There are a lot of things we could have done differently to prevent the current issues. Reducing capital efficiency by requiring massive stockpiles isn't necessarily at the top of the list of good ideas. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that this isn't necessarily the first thing we want to jump to across the market.
Think we are well past that. Even if these companies had huge stockpiles, they would have been depleted long ago.
No company is going to hoard multiple years worth of inputs. Supply has remained high in semiconductors too, it's more of a demand than supply problem. But of course, elevated demand and normal supply leads to shortages just the same as normal demand and shortened supply.
I hope not, I like the cheap goods that just-in-time produces.
If you look back at what many were saying at the start of Covid you would have thought we would have all been eating our neighbours by now. The reality has been completely different, an artificial shortage of toilet paper and a slight tightening of supply on consumer goods. If anything this tells me our supply chains are quite robust.
Isn't that obvious? If there is an oversupply of GPU, as a customer I win. If there's an oversupply of some niche ARM chip I might not win but I'm not losing either...
I don’t know if there will be an “oversupply” of GPUs, because now they are all manufactured at foundries and the chip companies can just cut their orders. But with Intel coming into the market, Samsung switching to TSMC, and TSMC putting in $120b of capex, the shortage should be alleviated pretty soon.
If there's an oversupply of GPU chips _and_ everyone builds them into products and sells them. There's a fair amount of demand in that specific instance but that doesn't translate into capacity for everything else and companies aren't going to be quick to lower prices.
To give a real world example of how the chip shortage is affecting me...
The vehicle I want to buy does not come with the chip for heated seats or parking sensors, because they simply do not have enough of them. You can buy that vehicle without those features, and at least with the heated seats, they promise to retrofit them "at some future date." All of the models that got made before the cut-off sold super quickly, and I'm just waiting to buy until the vehicle is complete at signing.
> Because if they wanted them they would buy them?
Only if they can afford them and can justify the purchase. People want many things that for various reasons they don't acquire. It may be cost (units would have to be sold at a loss to get down to consumer-comfortable pricing), it may be that it's part of a larger system. For me to get a new AMD CPU I'd also need a compatible motherboard and, possibly, different RAM (either for physical compatibility or to get an actual performance improvement, even if my old RAM "works" if it's sufficiently slow it's a bottleneck that makes the purchase not worthwhile to me).
Oversupply means a few of the suppliers will not be able to sell their chips and might face bankruptcy, leading to monopolies in a decade or so when the pendulum swings back again. Don't worry too much about it though, it's difficult to predict the future and it's equally possible that the market will return to relative balance without overcorrection.
There are not going to be any bankruptcies even in a severe oversupply situation. Chip manufacturers are much higher margin and better capitalized than in the past, and a lot of the riskier capacity expansion this time around has been financed by customers
I can’t think of any more major consolidation that can take place. Maybe within NAND, but for different reasons as there’s not really risk of a long lasting supply glut in that market.
Governments have/may start seeing chipmaking as something of national security, right? So would they let a great amount of consolidation occur or will every continent have its own heavily subsidized chip industry
Temporarily, perhaps. The risk is that without planning that oversupply leads to a period of greater shortage due to cancelled production, bankruptcy etc.
It depends on third-party requests which are blocked by uMatrix by default. Specifically, you need to enable JS from code.piano.io and experience-ap.piano.io, and XHR to c2-ap.piano.io; in addition to the first-party domain.
One upside of Bitcoin style mining is that its mining chips can't be used for anything else (no GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs, or SSDs used for Bitcoin mining - only special SHA256 ASICs), so it doesn't have much effect on the supply of semiconductors outside of a small number of older foundries allocating some capacity to BTC chips. Other projects like Ethereum intentionally used GPU-optimized mining algorithms, with the idea that this would help decentralization (which hasn't really worked for various reasons).
Bitcoin ASICs are hardly on older process nodes. Intel's just announced chips are using their 7nm process, Bitmain is on TSMC 7nm and 5nm, while Microbit is on Samsung's 8nm.
The future was much more certain a couple of week ago.
But yes, that's expected. After supply-line shocks shortage and oversupply follow each other. If people play their cards right, they get a quickly decreasing amplitude on those crises, if they play wrong, they get always increasing ones until a lot get bankrupt.
The chip manufacturers seem well aware of the problem and to be playing it correctly. I wouldn't bet on the oversupply crisis being nearly as large as the shortage.
I installed NOS's (the Dutch public broadcaster's) app on my phone and turned on push notifications. This way I get informed about important news, but can easily avoid everything else.
I don't think "the news" is actually all that good at informing people. "This happened and then this happened, and now for the weather" are facts and information without context, and without any real meaning.
I haven't watched the news for years, or read the newspapers. I do real articles from magazines and newspapers and books and such (from HN, among other places), which are far more useful. I don't really know what's going on in Ukraine right this moment, but most will have forgotten that in two weeks time anyway, so what's the point? Instead I spent some time reading up on the context a few weeks ago.
The news is also strongly biased towards negative events. The classic example is that "plane crashed" is big news, but that planes are actually very safe. "Man spills pint and gets punched" is news. "Man spills pint and it's all fine" is not. etc. It's not a particularly good reflection of reality.
Maybe, but it's the truth. Most events don't matter on a local or individual level and having access to global news updated every single second is a very recent development, one that seems to be contributing to an incredible amount of anxiety and stress for many people/society as a whole.
Perhaps a more reasonable approach is reading the news once a week. You stay informed, but it's not something you worry about daily.
It's not the truth. You can absolutely read the news and live a happier life from it. I feel better knowing what's going on outside my little bubble even if it's bad stuff.
It's on the individual to find a happy balance of media consumption for their mental health in the same way it's on the individual not to eat candy every day for lunch.
really, you have to be privileged to not watch the news? Then I guess by your reasoning, all those folks that can't afford tv or internet at all are the most privileged of all, correct?
Yeah! Imagine being so privileged you’re allowed to turn off the news and feel happier without mom and dad grounding you from the internet or the government aiming a nuke at you in response, which would thereby prevent you from typing words into a text box and clicking the Reply button when you’re done writing your thoughts.
That would suck because then someone else wouldn’t be able to come along and not actually provide a counterpoint to your comments, but instead just write “what a privileged thing to say”, undoubtedly smirking while simultaneously sipping a latte and clicking Reply to submit their effortless snarky reply from their $5K/month apartment located in the heart of some tech city.
You’ll always find a reason the latest crisis is worth being scared of. But we’re just going to go from one crisis to the next so we need a way to make peace with that.
