My most recent hobby has been an old Suzuki Samurai that I dragged out of the woods a few years ago. It doesn’t use much RAM. It doesn’t even have fuel injection.
I’ve also been getting back into archery with my kid.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that making it harder to get a computer and play games is a huge miscalculation. If everyone is distracted by Call of Battle: Dutyfield then you have fewer bored assholes casting about for something to do, and if people can still play Factorio, you don’t end up with bored, autistic, organized assholes casting about for something to do.
What if the unintentional consequence of hardware hoarding by AI companies is we have fewer devices being made that spy on us, like smart TVs and appliances.
The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn’t really exist to be put into GPUs that haven’t been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven’t been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn’t actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible.
😎
The price crash is going to be great. Such a massive yo-yo. Most of the AI companies will just completely eat shit out of it.
All that to create Artificial Intelligence that isn’t really intelligent.
What do you mean?
Just walk the car wash!
The supply chain for computing resources is extremely bottlenecked right now. Even with the high demand for open weight AI models the data centers hosting them aren’t able to get the computing resources they need and they keep running into rate limits even for paid users. Z.ai’s hosting quality has dropped which I suspect may be related. Even over the past few weeks this has gotten much worse with the release of Kimi K2.5 being competitive with closed US-based models and OpenCode becoming popular. Meanwhile we have corporations like OpenAI buying up half the world’s RAM fucking both other people and other corporations. So I’m not sure where this is going to end up, but the computer hardware market is going to really suck for a while.
I think sir misunderstands how malleable my hobbies and interests are and completely fails to see where my priorities are. You can’t eat RAM and it will never love you back. It’s almost irrelevant even when it’s not supply crunch’d.
That’s fine, I’m over here eating popcorn, watching all the drama……
Luckily I’m not likely to need any laptop, phone, tablet. game console, car, tv, etc any time soon. All my higher end devices are good for a few years until the bubble bursts.
That being said, my hobbies tend to be in low end devices. We know raspberry pi’s are now expensive and likely to get worse, but I wonder how it will effect the tiny bit of old technology memory in things like “smart switches” and sensors
. . . 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.
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.
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.
“everything you care about” - Time to change hobbies and care about things that don’t have RAM then.
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?
I’d be happy to use last gen stuff too
Starts to get into crochet, sewing and knitting.
Until Big Crochet buy up all the materials. Fuck Big Crochet
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.
Big Iron taking all the iron like kung fu panda
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
Laughs in AC/DC Model Trains and Battletech
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 would LOVE to believe this will force automakers to return to using buttons instead of touchscreen.
Yeah, I know. But I’d sure love to believe it.
I think this will be required to get full score on the safety test in Europe soon, so hopefully it can bleed into the global car market in a few years.
Unfortunately cars are one of those things where the brussels effect doesn’t work as well since lots of companies are set up to manufacture and deliver specific models to specific countries
Hyundai Motor group said they would commit to buttons but the leaks of the ioniq 5 refresh look like all the other chinese crap out there with a bigass tablet in the middle.
Also fuck Elon and Tesla for starting that shit
Hahahahahahahha…but yeah, that’d be awesome. Fucking damn touchscreens in cars.
The number of touch screen clicks I need to turn my windshield wipers on is just plain dangerous.
I’m old enough to remember a time when windows were rolled up by hand. It wasn’t perfect, but you never had to turn your car on again to deal with a window forgotten open.
Wait, touch screen for windshield wipers‽ Fuck that shit. It’s supposed to be a stalk opposite the turn signals because it’s safety critical. What next, touch screen for your turn signals‽
a time when windows were rolled up by hand
If you are talking about using the handle, then there are still plenty of cheaper cars that have that, depending upon where you are looking.
I don’t think I’ve seen manual windows in a car for at least 15 years. My lowest trim absolute base model civic in 2012 still had electric windows and would have been the same for the whole gen so at least 2010 for Honda. My 03 Saturn ion had manual windows (and the little thumb stick for the drivers mirror, my bae) but base model manual windows were already on the way out around then, at least in the US.
The Slate Truck has them, so assuming that that goes into production, it’ll be an example.
I like the function some cars have when you can old down the lock button to close all windows (and unlock to open them), without starting your car.
I already bought all I need for the next 4 years back in 2024. Hopefully it all continues to work.
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 wish Sam Altman to encounter difficulties every time he had to use bathroom and increased chance of his phone fell to the toilet all the time.
All that means is that I’ll start caring about something else. It’s RAM, not food or shelter.
