Looks like I’m gonna keep on rocking my pre-Covid era computer without an upgrade for a few more years.
Keep it as long as possible, the new shit suuuucks, is built to break & riddled with adware.
Back in my day ;) we had to worry about keeping up with the newest tech because you needed it for the best games or whatever.
These days, my desktop from 2014 can run all of the new games that I want to play (yes, even the demanding ones) It has 32 gigs ram and a 1660 Ti. That’s really all I need, especially since most of the games I enjoy AREN’T new.
How is adware an issue? I haven’t had any of that with my Mint machine.
It’s baked into a ton of hardware updates these days. Trust me, in 5-10 years it’ll be a big deal if we don’t do something about it…like yesterday.
Also, OS doesn’t matter if it’s a bios update.
That’s…not how device firmware works.
You’re not going to get adware drivers on a Linux system unless you’re using stuff that’s supremely sketchy and also installing things you shouldn’t be. What you’re thinking of is 3rd party windows drivers.
Also, If your motherboard installs something through a bios update, that has nothing to do with your OS. It comes before.
Please point out the bios deployed adware you are talking about, or I’ll have to assume you’re just talking from vibes.
That not how that shit is done.
The BIOS just take care of the basics, but Windows do have an API allowing the BIOS to ask for the installation of additional drivers. That process was abused (and continue to be) by multiple hardware vendors to install spywares or adwares.
Linux doesn’t have that API, and just ignore such requests.
Android runs on Linux, wouldn’t you agree that Android is compromised?
Android depends on who gave it to you. If you install Linux from a parking lot flash drive it doesn’t mean the Linux project is compromised, it means you got pwned.
I’d make the same argument about installing pre-compromised pirated windows but…windows kinda just is malware now.
… Not really. And also no.
The Android kernel is a modified version of a Linux kernel, yes.
“Android is compromised” is a very, very silly statement.
There is zero adware in Android (AOSP). Unfortunately manufacturers tend to install Gooogle Play Services, which compromises the whole device.
It’s actually scary how wrong you are while being so confident. It’s not even just wrong but also so incredibly dumb. Doesn’t matter if you’re drunk or not, you’re clearly an ignorant fucking idiot.
I mean they said “unless you’re using stuff that’s supremely sketchy and also installing things you shouldn’t be”
is built to break
honestly, i kinda agree to this, the current gaafets and mbcfets designs are like fuses on a nano scale if it doesn’t have REALLY good power management. Unlike with finfets where the channels/source are still connected firmly on base to dissipate heat in case of a nasty power draw.
Give me startcraft or age of empires ii over most modern fames anyday
My steam deck has become my all in one. Sucks memory card prices have leaped the past year. But I got a couple terabytes, so I’ll be alright, just going to have to shuffle them around. But I’m cool with not having 240 hz 4k on Powerthirst settings. I got a back log anyways and a yard to get back into shape.
I got 3 6+ year old thinkpads that are all chugging along just fine. got them all for dirt cheap.
But as another person said keep that shit for as long as possible and learn how to properly maintain it. New stuff is absolutely horrible. I recently had an ASUS laptop that fried itself after 3 years. was getting really wonky 2 years in.
I have an Asus laptop and the touchpad stopped working tue first week. Piece of garbage.
they really are horrible laptops, especially the ROG ones. Those things on day one you turn it on are like “alright, time to start killing myself”. you can keep all the fans constantly clean, repaste them every few months, and they’ll still cook themselves alive. and the AC adapter will die on you faster than the laptop itself. I had to replace the AC adapter on mine 3 times in 2 years.
Friends don’t let friends buy Asus laptops.
This is wild to hear? What year(s) are we talking on these Asus laptops? Everything Asus I’ve bought has been rock solid, and I go out of my way to get their hardware. I haven’t really bought any new systems or components in about 5 years though…
My beloved T440 fears only the oppression of “Zoom for Workplaces”
Yeah, same here honestly
Or maybe I should buy a refurbished gaming laptop
Praying it doesn’t malfunction
Luckily two and a half years ago I decided it was time for a new computer. I go more than a decade between new PCs so it was just really dumb luck that I got a new computer when I did. And the reason I can go so long between computers is because I always get way more RAM than I need when I get a new one.
So given the current state of things, it’s a little awkward to admit how much RAM is in my computer.
Sold out with pinky promises, not with actual money, no.
its nvidia and AI creating a bubble on the belief they’ll be able to get profit and get out before it pops.