I think CS Lewis explained it well when the atomic bomb was created:
> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
Remember that not everyone lives at a safe distance from the events that you prefer to tune out. We haven't been referring to low probability threats that are ever present in our daily lives, but acute issues that could change our lives very fast, especially if we don't pay attention.
To add, there's no requirement that you must keep tabs on every atrocity in the world at all times. No one is forcing people to check twitter every hour to tank your emotional energy every day.
And of course in that case the information is of immediate importance to you, however if I'm 16000 km away, I'm not sure that I need blow by blow reporting on events that may only impact me through increased costs of goods.
I have absolutely no way of impacting events in the Ukraine, even if I decide to contribute to a charity or try to influence my local member of parliament there is still absolutely no benefit to be gained by anybody (except perhaps the media) of me consuming this coverage.
I can however benefit significantly by avoiding news reporting that is going to continually trigger primitive fight or flight instincts and leave me in a high state of stress.
There isn't going to be nuclear contamination in Europe because of a stray rocket in a war zone. Come on. Chernobyl isn't going to explode again. This is a perfect example of the irrational catastrophizing that comes from getting your information about the world from the news.
If the default MO of the news media is to stoke fears and sensationalize the mundane in order to profit off higher viewership, then it's all the more important that we fight through the de-sensitization and pay attention when meaningful world events happen.
Because we can completely fill our days with what's going on in Ukraine and yet be able to do very little about it at an individual level and I'm really not sure that's good for someone's sanity.
I was thinking the same thing. It’s not like I’m being asked to direct troops or something.
Instead of watching/reading news for hours. Take 30 min to donate some money and email your representative in Congress on your beliefs. You’ll have done way more to help your cause than watching news and you get your day back.
For me personally, I find the war to be incredibly distracting, because my attention was almost constantly drawn to it. But throughout the past few days I learned a few thing:
The situation on the ground does not change that quickly, fresh reports are often wrong or fabricated. But most importantly: I've gotten myself to be constantly obsessed over a distant war which made me forget what I actually wanted to do over the past few days.
I'll continue to follow the news, but not every hour and minute, and I'm just thankful a place like this exist.
The future is never certain. There are times when it feels less uncertain. But that's generally an illusion, a false sense of security. Past performance is not guarantee of future (returns).
As someone already mentioned, the media loves to manipulating this state to their (profit) advantage.
Will this mean car prices will return to normal and wait times to receive them won’t be so long? I feel like the auto industry has directly impacted me the most, as I try to look to get a car.
Or just buy a car that has moved past the dealership model. There are a few now, and if the free market wins it should slowly replace the dealer model…
Literally 4-5k saved off every car if you order direct from the manufacturer.
They way I read the article, there is going to be excess supply of things such as power-regulation ICs, 2.4GHz radio chips and so on. I'd guess that consumers will gobble these up all across the world in smart appliances and IoT like never before. GPUs are nice, but they won't regulate your heating amid rising gas prices.
I wonder how AMD and Intel's announcement that they will stop chip shipments to Russia indefinitely will affect this. I don't know how big of a consumer Russia was but I imagine it could have some impact with all that stock now back on the market.
Their economy is smaller than Italy. Some datacentres and such, but meh, those aren't buying bare chips from intel anyway. They're usually buying complete servers manufactured in other countries anyway.
I'd be surprised if it even made a half percent dent.
They do want that. It’s part of their backup plan for being cut off from the West. That’s why Putin made a big show of meeting with Xi just before the invasion.
This is why I don't care about following any 'supply chain' worries the tech community is for some reason worried about. It'll undershoot, it'll overshoot, it'll balance itself out eventually and my interaction with it won't make a lick of difference.
Crossing fingers we will we be able to pick up 3080ti then for $100 bucks? I still think it may take much more time for the other affected industries to make up.. Which means there still some sort of supply chain communication problems...
You could try FB marketplace. I have seen MSRP floating around for quite the last few months. I haven’t purchased one really because most of my friends are either on PS4 or Xbox 1
At this point I don't even know if PS5 really exist. It's impossible to find in the store and there are some people whose job is find PS5 at MSRP in the stores and resell it.
There's deal alerts, specials at various retailers with a subscription like Walmart. You just have to continuously try and change up your game if it doesnt work.
Find local Discord servers with bots and people tracking stocks and sales going on. Within less than a week, you should be able to get your hands on one.
Yes, it's absolutely stupid to have to commit to this for a full week to just be able to buy a console.
I managed to buy a PS5 for MSRP-ish. I bought the console for 599€ and it came with a "free" second DualSense controller. The PS5 itself is 529€ and a controller is 70€.
Sales numbers on the PS5 seem to indicate demand is unprecedented. Even if supply can be ramped up the demand is still unmet. The world has never had so many people seeking in home entertainment simultaneously.
I guess I am also part of the problem. I hate the idea of a scalper but I bought one from a high school student who is scouting them out and buying them then reselling them at a $100 markup over MSRP to make money for college. They learned to code for this. I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support even if the entire supply chain issues we face are allowing less scrupulous people to profit akin to how this student is.
> I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support
You're supporting a scalper. You're teaching him that there's money to be made by positioning yourself as a middle man. There's no value creation here, just value extraction.
That would only be true if there were actually enough PS5's to go around, but the scalpers bought them all up anyway. There's real value in the products actually being available to buy at all, and the only reason they're available is because they're being resold at a higher price.
They were also available to buy before the scalpers bought them - that's how they bought them. The scalpers injecting themselves as middle men didn't change anything except the price.
No that's wrong. If you have $850 right now you can buy a PS5. If nobody on earth marked up the price, you wouldn't be able to buy one for any amount (without getting very lucky or expending a lot of effort to find one).
There were N ps5’s and there are still N ps5’s. The only change is from first come first serve to a market price. Without those scalpers, those units that you can buy today would already be owned by end users. Instead they’re sitting with the scalpers.
You’re completely ignoring the people who would otherwise have them. It’s less available to them and more available to those you’re talking about. It’s zero sum, at best.
I don't think I'm ignoring anyone, but I really like living in a society where goods are actually available for purchase. All I'm saying is that that's such a good thing that it counts as value added by the scalpers. There are maybe a couple issues obscuring my point, though.
First, there's a sense that scalpers are illegitimate and cheating the system. If Sony were to raise the MSRP themselves, or retailers did it instead, most of the anger and complaints would disappear. Honestly, they should absolutely raise the price. Scalpers are making the market function better in this case, because the "official" outlets are not doing their jobs.
Second, most people in the West are not used to thinking about real scarcity and what it means. (If there was a terrible coffee shortage, you might be happy to find a guy who will sell you a cup for $20.)
