- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
They are going to kill an industry and damage peoples ability to access technology.
Im kind of wondering if that isnt the real end game- there was a Bezos quote i saw the other day, where he said he wants to see personal computing die out in favor of essentially cloud based, where users own minimal hardware and just rent compute time for everything.
It kind of feels like they dont actually need ai to succeed- its already achieving the goal of denying components to end users. If they maintain that scarcity long enough, they can kill the pc/ laptop status quo. (Especially if chip makers abandon those fabs for data center tailored units for a whole generation, until theres nothing viable left on the market)
The good thing is that we have a few giants with vested interests in resisting that. PC OEMs like Dell and HP, Clevo, Intel/AMD who still have huge consumer sales, and the big one:
Apple.
Apple is all-in on personal compute, and they have the muscle to resist the anticompetitive plays, hopefully.
Tangential, but ironically the only used laptops you can buy right now that haven’t been gutted for RAM and NVME are macbooks and similar that have everything soldered onto the motherboard.
Apple can make Chrome book equivalents, they want you to rent compute power not computers.
Natively you’d be able to run VLC on a good day if you’re lucky, but everything else will be online with a subscription attached.
Such crazy logic from Bezos, personal computers are now more powerful and capable than ever, fulfilling the average users needs easily. Hey let’s just get rid of that and make them use our servers. He tries to frame it as the logical conclusion but the only conclusion I can see is he wants more money.
And all these memory are spent on the generation of pornographic content in the highest quality.
All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it’s not physically possible to [xyz].
Idk I’ve seen better in the amateur section
highest quality.
Man’s got jokes!
Are they really able to replicate pornography like that? I know that for normal stuff, the videos are only under ten seconds or so.
You can get up to 12 minutes locally even if you’re patient. Technically you can go way further if you do it in parts though, and use multiple generations. Might take a few weeks to “direct” it right though, depending what you want to make. If it’s vanilla stuff, maybe 3 days for a 45 minute video on a 3090? (Via 3-5 minute chained segments, with smaller second long segments for smooth camera angle changes)
This guy is an expert at jerking off to AI porn.
I said before and I will say it again. AI is product being built by its users, an unfinished program that it is used wrong just for companies to make money. AI hasn’t made any progress and we won’t see any progress, because it is used by companies to profit.
They don’t care about the economy and the downsides, they care to make us use AI.i overheard today on the bus, that someone(assume in grad school) as a TA was planning to use AI to grade all the classes homework without care if it was inconsistently correct or not, it isnt going to end well.
It almost seems like they want to make home computing unaffordable, so you have to rent PC time from a cloud provider. This way they nickel and dime you, and use your data to train their LLMs.
Micron and nvidia get their cut by being able to set whatever prices they can imagine.
I hope that will prompt many more people to adopt Linux then
That’s exactly what they’re aiming for.
These people keep saying “it’s the future” but it just seems like they’re chasing pink elephants and forcing us to partake in the delusion.
That delusion keeps pumping up stocks.
… Until it all goes to hell, and their delusion will finally meet its fait.
The C suite and management of these companies want two things - for the stock to go as high as possible, and for them to be able to sell at the top and leave a bunch of bag holders wondering what the fuck just happened.
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
It’s vassal capitalism. Capitalists pay their technofeudal lords their 30% cut of revenue and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.
Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
You are right that capitalism tends towards monopolies. But I think there’s a significant difference in what, exactly, is being monopolized. Capital itself is not being monopolized. Access to the marketplace is being monopolized.
In a traditional capitalist monopoly, you would have to buy, for example, shoes, from just one shoe factory, which has a monopoly on shoes, is the only factory able or allowed to sell you shoes, and can charge whatever price it wants.
In the current economy, you can go to Walmart or Amazon and buy hundreds of different shoes from hundreds of different factories, all competing against one another - but those shoe factories all have to pay rent to Walmart and Amazon, and have to sell their shoes at the price Walmart and Amazon tells them to, and have to agree to sell their shoes at lower prices at Walmart or Amazon than on their own website. If they refuse, they’re not allowed to sell on Walmart and Amazon at all.
And because so many physical consumers only have access to a Walmart, and no other stores; and because so many online consumers default to Amazon for all their purchases; if the capitalists don’t submit to Walmart and Amazon they lose so much of the customer market they won’t be able to compete.
