Hold on to Your Hardware

camgunz

I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.

mememememememo

In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.

CraigJPerry

Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital. Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.

keybored

Owning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea. You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now. Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...: Liberty goes beyond that.

vjerancrnjak

haha, all of a sudden I see a tab "waifu pillow" on Amazon, and think I have a split personality that runs searches in between consciousness shifts, and then I come back to a funny message.

duskdozer

uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ This happened because of the following filter: ||xn--$document The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage

barrkel

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while. This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it. I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.

shusaku

> These days, the biggest customers are not gamers, creators, PC builders or even crypto miners anymore. Today, it’s hyperscalers. … > These buyers don’t care if RAM costs 20% more and neither do they wait for Black Friday deals. Instead, they sign contracts measured in exabytes and billions of dollars. Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their employees?

lmz

Micron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer brand for RAM I don't think?

dust42

Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.

jleyank

Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.

jagermo

I knew the time for my cable box would come!

aurareturn

Capitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI. There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices. Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.

anonzzzies

I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.

defraudbah

I refuse, I'll buy when I need to and can hold on for a few months if prices become insane. This means I'll spend less on hardware then what I could, if I wanted to buy max mpro or latest framework I just will not, because prices are too mad and g o for a cheaper version. whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it

usrbinbash

As the old saying goes: "This too will pass." Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product. If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU

imtringued

I just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware. I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept opening it over and over again, then I realized that it completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the title contained the world "nudes" with a faked amazon favicon) and when you reopen the tab, it shows you a black overlay with a message intended to induce shock if you ever bother to read it (I didn't read past the first sentence so I don't know what it was actually about). Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session. The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.

tmtvl

I grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether or not it will actually last).

bluejay2387

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.

dist-epoch

I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage. Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it. This is pure Capitalism. If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain. But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged. Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt. And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them. Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin. AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.