I already bought all I need for the next 4 years back in 2024. Hopefully it all continues to work.
. . . And then the market will be flooded with RAM that companies preordered and can’t pay for, because the AI bubble burst before it could be manufactured.
Hey, I can dream, right? And seriously, I would be quite happy if this causes an increase in dumb appliances, devices, and cars in the meanwhile.
They’re already hedging by trying to rent you products instead of selling
Most of the lithography that is dedicated to RAM is being done for HBM modules, which are not consumer grade. So more likely it will end up in landfills.
My AMD GPU has HBM.
These are giant dedicated HBM chips that are on the motherboard, they won’t be going into any GPUs.
HBM are thinned die stacks which are assembled at the GPU periphery using silicon interposers. My AMD GPU has HBM. In case of HBM overproduction post-bubble we might see resurgence of GPUs with HBM rather than GDDRx.
Or new consumer HBM modules
Chip designs take years, so if there’s a sudden glut of HBM, there’s no good way to put it to use outside of existing designs.
That being said, a lot of LPDDRX is being produced for Nvidia servers and a few other systems. That would be useful. Doubly so if we packaged as LPCAMM.
I hear here a lot that the AI bubble will burst. And I wish this was true. But is there any indication for it? Crypto and GPU bubbles didn’t burst. I worry that it’s just another Lemmy circlejerk.
When the bubble bursts it will play out exactly the same as it always does. The government will use money it doesn’t have to bail out the too-big-to-fail companies causing runaway inflation, rates will be jacked up to bring inflation down causing a recession, we will all get laid off, and by the time everything starts to stabilize and we have disposable income something will happen to make prices untenable again.
“everything you care about” - Time to change hobbies and care about things that don’t have RAM then.
Maybe because tech has been my main hobby for so long, I don’t feel so bad about shaking things up like this yep.
Yeah, old consoles and PCs only need 4 mb or less ram and have millions of games :) this is only an issue for AAA gamers.
Half life death match runs on 512 mb no?
Yup. My local shooting range doesn’t need RAM. The archery target in my back yard doesn’t need RAM. The park where I go jogging doesn’t need RAM. My local food bank always needs volunteers, and they’re not handing out RAM to hungry people. My local theater always needs volunteer ushers, and you get to see a show for free.
My garden is far too small to be able to do archery in it sadly. Plus with a path behind it could result in killing someone. Maybe at a push I could manage a dart board somewhere.
I’d be happy to use last gen stuff too
I mean, I can stay on ps5 for another 5 years if needed, I don’t really care.
Starts to get into crochet, sewing and knitting.
Until Big Crochet buy up all the materials. Fuck Big Crochet
Just need to open-source it and print your own.
Rear your own sheep, spin your own yarn and start FOSS
If you are willing to spin the yarn you could probably just get some wool from a farmer for very cheap/free. Its almost worthless.
You could get some from my dog this spring when he gets his annual haircut.
We often joke about making our cat a scarf from all the fur he sheds
You joke, but the modern world has actually really fucked textile hobbies. One example is yarn for crochet/knitting. The major producers all moved their production to new countries in the past decade and, along with it, switched to shorter staple fiber (i.e. the individual fibers they make up the yarn are shorter).
Obviously, this makes goods made with these yarns worse, but there is also a growing, though rare, problem from people inhaling the fibers while knitting. It creates a lung disease similar to what someone who was exposed to asbestos experiences (though asbestos is much worse).
There are still ways to get artisanal yarns, maybe without plastic being one of the primary ingredients, but those are generally very expensive.
Then I will start to make my own cordage from nettles. The worse these companies become, the more I will return to monke.
This is the exact reason I bought a lathe and mill.
Big Iron taking all the iron like kung fu panda
Good thing AI sucks
Is your refrigerator running? This is Mike Hunt.
On the bright side it’s being used to artificially prop up a technology that nobody actually needs or even really wants
But there are still enough companies trying to ride the wave.
And paying all people’s salaries to Cloud AI services.
I find myself at a point where I don’t actually want any new computing devices, partly because of this, and partly because, well, what I have works fine for me.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that is still as solid as the day I got it (Sequoia for life) for the majority of my personal needs, plus a 2014 Mac mini running Mint as my home server, an M1 Mac Mini my dad gave me that runs my Home Assistant, and an old(er) PC that has a GTX 1060 GPU that’s capable of playing most of the games I care to play. My phone is a Pixel 9 running Graphene which is a year old and nowhere needing a replacement, and I have an iPad mini that I barely use these days anyway.