But all it is… is imaginary money going around in circles. nvidia invests a trillion in AI, AI buys a trillion dollars of nvidia videocards from some nebulous point in the future where they arent made yet, nvidia invests that trillion back into AI, AI uses it to buy ridiculous amounts of ram that wont be made for years, RAM invests it back into AI, and on and on they go, generating imaginary money and value, by buying imaginary things.
under a sane government this would be investigated as raw stock manipulation and fraud
I really hope when this bubble pops nvidia is destroyed in the process along with the AI companies.
It’s the same accounting trick as enron, but intercompany instead of internal.
Nvidia already made tons of profit off it. They’re the ones selling shovels.
nvidia is actually the only one that made profit
Then Nvida financed more shovels to the speculators in the hopes that enough of them will strike gold it will get paid back, but also created a shortage in the shovel market so the price of shovels is going through the roof.
If by “pinky promises” you mean contractually binding letters of intent, then yes. This is standard procedure in any manufacturing industry when dealing with orders of massive quantities, because it normally also requires investment from the manufacturer in equipment which they don’t make on non-binding "pinky promises).
My prediction:
- Investors continue to fuel demand, choking supply
- Plans to monetize LLMs don’t pan out
- Eventually, lenders call their margins
- Investors see the called margins and get spooked; demand fizzles
- AI companies desperately try to liquidate their positions. Seeing the price of components, there’s a rush to sell while prices are high.
- PC components flood the market
- Record high supply, record low prices
- PC gaming golden age
They aren’t PC components. They’re server GPUs.
They don’t even have ROPs anymore. There was a time when the Nvidia P100/A100 could technically game, but that’s generations ago.
FYI, during the crypto busts, Nvidia bought back GPUs and basically incinerated them to keep demand for new stuff up.
…I’m pretty sure that’s what they will do again.
It’s frustrating to see the tech industry take this path, because there were alternative paths that didn’t lead us here. We are in a selfish and shortsighted time.
yeah, but chip manufactures are reducing output for consumer class products, so yeah, there are still PC components choked by AI’s current supremacy in the market.
PC components flood the market
*Server-grade purpose built AI components flood the market
SXM to PCIe adapters already exist hehe
Not to mention my dumbass would chuck money at a whole server just to throw it in my home lab.
Its not trivial.
Check the level1 forums, where some electronics gurus are trying to get a single adapter MI250X to even boot. The problem isn’t the adapters, but firmware that makes it difficult.
I see no problem if I can snag some generic Instinct accelerators, and a server to go. I’ve already got half a rack full.
Just like how GPUs became cheap and plentiful after mining crypto became passé, right?
…They actually did.
I got an AMD 7950 is a crypto bust. Then a Nvidia 980 TI in the next one, dirt cheap.
Nvidia figured it out in the most recent bust though, and controlled supply fairly well.
After the last crypto bust, prices stayed up though. They’re still way higher than before the last crypto boom.
And nVidia, AMD, Intel all know better now than to overproduce consumer GPUs.
I want to believe
6 will actually be “RAM suppliers buy the stock in bulk and sell as refurbs, keeping prices up”
Eventually, lenders call their margins
Lending to companies doesn’t work like that.
Softbank’s $40bn loan will be called on March 25, 2027. If they can’t roll this over it’s the banking equivalent of a margin call.
So you’re not 100% incorrect, but does it happen in 2027? 2028?
Logistically it’ll probably happen eventually, but when?
OpenAI is likely to be the first domino to fall that causes the whole bubble to pop. They’re burning over $10-15 billion a year in losses, and have shown that any attempts to scale only increase that burn rate. They’re running out of investor money to toss into the fire.
And they just announced a last ditch free unlimited for everyone plan to…I dunno drum up interest or hope it converts to paying customers or something. So their costs are about to skyrocket even more, accelerating their death spiral
With imaginary money
Yeah but as long as the manufacturers keep selling all their production for real money, everybody else is screwed and prices are going up.
And people are trying to tax the imaginary money.
Can’t tax the imaginary money. It would destroy the imaginary economy.
Good. Time for software to be optimized again.
how will the vibe coders survive this?
please, will somebody please think about the feelings of the poor vibe coders :(
Vibe coders will ask the AI to write everything in Rust, memory usage will be reasonably low
The people writing everything in Electron are gonna have a fun time with their users though.
nah some dude got recently covered in press b/c he used an LLM to derive Assembly from C.
Huh? C compiles to machine code.