This is how the economy works. Scarce resources cost more money. Setting price ceilings just mean the people who are willing to pay the most can't get the item.
Isn't that the fault of Sony for selling them at a lower price than what people are willing to pay?
And the value being provided is the possibility of buying the PS5. Even without scalpers, chances are that someone else would have bought it. Scalping only works when the demand is very high compared to the supply.
PS5's are purchased between $700 and $1,000. PS5's aren't the only device with premium. Used cars have an unprecedented premium, alongside all GPUs.
The market is saying that semiconductors, especially GPU accelerated compute time is worth this much.
You can point at miners, you can point at scalpers, you neglect that every cloud compute and cloud gaming provider is building massive data centers full of GPUs as fast as they can get their hands on them at a premium too.
It doesn't take a free market libertarian to observe that its the MSRP that's wrong.
I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself. You can apply your same logic to healthcare, because people are always willing to pay more. It's the cornerstone of the US healthcare system.
I'm discussing ethics and you're discussing economics. The problem is this obsession with finding arbitrage to extract value from the system, which is the entire point of your comment where you're defending the market because someone can profit from it without actually providing any value. I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
Okay, let's discuss ethics. I don't see or have an ethical problem with this. Scalpers are taking a risk, if the supply was greater they lose, if the supply becomes greater before they can move their inventory then they lose. The supply is not greater. It is an amoral reality.
> I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
It is not possible to live in a market based economy and fulfill that desire. It is very easy for me to accept that. Demand for the asset simply has to dry up. It has not. People that want a PS5 can get one, at the available price. Scalpers are providing liquidity, you provided liquidity. Individual owners would be removing liquidity, likely causing greater premium in price to let one go and further hoops to jump through.
You're saying people scalping PS5s right now are taking a risk and deserve to be compensated for it. Setting aside how absurd I think this is, in the same paragraph you say this is both an "amoral reality" and you "don't see...an ethical problem with this."
You're using market dynamics to justify morality. My point is you extrapolate this and you end up with the US healthcare system, which is completely fucking broken providing less value at higher cost. Parasitic middle men don't deserve to be compensated and we should do everything possible to eradicate them.
It's actually quite easy to live in a market-based society and not have these problems - it's called regulation and we need a shitload more of it. It's how we established a minimum wage, and abolished child labor, and even separated commercial banking from investment banking for a period of time.
Good thing we are talking about consumer electronics and not healthcare, but if you must extrapolate then I can tell you my position is one of liquidity and services that provide liquidity, which the US healthcare system does not satisfy because of different market inefficiencies. So you can save that guilt trip for some other form of penance you pursue, good luck with your personal redemption arc, that doesn't move my position on consumer electronics scalpers or some other forms of middlemen.
I'm not trying to guilt trip anyone I'm just pointing out how retarded "the market" can be by using an obvious example. You're right, consumer electronics is not the same as healthcare. You're defending scalpers because you say they provide liquidity, but you're ignoring that they're creating artificial scarcity in order to price gouge you. It seems like things are misaligned to me, but agree to disagree.
Although scalpers don't behave in a uniform way, I'm envisioning a reality where individual owners using them for their consumptive purpose would be creating greater scarcity.
You're envisioning a world where people are using the product as intended, and simply because it's not available to richer people instead that is what you view as the problem?
It seems to me the problem is scarcity (I think we agree on this much), and people trying to profit off that aren't anything more than parasites (we seem to disagree on this).
Not really my stance except the one thing we agree on.
MSRP is wrong, the console is worth around $750, this would match the inflation adjusted price of home entrainment consoles for the last 40 years. In both of our views - maybe ironic to you - it would be more ethical to diminish the returns of scalpers by having the price correct in the primary market to begin with. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because Sony doesn’t want the vocal backlash especially when they drop the price to $200 just a few years from now.
As long as the primary market chooses to misprice, all the symptoms - like all the startup partime retailers you say aren’t providing a service - are completely benign. Extracting value isn’t unethical, to me that is blaming Sony’s “make work” program (the mispricing) as unethical, taking us back to square one: charge the correct amount.
I’m not here to agree, I’m completely fine with that disagreement and it doesn’t end the conservation at all, I’m here to elaborate.
I don't have a strong opinion about the manufacturer raising prices in this instance. In the sense that there is a wild mismatch between supply and demand it makes sense to do so, and I'd rather the manufacturer reap the reward. I haven't thought enough about knock-on effects though. Yes, I'd prefer the manufacturer raising prices to having scalpers do it. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but I never said otherwise.
My focus was entirely on the immorality of the scalper. In my opinion, they aren't providing value. In fact they are actually reducing value, since they have to hold at least some cards in order to sell them, actually restricting supply (and that's assuming they aren't doing it intentionally to create more artificial scarcity, which I'm sure some are). All they are doing is matching a limited supply with the highest bidder. Without scalpers just as many cards would get delivered to end users, now the only difference is those end users are richer. They are constricting a bottleneck and profiting from it at the expense of consumers and arguably even GPU manufacturers.
> Extracting value isn’t unethical
We just fundamentally disagree here. Parasitism is unethical to me. I understand it's inevitable, but that doesn't make it okay.
> I'm not arguing people aren't willing to pay more. I'm pointing out that the scalper is providing nothing of value to anyone but himself.
How is the scalper different from the retailer or the distributor (assuming there's a distributor between Sony and the retailer, although their might not be)
The scalper is providing value to the retailer by paying for and taking delivery of their inventory (although, if the scalper overbuys and then returns, that's a negative); although, if the demand is so high that the product never sits on shelves, the scalper doesn't provide much value to the retailer.
The scalper provides value to the customer by having inventory available.
I personally don't like to pay more to get something now, when I could wait and get it later for less, so I wouldn't buy from a scalper, but I can see there's value provided. The market shows there's value too.
Ethically, as long as you're honest about it, and personally, that would include not returning items you overbought, I'm not sure I see an ethical problem. If something is hard to find, and you take time and effort to find it, you can and should charge a premium to compensate you for your time. Sure, people buying to resell may move forward demand, and make the item harder to find, and that feels a bit squishy, kind of like if everyone stocks up on a commodity at once, it makes it harder to find, and makes stocking up more desirable, etc, but eventually people have enough and there will be a lull and then back to normal. Does that make stocking up unethical? I don't think so, but maybe it could be argued.
