So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.
That’s about the size of things, yes.
In 2030 you will own nothing.
And you will be happy.
I wish I believed the happy part
I think the happy comes with the unsaid “or else”
You be happy or you be soylent.
Heh, that applies to most of my idiot peers but not me!
I see the writing on the wall and I’m fighting back every way I can.
I am sure you will be able to subscribe to use a share along with hundreds of other people for 1 computer at $19.99 a month going forward.
Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
They’d only go bankrupt if they were spending the capital to increase capacity and were left holding the bag. And nobody’s interested in doing that.
Issue is that the production is for server gear not consumer. So it’s U2 and other connectors rather than SATA.
Same goes for RAM it’s ECC and won’t work in normal consumer PCs (AMD has like unofficial support)
I guess I’ll have to buy one of those racks when the bubble pops. Just add an LED strip on the outside and a gaming GPU on the inside. Surely they support PCIe?
Oddly enough ECC used to be quite common for consumer hardware…I had an old Mac desktop in the late 90s/early 00s with ECC memory. But at some point it was decided that consumers don’t want to pay the extra $ for error-free RAM and mobos largely dropped support.
Edit: reading up on it the G5 (which I had) required ECC memory
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Eh, the market will adapt.
I’ve been looking at components on AliExpress. Even now, there’s lots of X99-based motherboards with LGA2011-3 sockets that can take both regular DDR4 (with some limitations) and ECC DDR4.
But the descriptions are quite hard to understand, and they are apparently quite picky about which RAM will work with them.I could get a combo of one of those motherboards with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 CPUs (2.4GHz, 3.3GHz turbo, 28 cores, 56 threads in total) (hey, a dual CPU motherboard) for €120. And it’s got 8 RAM slots. So 32GB just with cheap 4GB sticks.
So that’s why consumer drives and ram are not affected by the price rise! /s
They’re saying that even when it bursts and there’s all these components laying around, they’ll still be useless for consumers.
I had laptops with ecc, cheapest ram I ever bought (used). If there is a way …
Unbuffered ECC DIMMs can be used as-is even on PCs not supporting ECC
Registered DIMMs can be unsoldered and the RAM chips reused in a pinch converting them to unbuffered DIMMs I suppose?
But reports of manufacturing capacity being moved to HBM will not benefit consumers if the bubble bursts.
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs
PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don’t
They do make hardware in most of those categories, actually, but they don’t sell much of it direct to consumer in the West. And unfortunately, the way things are going, they’re going to be able to get better prices for it from the AI-entranced idiots too.
I had an ExcelStor hard drive in the past and it was the most reliable drive I’ve ever had. I normally replace them when they die but that one never did, I just ended up retiring it when its capacity was no longer worth the electric cost to keep it running.
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home spying and backdoors.
E: what‘s this? All these folks either saying the US does it or skipping past all the phone-home spyware China includes in devices? Guess that means cheaper spying hardware is ok then?
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
For now, once China becomes the dominant power, they will certainly abuse it as much as the USA do.
Even if that happens (which is not an inevitability, since China historically has been doing things quite differently from the US), it is no worse than status quo. Until then, unless you are an active threat to China, and are planning on visiting it, you don’t have to worry about it.
Like they haven’t already done that in Asia?
Sure, not just world wide like the USA currently.
Two wrongs make a right?
It seems to be that you’re mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren’t Chinese, they’re from the USA
Well if the choice is between cheap spying hardware and expensive spying hardware…
Those are some big ear muffs
Absolutely massive
They’re huuuge… trunks of land!
The boobs really sell it.
Haha this is hilarious
XD
I uh…was not quite expecting that.
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.
Its the “service economy.” Instead of making things, industry (in the US at least) is heavily skewed towards providing services (aka things you subscribe to or need to buy each time you use).
It does not benefit the individual.
They can service deez nutz
Bastards
It’s awful.
I bought a second laptop for general use, because I wanted a Linux laptop and a gaming-dedicated laptop running Windows. (Seeing as how digital surveillance made privacy more important.)
I got a very nice, used Acer for about $600 that runs everything I need AND functions well with a dual-boot, so I was thinking of selling my gaming laptop. Now? I’m holding onto it so I don’t have to get price gouged if my main computer fails.
Wild world we live in.