That’s the feudalism part. The capitalists aren’t in charge. The vectoralists are - the people who control the flow of information, the lines of communication between producers and consumers. And the vectoralists have split the economy into a handful of private fiefdoms, and make money not from producing anything, but from charging rent for access to their private fiefdom and the customers entrapped within it.
And since this phenomenon is most advanced online, where Amazon controls almost the entire online physical goods market and Google and Apple control almost the entire app market, we can call it technofeudalism.
Traditional monopolies certainly exist - for example, the American food supply is controlled by only a handful of companies - but those companies aren’t the ones controlling the price of food. Walmart and Amazon do.
Or to put it another way: in a socialist economy, like the USSR’s, the government controls the flow of goods and the allocation of resources.
In a capitalist economy, the owners of capital - the land and factories and natural resources that produce goods - control that flow.
And now, in a technocratic economy, the flow of goods and services is controlled, not by the government, and not by the owners of capital, but by the vectoralists.
I think it’s a vital distinction to make.
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it’s an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of “the customer is always right in matters of taste”
Which just means “if they want to buy ugly shit, let them”
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
Well shit, that’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
Huh, til
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. “The customer is always right” just means don’t tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company’s bottom line.
I don’t think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money “they” can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
It’s exactly what monopolies and oligopolies end up doing, whatever is in their interest to do. If anti-trust laws were actually used to enforce competition, we wouldn’t be here. But since we can’t compete with the campaign donations of the companies those laws should be regulating, we get no regulation at all and end up here. Selfish people, being selfish, making everything worse for everyone else.
Was it the Big Gay Boat Ride that’s got everyone mad?
I’m worried that at the end of the day, gamers will just give up and accept higher prices, kinda like with GPUs.
they have to give up their bragging rights if they don’t upgrade their PCs
Yeah, imagine missing all that sweet reddit karma by not posting a photo of your RTX 5090.
They can fuck right off.
For the foreseeable future, DIYPC is dead.
most folks will pay. all my PC gamer friends are just paying $200 per 16GB stick now.
I am in a position to see first hand people regularly dropping ~$4000USD on “mid-range” PCs. It hasn’t slowed down purchasing of PCs, if anything it is speeding up compared to this time last year.
at that pricepoint it’s just about showing off how much money you have.
typical rich way to backhand brag about how rich you are is to whine about how ‘expensive’ things are that are luxury items.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
https://wccftech.com/asus-declares-all-in-ai-strategy-as-server-revenue-soars-beyond-expectation/
I still have one PC with a broken motherboard that I need to fix. I wonder when will I be able to do that.
motherboard prices haven’t inflated too much yet. gaming/consumer motherboards aren’t in demand from the AI industry. the want server hardware
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
Don’t forget obligatory data mining the crap out of you!
currently its very useful for propaganda, thats why conservatives are all in on it.
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
IMHO there’s much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for “outdated” hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
What’s funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
Software has also gone to shit performance wise, few things really get optimized anymore and there’s frameworks and containers behind everything.
For sure. Buying higher performance machines didn’t get us better performing games, it just got us lazy developers.
What does a kitchen server do?
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn’t want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.
Serves kitchens
🤔 ah, I suppose that makes sense
“Your kitchen, sir”
“Our special today, is silverfish and granite, served with a side of wood chips, garnished with table salt.”
Discworld?
?
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
I really need to get a new display replacement for my old vaio f series laptop. The screen layers are doing the funny vinegar thing. That and some sort of ssd. Maybe a USB Dom or some msata thing with a converter board.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Please tell me more.
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
One of the classics
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
I find it fascinating how the concept of coping with a situation has been made into a negative. “Get bent loser, how dare you try to make the best out of a bad situation”. Hold on, let me unfuck the tech sector real quick.
Not copium when the purpose is different.
It is and it isn’t. There’s a ton of tech waste and lots of people get rid of systems that are still quite capable. Obviously there’s less power but even a 6 year old gaming rig can still run most games, just at lower framerates
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.
What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Your TAM is about to go bam, so cut the shit and make us some RAM.
Yeah but your TAM (who you could possibly sell to) is the biggest concentric circle, inside that is the Servicable Addressable Market (who you could feasibly sell to) and your SOM (serviceable obtainable market, who you are actually selling to) and the consumer market is who you were actually selling to.
It could be that these data centers never become serviceable or obtainable, and this is all just predictions with no actual product making it into a machine.
I can’t take anything that uses the word “tremendously” seriously any more.
Bigly agreed
Slammed!
They gotta get while the getting’s good or they’ll miss out on that margin
