Heartily agree. I was trying for objectivity, personally you’ll take my general purpose computers from my cold dead hands, and I will encourage everyone I can to support it.
I take some solace from the general pendulum nature of the process (and societal evolution in general), this too shall pass. Doesn’t mean we don’t need to fight. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
Thing is, most of those data centers and video GPGPUs are dark and will likely stay so. The cards will be obsolete by the time the centers are built, the power sourced, they’ve been sued and injunctioned etc., etc. . (reminiscent of all that dark fiber left after the OG internet bubble pop)
The RAMpocalypse is mostly market manipulation courtesy of SamA grabbing 40% of global supply (of wafers, not even chips yet) from two of the three memory companies on the same day. In a better (the old) world he’d have been put in jail for this and fraud already.
Which is to say, the demand is mostly fictional and FOMO and the big three memory companies are leaning hard into it because profit, and, the price never comes all the way back down, also a win for them. They make huge profit (hence making 5 year price fix deals with stupid people) until the Chinese companies ramp up production and the game ends. The actual RAM may or may not actually end up used, depending on when the bubble pops and what happens after.
Just rampant greed doing what it does, SNAFU.
China makes their own I believe.
Yup, was going DDR5 this year, got a new bike (Marin Larkspur) instead, such a good decision, renewed my love of cycling, having a ball.
Yup, there’s a cycle between centralization and edge. Started with centralization, mainframes, went edge with the first PCs (and game consoles) and ever since corpos have been trying to pull it back to the center in waves. Thin client, cloud compute, arguably phones (as apps processing in the cloud), Geforce Now, AI. So far it’s always gone back to the edge for most of the population, except for niche cases (or not in the case of phones). As internet gets faster and more reliable the chance of it sticking longer in the central zone increases (IMO).
True, got carried away on the pirate theme, should have added ‘(to the corpos)’ to the end, or maybe just ‘but seed’.
Corpos: Own nothing, hate it. Keep paying, keep consuming.
Piracy: Own anything, keep it, smile. Take what you can, give nothing back.
Big Miss on ‘better than using windows’
ITT ‘get hired back for more’.
That wasn’t the goal, it was always hire someone else for less later while making this quarters financials look good and workers more desperate and fungible. Sucks for long term viability and institutional knowledge, but shareholders are happy now, C-suite gets bonuses, AI is just this years excuse. Just late stage capitalism working as expected.
Wow, that was a screed, (a worthy one) and yeah, an engineering degree should be special IMO, as perhaps a (pure) Math one. should also be. We have a tendency to regard you lesser, in self defense, but that professional responsibility is significant, a more elegant weapon from a more civilized age. I do apologize, the steam age thing was out of line (but meant with heart, trains rock, and IMO is where ‘engineering’ started) has it’s roots.
Nah, good engineers are retiring, bad engineers are running rampant. You give yourself away calling us engineers, we were never, except for some yearly title increase instead of money. Just programmers, and that is fine. Engineer is a whole other thing from the steam age, my BSc was in Math, worked fine to get me in.
We should seriously consider a right to destroy noise making crap in general. Currently listening to a 110Db mower, I should be allowed to go out and stomp it, except, maybe, on Sunday afternoons.
Even if it doesn’t, you can start again rested.