I guess I’m lucky enough that my shit is new enough that it’s still usable, and my use-case is light enough on resources that the older gear still works perfectly well for what I need.
My wife, however, needs a new PC…
I don’t really care about new tech. Pre 2010 tech is much more interesting. Learning to keep it repaired is good for us.
I’m still on the last Intel mac mini where you could upgrade RAM. Sitting pretty with 64gb, I’m not upgrading any time soon.
What I’m surprised hasn’t happened yet is RAM ICs being recycled at the retail level. As in, you could bring in an old laptop or phone with 32GB of soldered RAM and it would be desoldered and sold for cash or possibly even soldered into a new device you buy from that retailer.
I wonder how close we are to that business model arriving.
How many 16k 4116 RAM chips can your laptop handle?
32GB of RAM from old hardware might as well be trash compared to 32GB of RAM made today.
Don’t be fooled: if RAM had the chance it would kill everyone and everything you’ve ever loved.
deleted by creator
At least he wasnt goated…
They can be mean…NSFW
spoiler
There’s always… The Goat (be aware that only GenXers or older can handle that link, youglings might need therapy if they do).
Was it one of those lighting rams from the DLC? Man fuck those guys
You wouldn’t download an uncle would you?
You wouldn’t ram your uncle.
Guess it’s time for everybody to find some grass to touch.
When RAM becomes an AI tax, “touch grass” means that labs stall, ICUs postpone upgrades, schools ration PCs. But Altmann buys a new yacht.
I don’t really think the per student Chromebook thing is useful anymore.
Kids should be learning with pen and paint, which are shown to be more effective anyways.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to every class, but those classes always had out of date computer labs.
All of those things hit a brick wall from policy well before this artificial shortage aka fraud
I wish Altman would meet a French crowd like in the good old times.
Which was absolutely great, ideal almost. Just look at the exemplary equal and fair society that’s France.
Imperfect as it may be it sure as hell is better than the US.
What the fuck is in your Gauloises?
The magic potion, of course.
Maybe ICUs will upgrade their staffing ratios instead if the costs change that much
They are underestimating my willingness to run tiny systems. Say hello to Tiny Core Linux.
Running something meaningful on a $20 hardware is a pleasure like no other
Its a nice flex to be more productive on a potato than some are on the fancy stuff
Recently got OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installed on an old 32-bit Eee PC.
The thing was an absolute ultra-budget potato 14 years ago when it was released, and yet, it still works just fine if all you need is editing some documents in LibreOffice. And, it lasts 6 hours on a single charge! (Originally 10-12 hours)
Conceptually I really like the old netbooks.
I’ve gotten into self hosting and like the idea of using a netbook as a thin client.
I’m kinda sad that netbooks mostly died off as a device class. I’d love to explore newer options.
Self-hosting is cool! But having played around with it myself, I just found thin clients to be not so useful in a single-user environment. At most, it could be useful if you want high battery life and the ability to run something heavy from time to time. But being tied to a high quality Internet connection even for something that could be 100% local gets annoying very quickly.
Still, as a printing machine + occasionally connecting to the server for something more, it does deliver.
Fuck Sam Altman
Here I was hoping to casually siege a castle, but alas, no battering ram to be had ☹️
I think calling it a RAM shortage is a bit incorrect. It is not like we are running out of raw materials or something else in the supply chain is broken. It’s shitty AI companies buying RAM that is not existing yet with money they don’t have. Unfortunately there’s no good term for that, I guess.
Unfortunately there’s no good term for that, I guess.
Market manipulation?
It’s called Imaginary Economics.
It tends to happen right before a capitalist system fails.
Is this a thing? Because what comes to mind for me is “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” which just happens sometimes
I’m not holding my breath.
We’ve been hearing about an AI crash practically since the hype train started.
It’s the biggest bubble seen to date. It has all the characteristics, and it will crash eventually.
People can see the trends and see how it will probably break down in some way, the problem is that the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent. It helps that these dipshits seem to have forgotten that money equals abstract resources and creating new resource issues that’ll certainly put pressure on them in a more direct way either through legislation or via sabotage of required infrastructure.
Can I coin the term imagineomics?
When has this happened before?