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and highly addictive apps and subscriptions and micro transactions. Freedom and real compute power will be locked away in their servers. And the top of the line phones are already expensive enough that pretty much everyone that has one is on a payment plan for it
That argument always befuddled me. There will be a saturation point of AI data centers when there’s enough equipment already installed and ready to use by these over bloated behemoth corporations. Once that’s over or when the market hopefully pops, the demand for memory should have a steep decline. With their cash cow tapped out, WD and all the other memory manufacturers would then have to go back to consumers they previously fucked over to sell their new production stock. I doubt it’ll be at the prices we saw a year ago but once enough memory hits the consumer market for a while, prices should start to dip back down.
Regardless of whether the bubble bursts, the massive amount of compute in these data centers won’t go away. It will be up for rent when this AI training falls out of fashion.
Why would a chip maker try to predict the market when they can make contracts for years worth of production?
If the manufacturers never go back to producing the useful consumer hardware, we would be forced to rent this data center compute.
Smells like cloud gaming.
Haven’t seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It’s an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I’m missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it’s running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
It may be a little tinfoil hat like, but you cannot convince me that these companies are shoving AI in literally everything, buying all the hardware in existence, and building data centets on land that no one wants them at, just to “make a better ai for the consumer.” I believe this is an attempt at hardcore tracking and surveillence.
I think it’s a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
And govs are pushing it because it’s yet another arms race.
The logical course of action is to collectively just not do AI. But you can’t prevent your adversaries from doing such, so it ends up being like some sort of prisoner’s dilemma.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
Even if they didn’t, they probably don’t want to seem like they’re falling behind, so once one person goes all in, so do the others.
Unfortunately the most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition
Its where all the money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
Gotcha, wasn’t thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain’t got shit on our authoritarian future.
Caching. I’m guessing they download the internet to large storage arrays and then run neural network learning on them. Its probable they download all videos too and transcribe them later. So its not so much used for hosting content, but for teaching models.
Do your part to make ai unviable by salting their ai algos. Feed them false info & make junk ai requests.
The sooner this bubble pops, the better.
Remember: the tools they give you for free today will make the chains they use on you tomorrow.
I’m not sure feeding more misinformation to our systems and society is that good of an idea. I don’t think it’d be an effective influencing strategy either.
In the short-term, it isn’t. Long-term, I think it’s much better
It will force AI companies to find ways to combat bad data and intentional poisoning efforts. I’d much rather anti-AI activists be the ones abusing AI than for it to be a Russian, Chinese, or American APT
The second effect is that it would make more people aware of how often AI is wrong. Way too many people blindly accept AI results
Also, you can always poison AI to fit your own world view. Teach it that the Epstein files should be thoroughly investigated, with perpetrators prosecuted, or something
Onion Prices Reach Record Highs; Data Center Security Guards Secure Soup Contracts for Three Years
Onion prices have surged to unprecedented levels, setting new records in markets across the country. Traders report that supply shortages, rising transportation costs, and increased demand have all contributed to the sharp increase, placing pressure on households and restaurants alike.
In response to the soaring prices, security guards working at several major data centers have taken an unusual step to manage costs. The guards have collectively signed contracts to secure soup supplies for the next three years, aiming to stabilize their food expenses amid ongoing market volatility.
Industry analysts say the spike in onion prices reflects broader trends in food inflation, which continues to impact consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, the long-term soup contracts highlight how workers are adapting creatively to rising living costs.
Market observers will be watching closely to see whether onion prices stabilize in the coming months or continue their upward trajectory.
All these companies suck.
Fuck AI
I have the HDDs, but I can’t get a nas at a decent price at all. These fucking billionaires have to go or they will happily end us all before taking their claws out
Find some random used office PC and strap the drives inside. Install treunas and let it ride.
Yeah, I just ordered some cheap stuff from Ali Express to build one out instead, 150 instead of like 500. I figured I’d rather have new old parts than used old parts, even if the specs are lower, I guess we’ll see how it pans out, at least it’ll probably have a better uptime than my old hobbling pc.
Thanks for the heads up on truenas though, wasn’t sure what I’d need to use, cheers for that!
Sounds convenient after not long ago they cut production on the back of slowing demand.
“AI” more like thinly veiled business cartel on the back of low to no chances of law enforcement and regulation.
WD should run their business as they like. Given the simmering ai crash I’d make sure to get payed upfront. As for the other vendors, this is their chance to pick up market share.
How many consumers have brand loyalty for harddrives? To me, they’re effectively a commodity. I’ll go with the one that has the best benchmark results for the size and price
I’ve always bought Western Digital. The one time I bought Seagate I eventually had data loss. Stuck to WD ever since.