Yes, but why write C when we can let the LLM write assembly directly? Compilers are unnecessary bloat we don’t have a need for with modern technology.
yeah kid replace your systems with LLM written opcode streams completely all you want.
regarding the question: for maintain- and portability.
low-level compilers can output very ugly-looking assembly. he probably did this and then used LLM to super-optimize it. may be perfomant, but id guess that theres a risk that its unsafe.
Who cares about ugly-looking assembly ? No one’s gonna actually look at it, that’s, like, the whole point of C. And I really doubt the plagiarism machine can somehow do better than a compiler. I’m gonna look this up
Edit : is it this one ? https://arxiv.org/html/2505.11480v1
I was about to get insulted but I almost closed the lid on the laptop by accident and now have to make sure my cloude still operational on the task I gave it, so I can’t be rerouting my attention span resources
Half the joke of the AI bubble is how American tech firms prioritized brute force over efficient engineering.
Truth.
I am astounded that games like Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider and Abe’s Oddysee with their massive sprawling worlds were crammed into such relatively tiny file sizes.
Necessity gets results
This guy actually Making RAM at Home
Really interesting watch actually. But uh, I don’t think we’re gaming on homemade RAM anytime soon lol
Things don’t add up. I see articles about computer parts becoming unavailable along with articles about data center plans being cancelled or not getting built. I assume the data centers ARE getting built and those second articles are lies to calm people down.
OpenAI has a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to purchase 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, or 40% of global DRAM output. These are just uncut wafers, accumulating in warehouses that serve two purposes:
- Prepares them for the distribution to data centers,
- Manipulates the supply chain to squeeze their competitors, who are left with slim pickings.
You and I are the victims of this until the bubble finally pops and the deal falls through.
You and I are the victims
We’re way downstream. The “victims” are all the SaaS and smaller market cap firms that need business compute for accounting and commerce.
Case in point, I got a request for a new server delayed three months because we blew through our Q1 budget for new hardware faster than expected.
That’s not really hurting me, personally. But it means our server teams need to do more with less even as the business expands.
Local small businesses are being priced out of self hosted server options since ~October (Source: MSP)
It’s because it’s a Ponzi scheme. Huge amounts of investment dollars are being dumped into AI and anything related to AI. If you build any kind of chips that are used in AI datacenters, you suddenly have a bunch of money invested in your company. What do you do with it? You make a deal with OpenAI (or one of the other ones) that you’ll invest that money into them if they agree to buy a bunch of chips from you. Now you have revenue on books and are showing a reasonable return on that investment.
If you were a chip manufacturer and actually believed that there was a big future in AI, you’d be using those investment dollars to build some more chip fabs. And some of these companies are doing that. But overall, moving money to another company so they will order chips for datacenters that aren’t built yet (and may never be built) is just bubble ponzi shenanigans.
Computer hardware depreciates in value very quickly. You don’t buy hardware today so you can install that hardware in a datacenter that won’t be online for another year.
Capitalists wet dream is to make more money without investing any new capital. Chip fabs are in a situation like that where they can make buttload more money without changing anything except charging more.
Nothing will change because the alternative is investing billions just to keep the price down. They’d rather pocket the billions now.
If you were a chip manufacturer and actually believed that there was a big future in AI, you’d be using those investment dollars to build some more chip fabs.
Major new semiconductor fabrication plant projects are expanding across the United States, led by a $16.8 billion SpaceX and Tesla “Terafab” project in Grimes County, Texas, massive expansions by TSMC in Arizona, and Samsung’s ongoing fab development in Taylor, Texas.
Computer hardware depreciates in value very quickly. You don’t buy hardware today so you can install that hardware in a datacenter that won’t be online for another year.
Hardly unusual for speculators to buy up a hot commodity the day of release and then resell it into an inflated secondary market a few days or weeks later.
SpaceX and Tesla “Terafab” project
Ah, so the only thing we know with confidence is that it’s definitely not happening.
TSMC was because of the Chips Act and it’s not DRAM.
TSCM’s Arizona plant was announced in May 2020.
And it has much more to do with defense industry senators brokering the deal than Biden’s presidency.
The Chips Act was in committee with bipartisan support before the election was decided. Senator Warner joined U.S. senator John Cornyn in introducing the $52 billion CHIPS for America Act was back in June of 2020.
Sure there’s plans, maybe even some ribbon cutting with some gold shovels to “break ground” or whatever. These are things you do when running a Big Store type of scam.
What did that Michigan politician say “we’re used to ignoring people and just doing it anyway” something along those lines…
Production is usually sold a year in advance. This includes orders from retail outlets.
My take is more of a:
1000 DCs were planned
200 are getting cancelled
800 are yet to be built, built, supplied with productsand of the 800 remaining DCs, some are buying the stock that is now free or the orders are rerouted by the ordering company to other locations that also need more hardware.