It tends to happen right before a capitalist system fails.
How often does this happen that we can claim this correlation? 🤔
About once every 350 years… With a sample size of 3… 😅
So you’re saying which empires/systems exactly then?
Spain perhaps? The Holy Roman empire?
I was averaging roman, British and Mongolian empires, based on Google AI summary, so take that with a pinch of salt 😅 🧂
Better than no samples I guess!
It’s about to. The very nature of it, means you can only have a sample size of one.
And when do you predict this will occur? When should I have built my nuclear shelter so I know when to start building it?
Too late for that I’m afraid. It already happened. It just takes a while before the [citation needed] folks understand that past performance is not a guarantee for future success.
Lol sure, any time now, just one more year bro, just one more year and it will collapse bro, promise.
Maybe the usa will collapse a bit (because those people are often americans that don’t know there are other countries out there) but that’s another story.
I highly recommend staying ignorant honestly. It’s a much lighter burden to carry than seeing all the datapoints and seeing the collapse as a certainty. Have a good life, seriously.
[citation needed]
I like electron finance
Their exact location cannot be pinpointed; instead, they exist in a probability cloud where they are likely to be found at any given time.
That’s what this hype cycle is founded on. If I lend you $5, you have $5 you can lend further. Now, we each still have a right to $5, so we can lend that debt obligation again for $4.50. Now we have, somehow, a market value of $19.
Until someone looks, then it’s probably 0.
A mismatch between supply and demand is called a shortage. The source is irrelevant.
It’s shitty AI companies buying RAM
It’s greedy manufacturers selling it all to them in the first place and other market segments be damned.
I’m no AI fan but the manufactures aren’t angels either.The shovel makers and shovel sellers always get rich in a gold rush
If your boss offered you a raise for the same work, would you turn it down?
Not the same.
The money is fixed. You getting a raise means the money has to come from somewhere- which means the boss taking a pay cut or the customers paying more.
Still not the same, i don’t work for any of those manufacturers - and if i did i sure as hell wouldn’t care if their CEOs got a paycut to benefit the consumers. Won’t someone please pity the CEOs…
Supply monopolization?
Consumer fraud?
Sherman Act cartel market manipulation.
Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade.
It’s a racket, plain and simple. There used to be laws against this sort if thing.
It’s a racket, plain and simple. There used to be laws against this sort if thing.
Keyword: used to
I hope that it was worth it, and that America is great again. Let me just check some news articles… Oh my
We have RAM supply shortage.
Now better? god…The term was well established centuries ago.
FRAUD
It is a shortage caused by artificial demand rise.
Yes there is: it’s a Ponzi scheme (AI companies will fail when they get no new funds to pay off the stockholders)
Are they paying off stockholders?
They are creating staggering shortsighted profits, so yes, they are doing that. And of course ignoring what a bubble does in the long run.
It’s not just desktops, it’s phones and laptops and consoles
Good thing I don’t care about any of those things enough to pay the rip-off prices. I’m fine with my 4 year old phone and 10 year old PC. If they crap out then I’ll replace them with some cheap old crap. I don’t need high specs, there isn’t much worth running these days.
Do you care about hospitals, schools, research labs?
I’m too poor to enjoy any of those, all of their grants have been gutted, so right now, not at all.
First they came for…
Ha! I’m not sick, I already graduated, and I know everything! Checkmate!
I actually love that this is how my Godfather used to think. Then his social safety net broke.
He suddenly voted social democrats.
As the article explains, you will indirectly pay.
Any product that contains RAM or any service that relies on the use of computers at scale, is going to pass the operating cost (the cost of sourcing RAM) onto the consumer.
And these prices will never go down again. Even when shortages end, costoners will be used to the higher prices, and companies will be used to charging them.
This isn’t the first time that the memory companies have colluded to raise prices. It’s perhaps one of the more extreme instances, yes, but with the AI excuse going away, things will have to go back to reality, especially as China ramps up production and ruins the cartel setup we’re currently stuck with.
And used prices will surge as more people make the same decision as you
That’s assuming everyone’s devices crap out during this year or two while the AI and memory companies play pretend that they’re actually going to use up all this memory.
Unfortunately it isn’t just the high end stuff which is feeling the crunch. These AI companies have bought up all the production capacity, which means there is less low-end stuff being produced. We’re still coasting on existing stock at the moment, but as that runs out prices will rise across the board.