I picked one up via gamestops website of all places after trying and failing for over a month to get my order in at various retail websites. When I went to get the package from my doorman, told him it was a ps5 (and my tribulations to acquire it) and he said “oh I got one from a guy who lives in the building like a month ago, he’s had lots of them coming in”. I’m still mad and this was a few months after the launch…
It happens with age and responsibilities. My kids are grown and my friend are all stressed right now, so I've played 80 hours of valheim this week and the kids have been on 16 hours of elden ring last 2 days. Before my friends and I got going on valheim/astroneer I hadn't played games heavily for like the whole pandemic.
I’ve noticed this too. I think it’s a mix of age and no good games.
There’s more games than ever coming out but it feels like the number of really good titles is still low. Kinda like movies and TV too. I guess the market is so large now it’s a lot easier to succeed with mediocre content.
You don't need to play new games. My Steam library is full of cheaply-bought games and there are quite a few childhood games I'd love to revisit.
If you need a recommendation, I'd go for faster than light or slay the spire. If you have a lot of time, the X series recently released a free extension for X3:TC called farhams legacy, which you can pick up for dirt cheap. But there are many games that aged well.
I think this is a discovery problem, although I don't know your subjective idea of a really good title. I'd say I have more good games than I can reasonably play, some with near-infinite replayability thanks to human opponents and a chess-like complexity of outcomes.
There's a lot of cookie cutter uninspired money grubbing crap from big studios and small, but go find what people are playing by numbers, dig past the AAA shovelware, and there are plenty of gems.
There's great stuff from studios big and small. Sure they're still printing cod/bf/Madden. But they're also making rdr2/ghosts/botw/Mario Odyssey/Metroid dread/monster hunter rise. Just like indies are making valheim/astroneer/slay the spire/monster train/loop hero/hades
It wasn't really about what games were out there just what I felt like doing. I did a lot more physical real world stuff during the pandemic.
There are tons of amazing games out there. It's just like a new book series or author though. You gotta get to the hook.
What types of games do you like I can offer many suggestions. There have been plenty of amazing games in the last 1, 3, 5 years.
Now a days it's easier to make games, you just leverage an engine not invent graphics primitives. But it's harder to get noticed and make money. And easier to make small losses and harder to have massive blow outs. Games is a lifestyle business now.
Not many good games these days. I recently played through Age Of Empires 3 and 4. I just dont like stuff like Elden Ring that is popular these days due to Dark Souls or every third person game being turned into an RPG with stats and inventory and side quests.
If you 'can't find a game to play' while having a fast PC, you probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.
Or maybe you're overwhelmed by choice, between Steam sales, Game Pass, indie games, F2P, Epic Store freebies, and more, there's always something new you can try out whithout spending much money at all.
Although I suppose it can still be hard to find something really enjoyable to play if you were obsessed with a genre that's effectively dead these days (RTS? MMOs? Shmups?). But even then, there's usually indie devs out to fill every niche they can spot
>>probably aren't really interested in gaming any more, not enough to justify the time cost.
This, basically, which to me I find completely ironic, given that GAMES is literally what got me into computers back in the 80s, ran the Intel Game Lab in the 90s, worked as IT for the company that originally manufactured, packaged and shipped many many games, such as EverQuest, my best friend is an Production Director at Blizzard (with whom I worked for at Intel's game lab) and many other career accolades in the gaming space thats too lame to go into...
Whats weird, is that I ALWAYS have a high-end gaming machine... sans much gaming time...
I bought a PS5 in October because I was really excited for BF 2042. That game was a crushing disappointment. What's worse is the fact that it's pulled a lot of my friends from BF4 and they're still playing it, hoping it'll get better.
That's left single player games, and honestly single player games take a lot of time to get started. There have been weeks now where I start my playstation, look at who's playing. Look through my library to find a game I'm willing to sink hours into, find nothing and power off the machine.
There aren't any games for it yet practically speaking? It's not like the PS2 giving you access to a DVD player or PS3 a blu-ray until games appear. Even if it can "4k" a PS4 HD game, that's not that wide an audience.
Current forecast is August 2023 so I’m sure glad I bought my 3090 at retail price and a couple of used 2080ti right around the start of the chip shortage. They’ve been running nonstop training stylegan :)
This is coming and you will soon have any GPU want on ebay for nothing.
Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
This has been "coming" for years, I'm sick of seeing the Ethereum community use it as a way to whitewash their wasteful PoW excess. You and everyone else should stop even talking about it until it's shipped.
> It is important to note that an implementation goal of The Merge is simplicity in order to expedite the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Developers are focusing their efforts on this transition, and minimizing additional features that could delay this goal.
This is the exact forum to discuss this.
I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.
Electricity resources aren't limited; electricity gets cheaper when you install more solar panels, not more expensive. That will continue to be the case for the next three orders of magnitude of marketed energy consumption growth.
Some of my older notes on the topic are listed in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html, and there are further notes in Derctuo and Dernocua. Unfortunately I don't have a very clear summary anywhere.
I actually stayed at Arcosanti for a few days in college. Very cool concept that I wish had more traction. Maybe with a touch of what people are ready for today.
What's up with the weird pretentious verbage in that webpage? "Beacon Chain"? "Mainnet"? "The Docking"? Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?
Ethereum wasn’t designed to be a money alternative.. it’s a distributed virtual machine that incentivizes computational contribution with token economics… the token Eth is only valuable in the pursuit of performing work via the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Mainnet, not as a currency (at least, not any more than beanie babies could once have been a currency due to demand / fungibility)
You don't have to be old to be ignorant. "Mainnet," and "Chain," have non-arbitrary, universal meaning in the distributed ledger space. 'Beacon' is not arbitrary either as it fits the function it names. I'm not going to sit here and defend Ethereum - but to answer you question: most of that verbage has meaning independent of Ethereum's PR.
I know can you believe software companies are using words like Windows (they belong on a house!), mouse (it’s a rodent!) and keyboard (it’s on a piano!).
> Are they just exaggerated PR verbs, or am I just too old for this?
False dilemma.
They are proper nouns.
Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward.
Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector.
This is an article about them merging.
What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.
"Mainnet" is a well established technical term, universal across the blockchain space.
The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster".
"The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.
> Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
Devil's advocate: won't a fork of Ethereum which keeps PoW be able to do exactly that? (for example, Ethereum Classic?)
The market cap of ETC is much lower so if you have all that hash on it they sell their coins, no one wants to buy ETC nearly as much as Ethereum and poof goes the price.
> Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
You fundamentally misunderstand how mining works. Difficulty automatically increases if blocks are being mined at faster than the expected rate. Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
> Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around.
I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.