Dodge must be pretty happy.
My kid wants to build a gaming PC for their birthday.
Am I cooked?
Your bank account certainly will be.
That said, if you buy refurb you can put together a decent rig on a budget.
Recently built a computer for my kiddo. Beg, borrow, and steal. And keep an eye out for motherboard and memory combos from new egg.
Overcooked at this point
See if there’s a Microcenter anywhere near you. They fairly regularly have pretty good deals on CPU/MB/RAM bundles.
Those deals are still relative to the extortionate price rises, though.
SODIMM ram is still cheap. You could build them a ddr4 intel system with integrated graphics (ideally Arc cores or plenty of EUs) that will run some older or simpler games at 40-60fps with a little upscaling, and the whole thing could be done for 500-700 I reckon.
Either that or maybe build an AM4 if you find a used GPU at a good price.
Microcenter or some similar physical store is probably your own hope. They run pretty decent deals to bring you into the store.
I’d recommend visiting one for Black Friday/cyber Monday. It’s probably your only hope for things not to be ridiculously overpriced. Instead you’ll just pay for very overpriced items.
Build one without RAM and without storage.
Not necessarily. You could give them a budget and let them pick whatever fits inside that budget.
Chinese to the rescue?
It will take ages for them to build capacity and they will probably be wary of growing too fast since demand and prices could drop quickly when the AI boom goes bust. Likely CXMT is already supplying a lot of the consumer market under the stickers. China will be the big winners in the long term. This will be a gift for them.
Don’t count on ages, though, just recently it was revealed they can build manufacturing buildings twice as fast compared to the West. But you are right, there are other factors in play, it’s not that simple. Still, more the merrier I guess.
Why are AI companies buying consumer grade RAM?
They aren’t?
They are buying up capacity from manufacturers who are stopping production of DRAM and pivot to HBM which is more profitable. Abandoning DRAM which affects a lot more than just “consumer grade RAM”
They’re publicly traded companies. Their investor meetings point out that HBM is not more profitable.
It is in theory more guaranteed profit because it’s a smaller number of bigger contracts. But that’s the gamble they’re making.
But isn’t it kind of a game of chicken then for the consumer markets? Whoever gambles the other way, can win in both volume and availability, being able to cut the others off market just by pricing, enabled by the prior two points, get brand points by the ladle while at it, and kind of become a staple of the consumer market. When the bubble pops and others return, the market isn’t the same and everyone else sits at a disadvantage?
Yes.
Which is why it’s bad that the only 3 companies with capacity currently are colluding.
So that you can’t.
You can’t organize against billionaires online if walled garden censored posting to the cloud is the only thing available to anyone. You can’t pirate media if you can’t store media locally. You can’t run a ad blocker if they’re not allowed on their app store. You can’t install linux if your tablet can’t be jailbroken.
You have too much freedom. They must have control back. We allowed them to have enough money to take it, they just had to fool the rubes with the promise of utopian robotic labor via addiction.
This is it. Add in that AI is a 1-way filter of information, substituting web search engines. The AI companies will get all the questions and queries from people instead of search engines, you will not find information unless through the black box service of an AI company. The death of the open web, for the billionaires benefit.
They’re buying production time from RAM manufacturers, which means there’s no time left to make consumer grade ram
Didn’t know people liked shitty trucks that much
You joke but drunk drivers love those trucks.
*didn’t know there were so many drunk drivers
Mustang marketing department doing overtime
My bad, guys. I needed to upgrade my rig. I am planning to play BF7.
Don’t worry all orders will be canceled when the bubble pops.
We’re getting cloud computing/gaming in everything from now on, aren’t we?
Ironically, browsers are so fucking bloated these days that any thin client that can run one can also enjoy most of gaming history.
Even in this hardware hellscape you can get some pretty decent handhelds for $200. I think the low end segment can stay pretty strong with devices like those and indie games.
But yeah I think high end gaming is going to be pretty stagnant for at least the next few years.
“High-end” gaming had no future either way, with how larger (in size and power need) GPUs slowly got and most of it being wasted on penny-pinching of developer time (e.g. atrocious performance) of AAA studios.
Indies4TheWindies
Not long-term. No computers, phones, TVs? No consumers of cloud services. Including 90% of businesses. At some point, regulators have no choice (even if they are colluding), if they don’t want to strangle their economy.
The point with dissidents being on the cloud-rope still stands though. Especially on closed platforms like Apple, Android.
