Imagine how expensive they would price the vita memory card if it came out right now 🤣
thumb drives don’t need no ssd. backup my mp3 collection and give to friends for safekeeping. $5/32gig
Damn. Our global economy is teetering on just in time supply chains.
It’s okay we just need to build community fabs. Anyone know how to build a fab?
Ooh ooh I got this one. I’ve played modded Minecraft before.
First you find certus quartz ore until you get at least 4 charged certus, build a charger, then go looking for meteorites to find circuit patterns…
That’s easy: start like a shed and add machinery after finishing the roof.
And somehow it is worse than the high Covid-times
This isn’t sustainable. Almost all of our infrastructure runs on computers and eventually it will reach a point where you have a computer in charge of vital infrastructure that won’t be able to buy replacement part and it’ll just fail.
nah all of the datacenters they build for AI, will come to use then.
they will say"Need computing? Don’t worry, just rent from us, for an ever increasing and enshittifying subscription"
We can’t even get them to upgrade our infrastructure to the 21st century in some cases so good luck with that. We still got shit running on Windows 7 or even Windows XP.
Windows 7. Don’t moan, it was the last good windows. Plus all the themes and hacks you could get for XP. Times were good
Have you considered that…that is the intent?
Stuff is just getting more expensive, because of demand competition with AI. There is no reason to think that production for non-AI computing will ever hit literally zero.
Overall production != local availability or accessibility
We used to get by with much less. If only we could start writing more efficient software again…
Oh just use ai to do that. I hear it writes great software
There‘s existing infrastructure, that runs on hardware from the 1980s. Especially in industrial applications there are still plenty of gigantic machines controlled by a 386 or a C-64.
The used vintage market can keep these running for a long time. Eventually you replace them with an emulator or an FPGA that runs the same software.
Big banking, insurance, airlines, shipping, governments, militaries bought huge IBM mainframes from the 1960s onwards. They ran for decades. Many of these were transformed into virtual machines, still running their ancient FORTRAN code.
There’s also the story of (IIRC Minutemen) nuclear missiles needing 5.25 floppies to program their guidance systems. These were still operational in the early 2000s. Lots of military weapons systems run on ancient hardware.
Don’t forget the IRS! They’ve been on 1980s equipment since…well…the eighties!
Banks, insurance, and aviation all run on very well-tested established code, and are very, very resistant to change.
But people who know cobol and fortran are getting fewer and further between, so they are slowly changing. Fortunately with modern software development practices, you can much more easily write verified software.
BART looking smug because there’s no vacuum tube shortage.
Aaron lot of out infrastructure still uses floppy discs.
Yup
I want to get off Mr. Huang’s Wild Ride.
Don’t worry, it’s not like this AI bubble is dependent on cheap energy prices or anything.
Sorry, you can’t. However, you can look at his ever increasingly shiny leather jackets!
If you turn on DLSS5 you can clearly see his clown shoes.
Glad I’m stocked on memory cards that should last me for a while.
There is, however, a bigger problem that’s not addressed - manufacturers seemingly only playing nice to big corporations while screwing the end customer.
It’s mask off time for capitalism. Business to person sales are no longer lucrative. All the money is in company to company now. See AI companies buying out entire present and future stock of PC parts until 2030. Regular people are no longer needed in this form of society. That’s why the market goes up while job numbers and employment go down. The economy can now support itself without anyone else.
Except that it seems a lot of these trades are on-paper, and not involving the actual transfer of goods. The data centres aren’t getting built. The servers aren’t going in them. The power isn’t being supplied. The tokens are not being generated. At least… It’s only a fraction of what they are all saying.
Some auditor is going to have a field day.
Yes but who actually cares? If society tolerates no actual real physical transfer of goods and leaves it all speculative, it doesn’t matter. The deals are made, financial institutions accept this, realistically it doesn’t matter that none of this is “real”. If society decides that it’s real, it’s real. Just like how paper money has zero real tangible worth. It’s all an agreed upon concept. The same is happening here.
