I think calling it a RAM shortage is a bit incorrect. It is not like we are running out of raw materials or something else in the supply chain is broken. It’s shitty AI companies buying RAM that is not existing yet with money they don’t have. Unfortunately there’s no good term for that, I guess.
It’s called Imaginary Economics.
It tends to happen right before a capitalist system fails.
It tends to happen right before a capitalist system fails.
How often does this happen that we can claim this correlation? 🤔
About once every 350 years… With a sample size of 3… 😅
Better than no samples I guess!
So you’re saying which empires/systems exactly then?
Spain perhaps? The Holy Roman empire?
I was averaging roman, British and Mongolian empires, based on Google AI summary, so take that with a pinch of salt 😅 🧂
It’s about to. The very nature of it, means you can only have a sample size of one.
And when do you predict this will occur? When should I have built my nuclear shelter so I know when to start building it?
Too late for that I’m afraid. It already happened. It just takes a while before the [citation needed] folks understand that past performance is not a guarantee for future success.
Lol sure, any time now, just one more year bro, just one more year and it will collapse bro, promise.
Maybe the usa will collapse a bit (because those people are often americans that don’t know there are other countries out there) but that’s another story.
I highly recommend staying ignorant honestly. It’s a much lighter burden to carry than seeing all the datapoints and seeing the collapse as a certainty. Have a good life, seriously.
Can I coin the term imagineomics?
I’m not holding my breath.
We’ve been hearing about an AI crash practically since the hype train started.
People can see the trends and see how it will probably break down in some way, the problem is that the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent. It helps that these dipshits seem to have forgotten that money equals abstract resources and creating new resource issues that’ll certainly put pressure on them in a more direct way either through legislation or via sabotage of required infrastructure.
It’s the biggest bubble seen to date. It has all the characteristics, and it will crash eventually.
Is this a thing? Because what comes to mind for me is “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” which just happens sometimes
The term was well established centuries ago.
FRAUD
Yes there is: it’s a Ponzi scheme (AI companies will fail when they get no new funds to pay off the stockholders)
It’s a racket, plain and simple. There used to be laws against this sort if thing.
It’s a racket, plain and simple. There used to be laws against this sort if thing.
Keyword: used to
I hope that it was worth it, and that America is great again. Let me just check some news articles… Oh my
Supply monopolization?
Consumer fraud?
Sherman Act cartel market manipulation.
Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade.
A mismatch between supply and demand is called a shortage. The source is irrelevant.
We have RAM supply shortage.
Now better? god…
Going to be fucking hilarious when all the western companies get fucked by China taking over the market they don’t seem to care about.
Don’t count on China. They are going to invade Taiwan next year and the global trade embargo will be a rounding error to the destruction of the tmsc factories during that war. Or they will capture the fabs and prohibit export to the US. Loose loose for us.
I don’t understand this thing about anyone destroying those factories for any reason. I don’t think that would happen.
What is loose, certainly not your anus right? Or, maybe it is!
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AI is the last great bubble.
And it, like all bubbles, will pop.
You are already seeing the people in the know flee the field.
You see reports that every company that has adopted it has at best changed nothing, at worst lost money on it.
Outside of the psychotic linked in CEO bubble, literally no one wants AI. And every day its generating more and more hate due to its halucinations, mistakes, and bullshit.
Its garnering massive negative attention for its use, and for anyone stupid enough to adopt it at this point (cough intel cough)
Its a dying star, and people are frantically trying to harvest the last bits of warmth from it before going off in search of new horizons.
I can only assume you haven’t used it for anything it’s good at lately. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Just like we still have websites after the dot com bubble, there will still be LLMs after the AI bubble pops.
The only stories I’ve ever heard of involving AI are told by people who, once again, are unable to see how their increase in productivity is not being met with a reduction in work hours. Unless, or course, “reduction in work hours” means they are being shown the door so a different idiot can do kore work for the same amount of pay.
Why does everyone feel the need to do as much as possible as quickly as possible at all times of every single day? And why are most people I talk to using ChatGPT to replace Google searches so they don’t need to actually think?
We all need to slow the fuck down.
worker productivity continues to climb ever higher, yet wages never grow with it.
take someone from the 1950s office and ask them to do the same amount of work that an officer worker today does, and they’d quit on the spot. especially since they’d be paid less today than they were in the 1950s as far as buying power goes.
No, I dont use it.
I get enough hallucinations and blatant lies from biologicals, I don’t need an AI erasing a mountain to consume the coal underneath to tell me made up bullshit.
Certainly, but hopefully you won’t turn on your PC and have 50 popups and 10 different buttons blinking and getting in the way of each other begging you to try AI.