Miners will only sell at prices that cover their costs. Yes you need demand too, but it's a question of equilibrium. If demand is high, price will go up, attracting more miners. But if the cost of energy/gpus goes up, miners won't be willing to sell for the same price as before, which will also increase the price.
No I meant difficulty adjustment and I know they can also adjust now. What's being missed here is that price go up because of buyer AND seller behavior. The dynamic goes both ways. If there is a demand increase, price goes up, so miners mine more. But if costs for miners go up, they won't sell for less than their costs, so that also causes the price to go up.
The total hashpower of a coin adjusts to the point where the total cost to deliver that hashpower is just below the total mining reward.
Thus, a coin that issues $50k worth of coin per day will have $50k/day worth of hash power. If difficulty goes above that, mining becomes unprofitable.
That's correct, that's the kind of equilibrium that should be reached. I'm just pointing out that price increases can find from supplier costs going up, not just from increased demand.
Depends greatly on the conditions of the facility they were mining in. Heat kills these units. A professional set-up (not to be confused with a large one) will have much more mild impact on the units than a building with poor thermal considerations. Then again, high end miners will be running custom firmware which could also compromise the card lifespan.
Hard to say the number because it is difficult (but sometimes not impossible) to deduce the device from on chain data. ASICs do exist but they have not obsoleted GPUs like has happened on other projects (such as Bitcoin.)
FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.
You can blame miners but it's just extremely high demand for these cards - once the merge happens and GPUs stop being super profitable, we'll see that not much has changed in terms of availability - and 40 series cards[0] will be just as hard to get. The only change might be a temporary drop in second-hand prices as the mining GPUs flood eBay for a month.
Mining rewards and the price of a coin are mostly separate. Coins wouldn't crash, but rewards would be spread across more miners, reducing mining profits per hash rate.
Very unlikely, there will always be enough demand for most modern node technology to be expensive. Be it CPUs or GPUs. Those won't drop massively in price, but we might be lucky to go back to 500-1000 range.
Or may see a shortage in capacitors, resistors, transistors....there will always be a weak link and for most it has been chips. If we shift towards an oversupply and we will as with such lead time to lets build a fab to lets use that fab, markets change momentum. SO you get growth, then shrink back to balance out supply, then some spike via some event or demand and the pulse of industry moves on.
What will be more interested in is how the supply chain changes and will we see a more cautious approach to just in time, offloading warehousing to suppliers or will we see a more granular balance. So that will be interesting going ahead and may well see initial oversupply delayed filling up those buffers.
Although I do think there will be an oversupply "crisis", I think the article is too optimistic about the timing. From what I have read the new foundries will start production in 2024-2025, and I don't see demand going down anytime soon, and that's not to mention some of the backlog that has accumulated. Although I am curious as to how amd and nvidia have been handling this. Do they have stockpiles of chips themselves?
There’s alot of stuff stuck in the shipping channel or backlogged.
Not the same commodity, but as an illustration, I just got a bunch of 4k computer displays direct from an OEM. Normally we get stuff like this 30-60 days after manufacturing. These devices were tagged as last July and received a week ago.
I’ve been told that lots of stuff gets stuck waiting for final package assembly. (Ie the monitor stand, cable or even manual) Although chips aren’t end user products that have to have accessories, many require packaging or other subcomponents that may be lost in the mail.
Additionally, contracts prioritize certain customers, and many manufacturers don’t have good processes to deal with diversions. If you order 20,000 widgets, they may not stop shipping until to hit some high water mark. So when the US government say “emergency, ship me your widgets now”, your order gets “stolen”.
COVID response activity is winding down, so I’d venture to guess you’re going to see a lot of cancelled orders and chaos. Imo, you’ll see prices of consumer facing IT gear crash in the June-August timeframe as schools and students are flooded with gear, only to surge again as component makers retool.
Also, like gas prices (quick to rise, slow to sink), I think you’ll see manufacturers keep prices high in the many markets that are controlled by little cartels. Why sell Ford some chip for $1 when they are paying $12 today?
> Why sell Ford some chip for $1 when they are paying $12 today?
That's a very good point. When you're competing to get your part selected for a new design, you want to sell it cheap, but once they've done all the work of incorporating your part and testing it, you want to make it expensive. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Yes they do. First, they normally buy complete electronics (functional devices with or without software), not just chips. Second, they do have strong contracts, spreading for 3, 4, 5+ years, specifying the volumes for each contracted year and also the piece price (among other details, of course).
To add to the logistical supply chain issues, the fleet of Anotov aircraft (including the AN-125 and AN-225) play a crucial role in the fulfilling a range global logistical needs, but the factory in Ukraine is reportedly damaged, leading to expected impacts to their serviceability and spare parts manufacture.
This will almost certainly have flow-on impacts to the broader shipping and commercial airline market, and further screw up delivery of your monitor’s user manuals.
I have a tiny little side business making an electronic gadget. I've had to get good at substitution. Granted this is easier for me, I don't have to go through an engineering change order process, and can usually trust my gut on what's going to work. Still, it's a PITA.
Yeah it's a pain for those in the business. Thankfully it's just a hobby for me, but I've talked to professionals who were on their fourth board revision due to substitutions... can't be fun.
I feel like there’s a great opportunity here for electronic engineers with a good eye for supply chain dynamics to consult into all manner of industrial and consumer markets to assist with strategic re-engineering of their products.
Oversupply is just as much a crisis as undersupply. The lead time on ramping capacity up and down is long, which leads to a cyclic market which overshoots in one direction or the other. It's hard to predict the cycles.
However, an "oversupply" crisis means that either:
- prices falling, meaning costs aren't covered;
- equipment isn't running 24/7 as intended, leading to higher costs
This means businesses go under. There's a firesale which is nice, but the structural damage is far more harmful.
Personally, I'd like to see this industry a little bit more socialized. I'd like my chips produced in the USA, even if they cost a little bit more, so we're self-sufficient. I'd also like the supply chains to be in the US. I think the same goes for the EU, China, and hopefully soon, India and Africa. Having five independent supply chains costs five times as much, and I understand the efficiency argument for having just TSMC (and maybe Samsung or Intel), but I think both COVID and Ukraine highlight the risks of systemic failure.
We're just a little too over-dependent on each other.
I also wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for some excess, unused capacity, as they do with food production. That's also less efficient, but gives resilience.
We don't need to be self-sufficient everywhere, mind you. Most goods aren't essential. I do think each region should be self-sufficient for food, medicine, and now, ICs.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadNo company is going to hoard multiple years worth of inputs. Supply has remained high in semiconductors too, it's more of a demand than supply problem. But of course, elevated demand and normal supply leads to shortages just the same as normal demand and shortened supply.
