RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853

The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.

RT: https://mastodon.social/users/blogdiva/statuses/116127740444038853

I just noticed I have 18Tb of storage plugged into my desktop (a laptop with its own 2Tb of built-in SSD) and WTF am I doing with it all?!?

@blogdiva

@cstross @blogdiva Cat pictures. It's usually cat pictures. Have you checked Menhit's home directory?

@cstross There's also the "hardware still works fine but software goes planned-obsolescence" route, but Microsoft just did that a few months ago and it'll be awhile before they can get away with doing it again.

@cstross (unless it kills the industry)

@cstross I am willing to entertain the "we're going to get rid of consumer computer hardware that isn't rented" scenario.

In the 1970s, there was a thriving market for making, selling, and applying custom/aftermarket car parts. The entire auto industry systematically murdered it by successively moving cars into a space where you couldn't do that. It's not like we don't know a large market can't be expunged.

The incumbents have a strong general incentive to keep people from having options.

@cstross Yeah, I recently came to a similar conclusion.

I had replaced the fans in my 4 year old laptop and now it is ... just fine. Like I'm actually no longer even considering replacing it.

Now I did buy a ridiculous laptop 4 years ago, but still.

I wonder how many people could extend the life if their machines by just cleaning out the dust/replacing the fans.

@cstross @blogdiva I have such large storage, where I keep all my audio and film and game installer backups because fuck streaming.

@cstross /dev/random > randomnes_store_for_later_use.txt

@Kierkegaanks It probably *will* kill the industry. A lot of smaller VARs will go out of business, bigger ones will see sales stagnate and be forced to put up prices b/c the data center futures bids are ramping prices, then the bubble will burst and we're in Great Depression 2.0. Not much will come through that intact.

@cstross @blogdiva Tell me you have an oversized porn library without telling me you have an oversized porn library :D

@markdennehy @blogdiva Actually most of that storage is redundant backup drives :)

@cstross @blogdiva A redundantly backed up porn archive, you say? 😜

@cstross ...which only works for as long as nobody else can start producing alternative hardware.

And, come on: decades-old DDR3 is barely 5 times slower than modern DDR5. For most practical uses, cheap and somewhat slower than top-end memory would be perfectly fine.

@graydon @cstross that's not fair - there was no attempt to kill aftermarket parts, the aftermarket is thriving.

A poor comparison

@furicle @cstross It is not what it was and a whole lot of effort has gone into, e.g. doing things with on board computers to prevent off-brand parts. (Not, in autos, as much as in heavy machinery including farm machinery.) "Right to repair" didn't start with small electronic gadgets.

Or look at the cost of replacing a headlight; lots of effort has gone into making you buy the big assembly and not either a standard headlight or replacing a bulb.

@cstross @blogdiva Sell it and retire with a huge pile of cash?

@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)

it’s been so cheap to add another drive or RAM, IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY.

since my divorce, been so broke, everything i have is a hand-me down or refurbished.

that’s why i switched to linux. i’ve squeezed the proverbial blood from Dell Inspiron bricks with SOLDERED RAM. i have ran webservers on tablets meant for kids to play CandyCrush.

don't matter if the tech is cheap if i got no money to spend.

it’s why i can see the scarcity they are creating.

it’s like a divorce.

@cstross

@cstross There was a nice analogy for this on Greg Jenner’s You’re Dead to Me history programme;
back in the days of the viciously colonial spice trade, the Dutch tried to maintain high prices by burning spices in the Amsterdam docks; no matter that thousands of islanders had been killed, and hundreds of sailors drowned to get them, they burned them rather than accept a less than stratospheric price, while also starving their competition of product.

@cstross @furicle Back to at least to the 1970s!

The core point I'm after is that collusion across entire industries to prevent unwanted behavior (that is, not giving them maximal money) has a deep history of being found completely legal and proper and more or less working.

A combination of pricing people out of the market and pressure to make every device a managed device has been going on about personal computing hardware for at least ten years. Turning that up to 11 isn't implausible.

@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …

@cstross The RAM shortage doesn't even add up. An LLM's size is roughly its number of parameters times their precision. So even a hypothetical, 10 trillion parameter llm using single precision (32 bits) floating point would fit in roughly 40 terabytes. This has no business crashing any market at the scale we're seeing now, it's like 1000 high-end gaming rigs.

@cstross @blogdiva Somebody is bragging how rich they are :)

@cstross @blogdiva Backing up the Epstein Files?

@cstross @graydon

The parts are bought by the OEMs as assemblies, and installed as assemblies. They aren't interested in fixing them as it's cheaper to use whole units that robots assemble.

No attempt to kill the aftermarket - the aftermarket is happy to sell whole wiper motors instead of almost zero profit bushings springs and brushes, and one part instead of 1000 per car.

Lots of things have changed, and may be anti consumer, not arguing that, but it's driven by costs and requirements.

@cstross @graydon @furicle At various repair cafés over the past year I've fixed 3 Kenwood mixers, the oldest from 1950 was easy to disassemble and repair with common parts, the second from the 1990s or early 2000 had a simple break away pin to save the gear box if you overstressed it and the latest one from 2020 had a sealed gearbox where the drive shaft had bent £70 to replace. Planned obsolescence.

@cstross @blogdiva I converted to Linux around 2000, after one too many "blue screens of death." Before that, it was CP/M, then pirate copies of 3.1 and 98 on various computers.

@cstross this is the way

@cstross I remember getting a 4TB drive thinking it would take me ages to fill, then I filled it.

I then realised I don't need to be keeping such giant files.

Lost of videos, previously in 4K HDR, now everything is plain old 1080p and I have space again.