The economy we had for the last handful of decades is gone. Speculative economy where only the top percentage trades with itself is where we are at and where we will stay.
It can’t be completely circular. There is an end customer that will expect something for their money eventually. Right now it’s driven by huge amounts of debt, but you can’t be on that forever. At some point it unwinds
It seems that end point is government bailing out banks using taxes, and people are paying more for the same due to inflation, while their salaries do not catch up with the cost of living.
This seemingly happens in US right now.
The rationale for bail out the banks previously was that the retail arms (what you and I use) were so intertwined with the commercial arms that allowing the commercial part to fail caused the loss of everyone’s money. Regulation was introduced (at least in the UK. I don’t know about elsewhere) that ring fenced the two from each other, making future bailouts unnecessary. The commercial arm would shoulder the risk of its own investments.
Doesn’t stop corrupt politicians bailing them out though.
Yeah, all this is illegal not because it’s an infinite money glitch, but because it acts like it is while destabilizing the economy
Who is actually going to be making the bread? Who is going to feed these delusional morons?
It’s going to implode, as they are just parasitic mass.
What you’re describing is not a structural change. What you’re describing has happened before. You’re describing a bubble.
I do think there is a structural change, similar to how there has been for the arrival of computers, the arrival of the internet, the arrival of covid and WFH etc. LLMs have changed how many people will work. However. They aren’t able to replace workers.
The onlystructural concern I have currently is that the models and processing power become out of reach for all but giant corporations and data centres. As there are open models and much of the changes are happening across many companies and individual programmers, I don’t see that happening. Perhaps the best models and training data will be out of reach but there are enough people vested in open source and proficient, that should things start to get out of reach and computing become less available, I’d expect that to change. Similar to how windows led to Linux which is now better.
And now that they’ve had this incredible windfall, this is what they’ll expect from now on.
That kind of thinking has ruined lots of businesses, like the movie business. Titanic made ridiculous money, so now that’s all anyone wants to invest in. Why put your money in a smaller project that will make millions, when you can our the same money in a project that will make billions?
So great small movies never get made, while there are tons of crappy expensive movies instead, because the only real consideration was about the profit, never the art.
Well eventually someone has to consume something for all of this to make sense, no?
Also isn’t this more the result of unhinged capitalism without any real workers pushback?
Nope. This can keep going on. Big businesses with all the capital will continue doing trade exclusively with other big businesses and government. They don’t need our money anymore. And it’s not like we’re really going to have any trivial amounts of money anyways.
And what does that money represent anymore at that point?
Seems too many have forgotten that its the peasant’s labor that gives money any value.
Money doesn’t produce anything.
What’s the value of a dollar if it can’t buy you bread?
They don’t need our money anymore because they’ve already taken so much of our money.
There is zero evidence that this supposed AGI can actually maintain itself, let alone it’s owners.
If they trade goods with each other, but leave us to starve and die, they eventually won’t be able to buy food, coolant, maintenance, ANYTHING with their fake money.
I don’t see anything that can work in the real world yet.
They’ll have their own teams of people catering to them. 99% of the population is now no longer needed
That sounds like some future Quarter’s problem
Its the only place left to get huge sums of money, we’re in the end game of capitalism
Manufacturers are supply constrained and they are basically selling to those that pay the most. Prices are above what most consumers will pay, so consumer lines become unsustainable.
The big question is what happens when they are no longer supply constrained. Will they be able to start the consumer lines back up again?
Consumer lines aren’t unsustainable for them, they were able to sustain themselves with them just fine. They just aren’t maximally profitable.
What they mean by unsustainable is that for the price it costs them to stock these means selling them to consumers at the existing price would not make any money, and the amount of money they’d have to raise the prices by in order for it to be profitable would stop consumers from buying it altogether.
Essentially, there’s no way to sell them to consumers in a way that will make money. Therefore they have to sell to big corporate customers in order to make any money at all. These companies are not lacking in corporate greed, but in this case there’s literally no other option.