Retail Sales:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS
JIT allowed a lot of different manufacturers to “share” stocks, by keeping inventory in a supplier instead of in house.
In the end we traded in risk tolerance for better efficiency, and most companies are now doing the opposite trade.
> No company is going to hoard multiple years worth of inputs.
I actually work with companies who have done this.
If you look back at what many were saying at the start of Covid you would have thought we would have all been eating our neighbours by now. The reality has been completely different, an artificial shortage of toilet paper and a slight tightening of supply on consumer goods. If anything this tells me our supply chains are quite robust.
The vehicle I want to buy does not come with the chip for heated seats or parking sensors, because they simply do not have enough of them. You can buy that vehicle without those features, and at least with the heated seats, they promise to retrofit them "at some future date." All of the models that got made before the cut-off sold super quickly, and I'm just waiting to buy until the vehicle is complete at signing.
Only if they can afford them and can justify the purchase. People want many things that for various reasons they don't acquire. It may be cost (units would have to be sold at a loss to get down to consumer-comfortable pricing), it may be that it's part of a larger system. For me to get a new AMD CPU I'd also need a compatible motherboard and, possibly, different RAM (either for physical compatibility or to get an actual performance improvement, even if my old RAM "works" if it's sufficiently slow it's a bottleneck that makes the purchase not worthwhile to me).
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/global-enterprise/chip-shor...
Consolidation is a fairly easy bet to place though from a 2022 POV, so I guess GP (and I) are predicting cold during winter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
/s, I think...?
But yes, that's expected. After supply-line shocks shortage and oversupply follow each other. If people play their cards right, they get a quickly decreasing amplitude on those crises, if they play wrong, they get always increasing ones until a lot get bankrupt.
The chip manufacturers seem well aware of the problem and to be playing it correctly. I wouldn't bet on the oversupply crisis being nearly as large as the shortage.
Turn off the news and you’ll be much happier. Remember they only make money if they’ve scared you into watching.
Rather, be informed and watch whats happening with a critical mindset. Ignorance may be bliss but its also irresponsible.
Now I think it needs to allow for exceptions for events like now with Russia invading Ukraine.
Cut NYT, CNN, The Guardian and all the rest, you'll be happier and will be better informed
(Joke explanation: my username is Dutch for 'time traveller'.)
I haven't watched the news for years, or read the newspapers. I do real articles from magazines and newspapers and books and such (from HN, among other places), which are far more useful. I don't really know what's going on in Ukraine right this moment, but most will have forgotten that in two weeks time anyway, so what's the point? Instead I spent some time reading up on the context a few weeks ago.
The news is also strongly biased towards negative events. The classic example is that "plane crashed" is big news, but that planes are actually very safe. "Man spills pint and gets punched" is news. "Man spills pint and it's all fine" is not. etc. It's not a particularly good reflection of reality.
what a privileged thing to say
Perhaps a more reasonable approach is reading the news once a week. You stay informed, but it's not something you worry about daily.
It's on the individual to find a happy balance of media consumption for their mental health in the same way it's on the individual not to eat candy every day for lunch.
Yeah! Imagine being so privileged you’re allowed to turn off the news and feel happier without mom and dad grounding you from the internet or the government aiming a nuke at you in response, which would thereby prevent you from typing words into a text box and clicking the Reply button when you’re done writing your thoughts.
That would suck because then someone else wouldn’t be able to come along and not actually provide a counterpoint to your comments, but instead just write “what a privileged thing to say”, undoubtedly smirking while simultaneously sipping a latte and clicking Reply to submit their effortless snarky reply from their $5K/month apartment located in the heart of some tech city.
I think CS Lewis explained it well when the atomic bomb was created:
> In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
I have absolutely no way of impacting events in the Ukraine, even if I decide to contribute to a charity or try to influence my local member of parliament there is still absolutely no benefit to be gained by anybody (except perhaps the media) of me consuming this coverage.
I can however benefit significantly by avoiding news reporting that is going to continually trigger primitive fight or flight instincts and leave me in a high state of stress.
Because we can completely fill our days with what's going on in Ukraine and yet be able to do very little about it at an individual level and I'm really not sure that's good for someone's sanity.
Instead of watching/reading news for hours. Take 30 min to donate some money and email your representative in Congress on your beliefs. You’ll have done way more to help your cause than watching news and you get your day back.
For me personally, I find the war to be incredibly distracting, because my attention was almost constantly drawn to it. But throughout the past few days I learned a few thing:
The situation on the ground does not change that quickly, fresh reports are often wrong or fabricated. But most importantly: I've gotten myself to be constantly obsessed over a distant war which made me forget what I actually wanted to do over the past few days.
I'll continue to follow the news, but not every hour and minute, and I'm just thankful a place like this exist.
As someone already mentioned, the media loves to manipulating this state to their (profit) advantage.
Literally 4-5k saved off every car if you order direct from the manufacturer.
I'd be surprised if it even made a half percent dent.
Maybe it really is that easy. I don't know. But Yandex isn't buying computers off Newegg anymore. That's for sure.
Though it will still increase cost to Russia with another middle man involved.
Then you are very lucky. My life was certainly easier before supply chain disruptions.
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ps5/register-to-buy/
The only issue is that there aren’t a lot of PS5-exclusive games.
We grabbed a PS5 in January from Gamestop by queueing for a couple of hours.
Yes, it's absolutely stupid to have to commit to this for a full week to just be able to buy a console.
I guess I am also part of the problem. I hate the idea of a scalper but I bought one from a high school student who is scouting them out and buying them then reselling them at a $100 markup over MSRP to make money for college. They learned to code for this. I figured it was the right kind of entrepreneurship to support even if the entire supply chain issues we face are allowing less scrupulous people to profit akin to how this student is.
You're supporting a scalper. You're teaching him that there's money to be made by positioning yourself as a middle man. There's no value creation here, just value extraction.
First, there's a sense that scalpers are illegitimate and cheating the system. If Sony were to raise the MSRP themselves, or retailers did it instead, most of the anger and complaints would disappear. Honestly, they should absolutely raise the price. Scalpers are making the market function better in this case, because the "official" outlets are not doing their jobs.
Second, most people in the West are not used to thinking about real scarcity and what it means. (If there was a terrible coffee shortage, you might be happy to find a guy who will sell you a cup for $20.)
And the value being provided is the possibility of buying the PS5. Even without scalpers, chances are that someone else would have bought it. Scalping only works when the demand is very high compared to the supply.