What’s your source for that. China has no more reason to invade Taiwan next year than they have at any point in the last 30 years
Umm hundreds of Chinese ambassadors to Xi Himself. How many do you want I’ll start pulling them.
China has been wanting to reunite with Taiwan ever since the founding of the PRC. the reason has always been there, and right now they are more ready than ever.
keep a close eye on what Chinese military is doing.
Why are they more ready now than they were 2 years ago? Politically nothing has really changed I know Americans like to think that Trump is a big factor but he isn’t, since even he is just as bullish on China as any other US president has been and it’s not as if the military is left.
Well, our economy is collapsing from bad debt and inflation, we’ve alienated ourselves from our ally’s, we’ve relocated aircraft carriers and are starting new wars.
It’s honestly a great time for china to exert some force.
you really are asking me to do the research for you huh.
a quick web search finds me:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/29/china-live-fire-military-drills-around-taiwan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLA_Navy_landing_barges
and it’s not hard to find more.
Why would they need to invade Taiwan? They already have their own companies making RAM.
they have more than practical reasons.
It’s not about recent tech, it’s about historical territorial claims, and broader territorial strategy. Of course, while ignoring history/historic context at the same time.
It’s called unfinished business. Xi is not going to give up on reunifying all of china. They got their Hong Kong now they need the Taiwan
Back in my day, we downloaded ram. 8GB at a time.
I downloaded a gallon of cum and my parents got really mad
Kids these days don’t know the pain of LimeWire
no I never had to use that crap
Nutsack doesn’t know the pain of downloading gallon-of_jizz.vid.exe and completely fragging the family pc
no i never did this one time even because i am a genius
Which was used to then download a car.
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
Does this mean no smart fridges?
Coz that would be cool
i’d be willing to suffer another year of ram shortage if that meant all smart devices fucked off
maybe we could even see actual physical buttons on devices again! i miss buttons and toggles
Mr Brightside checking in
You think companies would cut off ad revenue and pass cost savings to customers?
Fridges will get MORE expensive to ensure that you see ads on your fridge.
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 🤷
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.
32GB of RAM from old hardware might as well be trash compared to 32GB of RAM made today.
What good is all that (slow) RAM if you’re stuck with an equally slow CPU?
Its not an equally slow CPU. These boards support Xeon CPUs that first launched 11 years after DDR3.
The implication is that there are users needing large RAM footprints that aren’t CPU bound. The hit in performance on the RAM isn’t significant enough to justify spending orders of magnitude more for modern DDR5 which is in short supply.
In computing history there’s precedent for this. Amiga computers had a small amount of “Fast RAM” which was extremely expensive, but the CPU could address a second bank of “Chip RAM” which was significantly slower but much much cheaper.
We could see this idea return in modern computers.
Frustratingly this is not just affecting the current generation of devices, but the previous one too. DDR4 RAM (which I use in my desktop) has gone up 300% since I bought it a few years ago.
Here’s hoping that nobody needs to replace current or previous gen hardware if it breaks in the next 2 years…
Many RAM producers have simply stopped producing DDR4, because it isn’t used in data centers.
Looking at me 2 x 32GB DDR4 systems 😌
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.
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.
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
Fuck Sam Altman
I’m so glad I bought this book years ago
I was saving it for a retirement hobby project but looks like I will have to open it sooner than I thought.
IDK at the current price trend, maybe we’re approaching a point where having sweatshops make ferromagnetic memory modules in GB sizes is feasible. I’d better start building a couple of hangars for my GPU memory.
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 idea is that in the future your “personal computer” will be a streaming stick that you plug into a monitor to access your Microslop Copilot Windows 12 OneDrive Azure Cloud Virtual PC for $99 a month.
Yup, they’re 100% trying to shift towards cloud computing. It has already been happening with gaming, and many players have decided that they’re okay with a slightly worse experience if it means they can run their games on a potato PC. Tech companies see the blood in the water, and know that there is money to be made in cloud computing. Everything is shifting to SAAS, so it only makes sense that hardware will be a subscription next.
A terminal would require more RAM, not less.
It’s not just desktops, it’s phones and laptops and consoles
Good thing I don’t care about any of those things enough to pay the rip-off prices. I’m fine with my 4 year old phone and 10 year old PC. If they crap out then I’ll replace them with some cheap old crap. I don’t need high specs, there isn’t much worth running these days.
Do you care about hospitals, schools, research labs?
Ha! I’m not sick, I already graduated, and I know everything! Checkmate!
I actually love that this is how my Godfather used to think. Then his social safety net broke.
He suddenly voted social democrats.
I’m too poor to enjoy any of those, all of their grants have been gutted, so right now, not at all.
First they came for…
I do, that’s why I refuse to buy anything so that they can have more supply.
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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
First the rich took our data. Then ownership, privacy, money, rights, now RAM. next will be our organs.