I only have ~250GB of music.

I do have two drives though, so if I break something there's a duplicate.

@cstross I'm using a laptop that came out in 2012, I.E. 14 years ago.

I upgraded the ram to 16 gigs and threw in a 2 terabyte ssd, but otherwise bog standard quad core 2.6ghz i5, slightly wider than 720p display resolution.

You can still get them on ebay for $90. I have a spare and two dead ones in a box I could salvage parts from if that didn't come with ram and a hard drive.

The netbsd guys pointed me at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@washbear/115632856822177532 which is only 8 years old, if I want to upgrade. :)

@graydon @furicle @cstross Obama's "cash for clunkers" program was another direct attack on aftermarket parts, by eliminating working vehicles that predated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-JOYGlsnKw

Late stage capitalism performing regulatory capture literally bought them and destroyed them en masse.

@cstross

That may be the outcome, but I'm 100% sure the decision is not made on those grounds.

The decision is made: "we legitimately believe we'll need X amount of compute in 2027 for our business and research. Let's prepurchase what we need so we don't fall behind."

A corporation that believes it's under future existential threat, is prepared to pay a lot more for existing capacity than a consumer who wants a new iPhone.

This is how pricing works, not a deliberate plan.

@cstross @blogdiva Doesn't the "earn my living" part mean you can claim it/write it off on your taxes?

@graydon @cstross @furicle There's a reason I'm not too upset about a supply chain collapse. (Although I'm watching food distribution closely.)

A raspberry pi is an outright miracle of computing... by 1990s standards. It can be a media center, server, gaming, the works. The sane open source people make the same hardware do more over time.

Alas Linux stopped being sane ~10 years ago, because https://www.zdnet.com/article/graying-linux-developers-look-for-new-blood/ eventually became the "here's a nickel kid" dilbert strip unix greybeards.

@cstross also they’re making your PC run like an old arthritic dog by dumping more and more code on it so you use your phone instead, which is a low-cognition consumption device that encourages you to scroll past more ads and buy crap you don’t need. Not sure how MS thinks it can make money encouraging everyone to use their Apple or android phone instead of their PC, but 🤷‍♂️

@cstross @graydon @furicle one of the brake lights on my previous car broke. What should have been a $5 bulb, instead I was quoted $700 to import the assembly from Japan, plus labour. For a brake light, likely illegal for me to drive it without paying $700 to fix it.

@cstross I cannot agree enough, we gotta RAID SOME DATA CENTERS

@cstross

I am reasonably sure the math does not work for this to be a deliberate attempt to get the world hooked on remote services.

If that is your goal, it would be cheaper to make it near-free for 5-10 years, driving OEM out of business. Instead, this juices production, R&D.

I do not know what *is* driving it, though. Perhaps quantum arms races? Internet redundancy/duplication? Remember PRISM? caused the same sort of bubble.

@Gnuxie Businesses figure on replacing the PCs on their staff desktops every 2 years. Long habit from the 80s/90s and an expectation that company kit will be hammered hard.

@negative12dollarbill @blogdiva Yes, but first I have to *earn* the money. (I'm still in a rough patch financially following a year of downtime due to COVID then finishing a series of novels that had dwindling sales before spinning up a new series, because: COVID and age-related decline in energy.)

@graydon @cstross just remember, communists are the ones who want to take your private property!

@dresstokilt @cstross "Every accusation is a confession" is not limited to skeevy remarks and musings about genocide. Pretty much everything ever said about the perils of communism also counts.

@graydon @dresstokilt Yep: it is glaringly obvious today that "the menace of the communist international conspiracy!!!" was 100% right-wing projection (of what they wished they could get away with, or what—once the Heritage Foundation got going—of what they were actively trying to achieve).

@jmtd @cstross @Gnuxie when I was at Red Hat years ago, I had a machine that was about three years old come up for refresh. It was 100% fine, and I had zero interest in going through the hassle of getting a new system set up at the time.

I could not, under any circumstances, avoid the refresh though. Mandatory due to leasing, etc. So annoying.

@dresstokilt please learn the difference between personal property and private property before fearmongering about who is coming to take what from whom, it is the capitalists who are coming after personal property and the only people who fear the abolition of private property are themselves actual or aspiring despots @graydon @cstross

@Irenetherogue @graydon @cstross Here this might be helpful for you to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

@dresstokilt heres one for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior

@graydon @cstross

@Irenetherogue @dresstokilt @graydon At least 2/3 of the people in the thread you just rudely barged into are not USAns. We understand and use sarcasm *and* irony. (And you're one toot away from a block right now.)

@yugthebug @cstross, … just don't RAID0 them.

@cstross

Had this thought. Coupled with the recent statements about streaming all of your games. The goal is the end of ALL local storage and computing. Tech bros want it all server-side so they can manipulate what you see, what search results you get, what content you have access to and even whether you are “worthy” to use the service. Privacy and autonomy be damned.

@cstross this is also probably part of why companies aren’t gonna ramp up production to meet the bananapants AI demand - they’re betting the bubble will pop *and* non-bubble demand will go way down

@cstross I think it’s even worse: Moore’s law has faltered (unsurprising, it’s an approximation) but the chipmakers have been tracking closer to it than predicted, only to see demand plateau before supply for the first time. That’s terrifying for an industry built on insatiable appetite.

I note a recent review of Samsung’s latest Galaxy: “you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart from last year’s phones”. They’re using that “needed” extra silicon to … order Uber/DoorDash/GrubHub using an LLM.

@cstross @blogdiva cat videos?

@cstross @blogdiva
Sorry to hear that. Somehow I didn't know that about you.