If its out of the budget they’ll have to do something else, that doesn’t even need to be explained
PS5's are purchased between $700 and $1,000. PS5's aren't the only device with premium. Used cars have an unprecedented premium, alongside all GPUs.
The market is saying that semiconductors, especially GPU accelerated compute time is worth this much.
You can point at miners, you can point at scalpers, you neglect that every cloud compute and cloud gaming provider is building massive data centers full of GPUs as fast as they can get their hands on them at a premium too.
It doesn't take a free market libertarian to observe that its the MSRP that's wrong.
I'm discussing ethics and you're discussing economics. The problem is this obsession with finding arbitrage to extract value from the system, which is the entire point of your comment where you're defending the market because someone can profit from it without actually providing any value. I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
> I'd like to live in a world that isn't full of selfish assholes trying to fuck everyone else over all the time. I understand market dynamics just fine - I got rich from it and I'm a shittier person for it.
It is not possible to live in a market based economy and fulfill that desire. It is very easy for me to accept that. Demand for the asset simply has to dry up. It has not. People that want a PS5 can get one, at the available price. Scalpers are providing liquidity, you provided liquidity. Individual owners would be removing liquidity, likely causing greater premium in price to let one go and further hoops to jump through.
You're using market dynamics to justify morality. My point is you extrapolate this and you end up with the US healthcare system, which is completely fucking broken providing less value at higher cost. Parasitic middle men don't deserve to be compensated and we should do everything possible to eradicate them.
It's actually quite easy to live in a market-based society and not have these problems - it's called regulation and we need a shitload more of it. It's how we established a minimum wage, and abolished child labor, and even separated commercial banking from investment banking for a period of time.
It seems to me the problem is scarcity (I think we agree on this much), and people trying to profit off that aren't anything more than parasites (we seem to disagree on this).
Let's just agree to disagree.
MSRP is wrong, the console is worth around $750, this would match the inflation adjusted price of home entrainment consoles for the last 40 years. In both of our views - maybe ironic to you - it would be more ethical to diminish the returns of scalpers by having the price correct in the primary market to begin with. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because Sony doesn’t want the vocal backlash especially when they drop the price to $200 just a few years from now.
As long as the primary market chooses to misprice, all the symptoms - like all the startup partime retailers you say aren’t providing a service - are completely benign. Extracting value isn’t unethical, to me that is blaming Sony’s “make work” program (the mispricing) as unethical, taking us back to square one: charge the correct amount.
I’m not here to agree, I’m completely fine with that disagreement and it doesn’t end the conservation at all, I’m here to elaborate.
My focus was entirely on the immorality of the scalper. In my opinion, they aren't providing value. In fact they are actually reducing value, since they have to hold at least some cards in order to sell them, actually restricting supply (and that's assuming they aren't doing it intentionally to create more artificial scarcity, which I'm sure some are). All they are doing is matching a limited supply with the highest bidder. Without scalpers just as many cards would get delivered to end users, now the only difference is those end users are richer. They are constricting a bottleneck and profiting from it at the expense of consumers and arguably even GPU manufacturers.
> Extracting value isn’t unethical
We just fundamentally disagree here. Parasitism is unethical to me. I understand it's inevitable, but that doesn't make it okay.
How is the scalper different from the retailer or the distributor (assuming there's a distributor between Sony and the retailer, although their might not be)
The scalper is providing value to the retailer by paying for and taking delivery of their inventory (although, if the scalper overbuys and then returns, that's a negative); although, if the demand is so high that the product never sits on shelves, the scalper doesn't provide much value to the retailer.
The scalper provides value to the customer by having inventory available.
I personally don't like to pay more to get something now, when I could wait and get it later for less, so I wouldn't buy from a scalper, but I can see there's value provided. The market shows there's value too.
Ethically, as long as you're honest about it, and personally, that would include not returning items you overbought, I'm not sure I see an ethical problem. If something is hard to find, and you take time and effort to find it, you can and should charge a premium to compensate you for your time. Sure, people buying to resell may move forward demand, and make the item harder to find, and that feels a bit squishy, kind of like if everyone stocks up on a commodity at once, it makes it harder to find, and makes stocking up more desirable, etc, but eventually people have enough and there will be a lull and then back to normal. Does that make stocking up unethical? I don't think so, but maybe it could be argued.
yet I sit and type text and browse the web on a flagship gaming omen RTX 3070 laptop and I cant find a game to play...
Our gaming days are dwindling in this house.
There’s more games than ever coming out but it feels like the number of really good titles is still low. Kinda like movies and TV too. I guess the market is so large now it’s a lot easier to succeed with mediocre content.
If you need a recommendation, I'd go for faster than light or slay the spire. If you have a lot of time, the X series recently released a free extension for X3:TC called farhams legacy, which you can pick up for dirt cheap. But there are many games that aged well.
For the younglings - they can give themselves fully to the experience.
There's a lot of cookie cutter uninspired money grubbing crap from big studios and small, but go find what people are playing by numbers, dig past the AAA shovelware, and there are plenty of gems.
There are tons of amazing games out there. It's just like a new book series or author though. You gotta get to the hook.
What types of games do you like I can offer many suggestions. There have been plenty of amazing games in the last 1, 3, 5 years.
Now a days it's easier to make games, you just leverage an engine not invent graphics primitives. But it's harder to get noticed and make money. And easier to make small losses and harder to have massive blow outs. Games is a lifestyle business now.
Or maybe you're overwhelmed by choice, between Steam sales, Game Pass, indie games, F2P, Epic Store freebies, and more, there's always something new you can try out whithout spending much money at all.
Although I suppose it can still be hard to find something really enjoyable to play if you were obsessed with a genre that's effectively dead these days (RTS? MMOs? Shmups?). But even then, there's usually indie devs out to fill every niche they can spot
This, basically, which to me I find completely ironic, given that GAMES is literally what got me into computers back in the 80s, ran the Intel Game Lab in the 90s, worked as IT for the company that originally manufactured, packaged and shipped many many games, such as EverQuest, my best friend is an Production Director at Blizzard (with whom I worked for at Intel's game lab) and many other career accolades in the gaming space thats too lame to go into...
Whats weird, is that I ALWAYS have a high-end gaming machine... sans much gaming time...
That's left single player games, and honestly single player games take a lot of time to get started. There have been weeks now where I start my playstation, look at who's playing. Look through my library to find a game I'm willing to sink hours into, find nothing and power off the machine.
There aren't any games for it yet practically speaking? It's not like the PS2 giving you access to a DVD player or PS3 a blu-ray until games appear. Even if it can "4k" a PS4 HD game, that's not that wide an audience.
