Back in my day, we downloaded ram. 8GB at a time.
I believe that’s the plan for the future, too. Conglomo A owns all the RAM, but we can rent access.
I hate that this is the plan. Time to burn it all down
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.
It’s not just desktops, it’s phones and laptops and consoles
Good thing I don’t care about any of those things enough to pay the rip-off prices. I’m fine with my 4 year old phone and 10 year old PC. If they crap out then I’ll replace them with some cheap old crap. I don’t need high specs, there isn’t much worth running these days.
Unfortunately it isn’t just the high end stuff which is feeling the crunch. These AI companies have bought up all the production capacity, which means there is less low-end stuff being produced. We’re still coasting on existing stock at the moment, but as that runs out prices will rise across the board.
For a while, but when the AI bubble pops and as China ramps up production, we’ll hopefully see the memory cartel eat shit.
And used prices will surge as more people make the same decision as you
That’s assuming everyone’s devices crap out during this year or two while the AI and memory companies play pretend that they’re actually going to use up all this memory.
Doesn’t need to be everyone, there’s always going to be people needing replacement devices, it just takes a greater percentage of those to buy used to drive up demand. At the same time it’s like supply will drop at least some as people are put off buying a new device so their used device doesn’t reach the market
And they told me I was crazy for putting 64 gigs into my machine back in early 2021. I “only” paid about 200 USD
Same
MY CLASSIC SCI-FI SOFT COVER BOOKS!!??!1
Edit: MY CLASSIC CONSOLE COLLECTION?!
The things I love the most don’t have RAM, or I already have them 🤷
Is your refrigerator running? This is Mike Hunt.
What I’m surprised hasn’t happened yet is RAM ICs being recycled at the retail level. As in, you could bring in an old laptop or phone with 32GB of soldered RAM and it would be desoldered and sold for cash or possibly even soldered into a new device you buy from that retailer.
I wonder how close we are to that business model arriving.
How many 16k 4116 RAM chips can your laptop handle?
4116s are DIPs. I’d de desolder those myself for installation into my Intel 8088 luggable.
I want to be there when you set that up on the table at your next departmental meeting.
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.
Good thing AI sucks
I took the plunge last month and went with 32GB 6000MT/s DDR5 in a new system. 16GB VRAM card, too.
We’ll see if this system will hold up for as long as my old pc did, which was 10 years.
Look at mister millionaire over here!
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.
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
My Pixel 6 Pro is about to lose software support even though it functions perfectly fine, and GrapheneOS has the idiotic logic of “sending software updates for unsupported phones is bad security so it’s better to not send any software updates at all and make it even more unsupported”. Either way I can’t really afford a new one (and don’t really want to buy one anyways with Google’s recent Android fuckery) so I guess I’ll just stick with a phone with abandoned software for a while.
We said that a few times, first it was the harddisk factories flooded in Thailand IIRC, then it was GPUs for crypto, now it’s this shit. Not much bursting, more like a chain of bubbles.
Imagine if the crypto GPU shit was actually AI all along. After all a Google employee got fired for saying they made a sentient AI a while back before the AI hype. Although there has been a lot of crypto shit happening too so probably both.
All that means is that I’ll start caring about something else. It’s RAM, not food or shelter.
That is ok we will get more videos of cats making lattes.