That look like white washing corpo. What changed which make their existing line go down. Aren’t they building the RAM they sell ? Look like the make any money at all part is fake news. I look more like they think selling to corpo is more profitable than selling to humans. Why take 90 when you think you can take 150 selling to corpo. Édit : my bad I though they were building their own.
What changed which make their existing line go down.
Costs go up, but they can’t raise the price anymore. This makes line go down.
Aren’t they building the RAM they sell?
No they don’t. Sonys semiconductor subsidiary makes image sensors, not the type of RAM that goes into a PlayStation for example.
The big question is what happens when they are no longer supply constrained.
I can’t see that happening unless the AI bubble pops and their insatiable demand for more hardware ends.
Manufacturers only have a limited capacity of production and want to make money. It’s a much better business to sell all your production’s capability for a few months to one customer for a fixed price, instead of selling to thousands of small customers for a highly volatile price. In the worst case you produce stuff, you can’t sell or have to sell at a loss. A factory standing still and not producing is also expensive.
A factory with all machines running, all people working, all product selling at a good price is the ideal state for a manufacturer to be in.
Big customers bring stability and predictable profits.
Production capacity for in demand products will increase over time. Likely these same manufacturers‘ profits will be invested in more production capacity, optimizations, cost savings, etc.
In a few years this will result in cheaper and available consumer products.
General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!
Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.
If you actually make serious money with your work computer, then paying 8k for a machine will pay for itself over a few months.
General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!
Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.
Yeah, I generally agree with your points. I dislike the push to planned obsolescence with everything. I’m also trying to maximise the life out of things I have and I buy a little less often even if under normal market conditions I can afford new things whenever I want.
I’m a hobbyist photographer (so almost everything I throw at the hobby is out of pocket) and recently made a jump to higher megapixel cameras (the megapixel increase wasn’t a requirement, more of a side effect). I have a pretty adequate AM4 PC, but suddenly the 32 gigs of RAM that it has don’t quite cut it. Could’ve maybe bought 64 back then, but opted not to. It’s still a workable situation, just not ideal. Had to replace a dead SSD recently (the Phison controller ordeal), swallowed the increased prices on these as well (because the old one was “luckily” just a few months out of warranty). As for the RAM, before the price boom I could’ve gotten a decent 64 or even a 96 GiB DDR5 kit for 500-ish EUR (to add to a new CPU and mobo) - and now both cost 1500+. Upgrading the existing also wouldn’t be exactly easy because when I built it I hunted a very specific combination of frequency and timings - just buying anything would cost as much as it did when it was brand new. Should’ve jumped to AM5 last year, I could’ve even sold the current things at a profit now, but who would’ve known… At this point it’s a market crisis after another market crisis - maybe we should buy and never look back at the prices the next day.
A lot of people seem to think
I’mwe’re crazy for not getting a new phone every year or two. Previous one lasted 7 years, this one is at a bit over 5 years… It’s fine.True enough, my previous phone I kept until my banking app stopped working (my very, very old version of android was no longer supported) and my current phone is from 2019. I don’t think people need new phones/tablets/computers every year.
However… eventually I’m going to be needing a new computer. My desktop is about 6 years old now. And if it broke down right now, I don’t even know if I could afford to build a new one, unless I build one that’s worse than the one I currently own - and probably way more expensive than it was years ago (the RAM price alone is insane already).
And my phone won’t last another 6 years either. Although, who knows, it might. It seems indestructible so far, lol.
I’ve been dreading the new computer as well. I built the original incarnation of my current one in … holy shit, late 2013. I was thinking 2016 but I just looked up the order and it was 2013. I did it pretty damn “top of the line” because I wanted it to last ages. I have occasionally upgraded or replaced drives, GPU, RAM, power supply, but I’m still on the original board+CPU.
It’s still great… running Linux and occasionally gaming.
Wow, yours is a bit older than mine. Hopefully mine will keep functioning that long as well! I don’t honestly think it’ll break down any day now, but you never know. Things are known to happen, and when they do happen it’s always at the most inconvenient of times! Also, my computer is very heavily used, every day. Lots of games too.
