This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Here's an idea: a catalogue of companies who pulled this shit during the bubble, so we know who not to buy from when it bursts.
It almost seems like they want to make home computing unaffordable, so you have to rent PC time from a cloud provider. This way they nickel and dime you, and use your data to train their LLMs.
Micron and nvidia get their cut by being able to set whatever prices they can imagine.
there are plenty of home computers for sale for under $500. i'm on a $700 laptop right now that's 4 years old.
they just can't run modern games. i can run 2d games just fine or old games.
the gaming crowd seems to forget that most computers don't use integrated graphics and a $1000 PC is a luxury purchase.
That's exactly what they're aiming for.
I said before and I will say it again. AI is product being built by its users, an unfinished program that it is used wrong just for companies to make money. AI hasn't made any progress and we won't see any progress, because it is used by companies to profit.
They don't care about the economy and the downsides, they care to make us use AI.
i overheard today on the bus, that someone(assume in grad school) as a TA was planning to use AI to grade all the classes homework without care if it was inconsistently correct or not, it isnt going to end well.
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
You could go further and say what's happening now isn't capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy "technofeudalism": it's controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you're an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don't get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don't get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don't agree to their terms can't get to their consumers at all.
It's vassal capitalism. Capitalists pay their technofeudal lords their 30% cut of revenue and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it's an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of "the customer is always right in matters of taste"
Which just means "if they want to buy ugly shit, let them"
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. "The customer is always right" just means don't tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company's bottom line.
I don't think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money "they" can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
Forget ram. Wait until there’s widespread power outages yet you’re somehow paying 10x for your electricity bill because of the new data center down the street.
this is actually happening
my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after
we have a power making dam in town
historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA
Combined over 20% last November, great times!!
Combined means we have:
first 1k kwh rate Above 1k kwh rate
And the above 1k kwh changes seasonally.
they send us these cute charts and stuff about our usage
they show you a "you are using xyz% more then previous year" type stuff
but my wife keeps it and their little bullshit is because they keep changing the rate and then using the new rate against your old usage as comparison. Looks like OMG we used a lot more power then last year! We should consider cutting something out.
But the actual meter reading numbers are almost always the same year after year
I like the suggestions to save money and lower usage.
"Have you tried living in complete darkness this month? You could save $2 off your bill!"
"Perhaps try not using electricity this month. Or, consider getting a second source of income to turn on your fridge for a few hours a day!"
"try building your own dam, or wind farm, or having solar panels, why not have a nuclear reactor in your basement to powe houser house.
If the data center is causing all that power drain, they should be the ones footing the damned bill
they also, businesses get wholesale lower rates than residential consumers. which is one of the big issues about them not paying thier fair share.
In order to appeal to others' emotions, it really helps to have emotions of your own and feel empathy.
It's just the same old tactics advertising and marketing shitheads have been using for decades. Just ignore them.
Yet if prices somehow go back to sanity, people will flock back to nVidia like they always did
Lol
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
Let me translate that for you:
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they're willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that... We're gonna make so much money!
But uh, yeah uh, I feel you, that sucks bro and I appreciate you. But, dude, seriously, look at all this money! So yeah, stay strong guys, tweet about us! And don't forget, if you want to be informed about the best memory deals, definitely sign up for our newsletter! Just put your email right in this field...
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
To be fair I would not be mad if that was the response, It's the pandering that get's me fuming
They can fuck right off.
For the foreseeable future, DIYPC is dead.
most folks will pay. all my PC gamer friends are just paying $200 per 16GB stick now.
I am in a position to see first hand people regularly dropping ~$4000USD on "mid-range" PCs. It hasn't slowed down purchasing of PCs, if anything it is speeding up compared to this time last year.
at that pricepoint it's just about showing off how much money you have.
typical rich way to backhand brag about how rich you are is to whine about how 'expensive' things are that are luxury items.
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
https://wccftech.com/asus-declares-all-in-ai-strategy-as-server-revenue-soars-beyond-expectation/
These people keep saying "it's the future" but it just seems like they're chasing pink elephants and forcing us to partake in the delusion.
What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Your TAM is about to go bam, so cut the shit and make us some RAM.
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
currently its very useful for propaganda, thats why conservatives are all in on it.
Nothing like a call for empathy from the morally bankrupt.
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
And all these memory are spent on the generation of pornographic content in the highest quality.
speaking of gaming i know people with recent degree in gaming related field, not surprise he couldnt find a job in that field.
