Well thank th FSM that the article opens right up with buy now! No thanks, I'm kind of burnt out on mindless consumerism, I'll go pot some plants or something.
Positive downstream effect: The way software is built will need to be rethought and improved to utilize efficiencies for stagnating hardware compute. Think of how staggering the step from the start of a console generation to the end used to be. Native-compiled languages have made bounding leaps that might be worth pursuing again.
I've been ruminating on this past two years, with life before AI most of the compute staying cheap and pretty much 90% idle , we are finally getting to the point of using all of this compute. We probably will find more algorithms to improve efficiency of all the matrix computations, and with AI bubble same thing will happen that happened with telecom bubble and all the fiber optic stuff that turned out to be drastically over provisioned. Fascinating times!
I now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.
For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs).
Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing.
New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment.
Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits).
It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.
And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.
>It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.
I mean, isn't this exactly what happened? I could be wrong about this, but didn't ycombinator themselves say they weren't accepting any ideas that didn't include AI?
80 percent of the jobs people reach out to me for are shady AI jobs that I have no interest in. Hiring in other non-AI jobs seems to have slowed.
When I talk to "computer" people, they only want to talk about AI. I wish I could quit computers and never look at a screen again.
At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.
Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly
- high electricity prices
- crazy computer part prices
- phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs
and the benefits are mostly
- slop and chatgpt
Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.
Software has gotten bad over the last decade. Electron apps were the start but these days everything seems to be so bloated, right from the operating systems to browsers.
There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old.
Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better.
I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience.
I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.
DRAM spot prices are something like what they were 4 years ago. Having RAM for cheap is nice. But it doesn't cost an extraordinary amount. I recently needed some RAM and was able to pick up 16x32 DDR4 for $1600. That's about twice as expensive as it used to be but $1600 is pretty cheap for 512 GiB of RAM.
A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.
It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.
It's called a shortage. Chips are highly cyclical. Right now demand is surging and prices and investment are booming. Give it 5 years and I'd bet many in the chips industry will be bemoaning a massive glut and oversupply that sends prices plummeting.
Yes. To put it in slightly different terms, it's alarming that a handful of companies can price all of humanity out of computing goods. And it's even more alarming that those companies don't even need to be profitable.
Datacenter RAM is heavily utilized. RAM in personal devices is sitting idle 99% of the time. Think of all the ram sitting in work laptops on nights and weekends sitting unused. Big waste of resources.
Outside say video and image editing and maybe lossless audio. Why is this much ram even needed in most use cases? And I mean actually thinking about using it. Computer code unless you are actually doing whole Linux kernel, is just text. So lot of projects probably would fit in cache. Maybe software companies should be billed for user's resources too...
You must be surprised to learn that most of the personal/SOHO PC users use Windows as the default OS.
In fact, Microsoft and Intel made a cutthroat monopoly of the PC market by their long-term WinTel nexus (MS Windows optimized to run better on Intel CPUs, Intel CPU PCs being sold with MS WINDOW by default), until AMD upped the ante and stole the race by being first on the block with releasing x64/x32 bit processor so Microsoft chose to ditch Intel for AMD to usher in the new era of 54-bit Windows OSes.
AMD still dominates in server market and GPU market (where it has been innovating harder and giving better VFM than nVidia and Intel), so still struggling to dominate the PC market (PC assemblers/stores get better lucrative deals from Intel to sell Intel-based PCs, that's why we find fewer AMD-based PCs for sale in shops/stores.
And that doesn't bode well for PC users/customers. Because that WinTel+nVidia nexus will choose MS Windows over Linux any day.
As for why more RAM is needed, you must be again surprised to know that most people play video games on PCs and mobiles rather than expensive consoles.
But even casual gaming needs adequate RAM and some vRAM. Even heavy duty office work (e.g., opening/editing big Excel files or complex PDFs) is a problem in low-end PC. Engineering students and workers need to do complex CAD/CAM work on their PCs. Artists (including musicians) need to use powerful software tools to do design and art work. All these needs mandate more RAM (16GB at the minimum) because most of these tools need MS Windows (or alternatively, expensive Mac PCs, assuming MacOS has alternative apps to suit such needs).