I was surprised about my phone. I don’t even know how many times I dropped it already and the battery is still good enough to survive an entire day. Truly, I dread getting a new one. I always hate having to figure out the settings, downloading and installing every thing, and configuring the thing exactly the way I want to. If it were up to me I’d keep using the same one forever, but I doubt even my stubborn phone will outlast me. ;)
Sure, but we also don’t need more chatbot data centers to flood everything with more slop
Corporate clients buy in bulk, have supply contracts in place, can pay in advance for your capacity, etc. A direct consumer is worse in every way as a buyer.
At this point it’s good for economy when people burn down AI datacenter.
Liberate the RAM first.
Going to take you a lot of time with a soldering iron. These are soldered HBM2 chips, not the DDR DIMMs you want. Still manufactured in the same facilities so they hold up that manufacturing capacity but can’t really be repurposed.
Not even that. They’ve bought a lot more storage, memory and GPUs than they have datawarehouses with power to install them in.
They didn’t. They agreed to buy them. With the money that they don’t yet have, and probably can’t ever earn.
Which makes this whole thing so much more insane.
Yes, but line goes up, and by the time it goes down I’m not gonna be holding the bag anyway
It might burn itself down.
Not even that. The threat of a missile was enough to close the strait of Hormuz. They didn’t need to blow up every ship… Targeting a single ship, alongside an announcement that more is to come, would have been enough. It’s the risk that has the lasting effect, and I think it could only take a single well-motivated person to reproduce those results with data centers.
Except data centers have already been attacked in this war.
Not on US soil. There’s still a perception that those are safe investments.
I mean if you gonna use violence just fight Alt-Man and his villainous brotherhood. Keeping the datacenters will probably spur the economy once they aren’t used for AI anymore and the compute will become available for general use. Like when the internet bubble burst they put way more fiber lines into the ground than they used at the time but eventually the overcapacity came to good use. Scientists are always in need for compute to run their simulations.
Oh oh…shit. That’s going to hit photography hard.
So photographers get hit double… First being replaced by AI and then forced to increase their prices because of… Again AI. What a great world we live in
I don’t like having eyeballs anymore 😭.
Won’t need those where we’re going.
I gotta spoon . . ?
I work in a photostore, and the prices for fast sd-cards are getting ridiculous. Every time I scan one in the cash register I am almost scared of telling them the price.
I just picked up my first real camera, perfect timing huh? Hopefully this one will be good enough when I figure out how to do the burst photos thing as I’m gonna need that I think.
I’m gonna pull a heist on a Staples ffs.
Yeah probably.
But watch out that Amazon doesn’t send you a fake. Run one of the storage testers to validate the actual capacity.
Unfortunately, thems are for windows, we don’t like their kind 'round here.
I’m sure I can find one for linux though, thanks for the advice!
I used FFF (fake flash finder) a few months back when I last bought SD cards. Should be in your distro’s repos
I found that while looking into it a few hours back, but haven’t tried to install it yet (FedoraKDE), thanks!
It really depends on the camera you have and how you use it. If it’s high enough megapixels (20+) and you bought it for high fps burst shot (needed to shoot moving subjects or kids), you might need a v90 cards which will be 4 times that price. Otherwise the Canvas is ok, but these days you can find them in the same price range of Prograde which would be my suggestion. I have and use both.
Shit I’m gonna need one of those Heist cards, Fuji x-t4. At the moment I haven’t even found the setting for burst and have no train trips planned so I guess I have time, but I better grab my grappling hook lol.
I can’t imagine this is good for consumers.
Dw guys, you can all just sit at home and watch as your world is scrapped for parts. Just… Keep protesting, I’m sure your gov will start listening to you any second now. Ah it’s just memory cards, why get into a stink about the ramifications of that…
Well shit how am I gonna get memory stick duos now?
Cherry tree and knife.
Last time I did that I only carved out a 256mb stick. The data density of cherry trees is far to low. Oaks are better they are atleast 1gb but even then that’s just not enough data.
deleted by creator
So long! And thanks for the memory.
Time to go back to film
China will come to the rescue.
Do nothing, win