Current forecast is August 2023 so I’m sure glad I bought my 3090 at retail price and a couple of used 2080ti right around the start of the chip shortage. They’ve been running nonstop training stylegan :)
This is coming and you will soon have any GPU want on ebay for nothing.
Inb4 someone tells me they will just mine something else. Nothing else is remotely able to handle the hashpower without crashing the price of the coin.
https://i.imgur.com/TBouXrK.jpg
That is a list of coins to mine sorted by exchange volume.
This is the exact forum to discuss this.
I can't wait till your kind of vitriol has no legs to stand on.
A) content with the progress given the existence of the beacon chain
B) don't care if the merge is delayed again, delayed indefinitely, or Proof of Work never gets turned off for some reason
so although its tempting to get defensive I guess my real response is "okay? I don't care."
Climate change is more important than being excessively polite to you for years.
Don't hold your breath...
very much a global tech startup!
False dilemma.
They are proper nouns.
Beacon chain is simply the name of the network launched a bit over a year ago. It is likely intended to be named as an aspirational thing to move toward.
Mainnet is the network launched 7 years ago. Usually distinct from "test networks", testnet, and seen far beyond ethereum into all cryptocurrency networks, and inherited from the idea of test, development, staging and production environments seen in the best practices of all web projects in the broader tech sector.
This is an article about them merging.
What is "weird pretentious verbiage" about that? If there was anything odd it would be "the docking" and that article immediately says that was a former name, making it a moot point.
The chain names (e.g. "Beacon") are basically version codenames - think of them like the "Buster" in "Debian Buster".
"The Merge" is the (arbitrary) name they gave to a specific future event, because people like to be able to easily refer to things they're talking about. I assume the previous name was discarded due to political correctness.
Curious but it's hard to Google this. What was it?
Intel is releasing their own graphics cards, which is neat. It's a good time to enter the market, for sure.
Devil's advocate: won't a fork of Ethereum which keeps PoW be able to do exactly that? (for example, Ethereum Classic?)
You fundamentally misunderstand how mining works. Difficulty automatically increases if blocks are being mined at faster than the expected rate. Needing more GPUs to mine the same number of coins raises the price.
Ridiculous. Price is determined by how much people are willing to buy or sell it at, which they decide based on speculation. The amount of GPUs that will be put to the task of mining is dependent on price. Not the other way around.
I could create an alt coin that requires some arbitrarily large number of hashes to mine a single block and receive 1 coin as reward. Yet I cannot command a higher price for it, because no one wants to buy my coin.
First, you are ignoring that difficulty adjustments can happen downward too.
Second, you flipped the actually dynamic - the price swings dictate how much mining ends up being profitable, not the other way around.
You might have also confused the difficulty adjustments with the reward decreasing over time.
Thus, a coin that issues $50k worth of coin per day will have $50k/day worth of hash power. If difficulty goes above that, mining becomes unprofitable.
>Simple division yields an estimate of 13.982 million GPUs mining Ethereum on April 16 2021.
>40 million graphic cards produced in 2020
It's just 1/3 of one year's production that could be freed if people don't move to other coins. Is that enough to crush the market?
[1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1327701-honest-question-how-...
FPGAs were never big for mining. There was like 3 months in early Bitcoin where they people seriously tried deploying them but the simple fact is they are way too expensive from manufacturer markup for mining. And if you want to make your own you’ll just end up making an ASIC instead.
0: https://twitter.com/greymon55/status/1418795735802425349?s=2...
The BOM cost of 3080Ti with Memory in itself is more than $100.
I'll take this any time. I am eyeing new server and laptop but prices suck at the moment for my specs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/25/ukraine...
What will be more interested in is how the supply chain changes and will we see a more cautious approach to just in time, offloading warehousing to suppliers or will we see a more granular balance. So that will be interesting going ahead and may well see initial oversupply delayed filling up those buffers.
Not the same commodity, but as an illustration, I just got a bunch of 4k computer displays direct from an OEM. Normally we get stuff like this 30-60 days after manufacturing. These devices were tagged as last July and received a week ago.
I’ve been told that lots of stuff gets stuck waiting for final package assembly. (Ie the monitor stand, cable or even manual) Although chips aren’t end user products that have to have accessories, many require packaging or other subcomponents that may be lost in the mail.
Additionally, contracts prioritize certain customers, and many manufacturers don’t have good processes to deal with diversions. If you order 20,000 widgets, they may not stop shipping until to hit some high water mark. So when the US government say “emergency, ship me your widgets now”, your order gets “stolen”.
COVID response activity is winding down, so I’d venture to guess you’re going to see a lot of cancelled orders and chaos. Imo, you’ll see prices of consumer facing IT gear crash in the June-August timeframe as schools and students are flooded with gear, only to surge again as component makers retool.
Also, like gas prices (quick to rise, slow to sink), I think you’ll see manufacturers keep prices high in the many markets that are controlled by little cartels. Why sell Ford some chip for $1 when they are paying $12 today?
That's a very good point. When you're competing to get your part selected for a new design, you want to sell it cheap, but once they've done all the work of incorporating your part and testing it, you want to make it expensive. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This will almost certainly have flow-on impacts to the broader shipping and commercial airline market, and further screw up delivery of your monitor’s user manuals.
Same. When looking at DigiKey and Mouser they've got confirmed dates well into 2023 for loads of parts.
Here's a random example I was looking at yesterday[1]. Sure they have a few in stock, but once those are gone the next batch is due next summer.
edit: another example[2], no stock and 39k due next summer.
[1]: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/TLC59...
[2]: https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/TLV62...
However, an "oversupply" crisis means that either:
- prices falling, meaning costs aren't covered;
- equipment isn't running 24/7 as intended, leading to higher costs
This means businesses go under. There's a firesale which is nice, but the structural damage is far more harmful.
Personally, I'd like to see this industry a little bit more socialized. I'd like my chips produced in the USA, even if they cost a little bit more, so we're self-sufficient. I'd also like the supply chains to be in the US. I think the same goes for the EU, China, and hopefully soon, India and Africa. Having five independent supply chains costs five times as much, and I understand the efficiency argument for having just TSMC (and maybe Samsung or Intel), but I think both COVID and Ukraine highlight the risks of systemic failure.
We're just a little too over-dependent on each other.
I also wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for some excess, unused capacity, as they do with food production. That's also less efficient, but gives resilience.
We don't need to be self-sufficient everywhere, mind you. Most goods aren't essential. I do think each region should be self-sufficient for food, medicine, and now, ICs.
Semiconductor fabs take years to start production.