After failing to beat AMDs versatility and VFM performance in the CPU & GPU market, nVidia and Intel have insteaf pivoted to AI to regain their stranglehold on the market. Their AI NPUs are dominating the PC market this year, but those new PCs are bad for the types of specific needs listed above.
This is also why Microsoft and its allies ensured that most video games are not ported to Linux (and Mac), until Valve finally started to change that status quo by focusing on Linux gaming (but out of self interest, as its money-maker Steam store became too heavily dependent on Microsoft for gaming).
It feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want.
Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.
The people who worry about “alignment” are very much not the same people who want anyone to have local AI hardware. They are the people who would force every computer legally allowed to be sold to the hoi polloi to be as locked down as an iPhone if they could.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 85.7 ms ] threadPrices are already through the roof...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates
next stage is paving everything with solar panels.
Looks like the frame.work desktop with Ryzen 128GB is shipping now at same price it was on release, Apple is offering 512GB Mac studios
Are snapdragon chips the same way?
Isn't Micron stopping all consumer RAM production? So their factories won't help anyway.
Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing.
New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment.
Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits).
It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else.
And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.
I mean, isn't this exactly what happened? I could be wrong about this, but didn't ycombinator themselves say they weren't accepting any ideas that didn't include AI?
80 percent of the jobs people reach out to me for are shady AI jobs that I have no interest in. Hiring in other non-AI jobs seems to have slowed.
When I talk to "computer" people, they only want to talk about AI. I wish I could quit computers and never look at a screen again.
Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly
- high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs
and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt
Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.
There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old.
Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better.
I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience.
I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.
A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.
Presumably the boom times are the main reason why investment goes into it so that years later, consumers can buy for cheap.
Datacenter RAM is heavily utilized. RAM in personal devices is sitting idle 99% of the time. Think of all the ram sitting in work laptops on nights and weekends sitting unused. Big waste of resources.
In fact, Microsoft and Intel made a cutthroat monopoly of the PC market by their long-term WinTel nexus (MS Windows optimized to run better on Intel CPUs, Intel CPU PCs being sold with MS WINDOW by default), until AMD upped the ante and stole the race by being first on the block with releasing x64/x32 bit processor so Microsoft chose to ditch Intel for AMD to usher in the new era of 54-bit Windows OSes.
AMD still dominates in server market and GPU market (where it has been innovating harder and giving better VFM than nVidia and Intel), so still struggling to dominate the PC market (PC assemblers/stores get better lucrative deals from Intel to sell Intel-based PCs, that's why we find fewer AMD-based PCs for sale in shops/stores.
And that doesn't bode well for PC users/customers. Because that WinTel+nVidia nexus will choose MS Windows over Linux any day.
As for why more RAM is needed, you must be again surprised to know that most people play video games on PCs and mobiles rather than expensive consoles.
But even casual gaming needs adequate RAM and some vRAM. Even heavy duty office work (e.g., opening/editing big Excel files or complex PDFs) is a problem in low-end PC. Engineering students and workers need to do complex CAD/CAM work on their PCs. Artists (including musicians) need to use powerful software tools to do design and art work. All these needs mandate more RAM (16GB at the minimum) because most of these tools need MS Windows (or alternatively, expensive Mac PCs, assuming MacOS has alternative apps to suit such needs).
After failing to beat AMDs versatility and VFM performance in the CPU & GPU market, nVidia and Intel have insteaf pivoted to AI to regain their stranglehold on the market. Their AI NPUs are dominating the PC market this year, but those new PCs are bad for the types of specific needs listed above.
This is also why Microsoft and its allies ensured that most video games are not ported to Linux (and Mac), until Valve finally started to change that status quo by focusing on Linux gaming (but out of self interest, as its money-maker Steam store became too heavily dependent on Microsoft for gaming).
So yeah, more RAM and better CPUs & GPUs please!
Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.