts
Don’t worry, you can use AI on anything that can access the internet! No need to ever have personal (let alone private) thoughts - I’m sorry, data - again.
MS has been trying to get you to give up your personal computer for years. Do everything in the cloud, please! Even gaming with Stadia! And now they’re getting their wish. All it took was running the entire global economy.
Doing everything in the cloud is crazy. I’m so glad I jumped over to Linux a couple years ago!
Still need hardware to run it on ☹️
Me with my 5 lenovo thinkcentres: 😎
The ai crash is going to slap the tech industry hard
Not just the tech industry. A huge proportion of the US economy is made up of betting on AI. Like the crash of 2008 (but worse, some predict) it will hurt everyone but the richest, who will become even richer.
There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as “AI” than on the Internet-related tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones.
The risk is that when one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classes, in turn creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes, which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses and that will pull even more money out from other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.
All this to say that I expect this one when it blows up will be bigger than 2008 and 2000, possibly bigger than both of those combined.
Going by inflation adjusted market cap values, it certainly looks like the financial facet of the AI companies alone are bigger than both those events… This is going to be beyond messy…
Is there anything a normal person can do to insulate against it to any degree?
