The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*.
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@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.)
@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.
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@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.
@graydon @cstross again, wasn't the intention.
Modern headlights throw a lot more light than any old headlamp, and aerodynamic styling and mileage drives custom swept shapes that aren't standard
We used to replace bulbs often, now it's only when defective or damaged.
There was no conspiracy to kill the aftermarket
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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.
@cstross @blogdiva My desktop computer broke a year ago. I replaced the required parts and now it’s working again, of course on paper, as the old one was over ten years old — mostly.
But in practice, the difference is not very much. Disk access is faster as I upgraded the spinning metal with SSDs, but mostly it does what its previous incarnation did.
And I’ve also been running a Thinkpad over a decade old (with debian), and it, too, does most of the things I want a computer to do.
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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.
@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 …
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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.
@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.
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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?!?
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@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.
@mbpaz @cstross There is so much untapped wealth in all the old tech collecting dust all over the world. Commercial software steals this wealth from us by dropping support but free software unlocks it all back.
I'm writing this on a laptop from 2010 that I've been using as my only personal computer for about two years. It's running linux and can stream video in 720p when the website isn't too bloated, 480p otherwise, and I can use it to work on my godot game.
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@falken @furicle @graydon @cstross Speaking of parking sensors, my mother bought a new car 3 years ago. The model she chose included parking sensors, and had to be sold with them – except thanks to the shortages, Opel couldn't actually include them, so the dealership had to add aftermarket sensors to the car.
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@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.
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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?!?
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@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.)
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.
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@falken @furicle @graydon @cstross Speaking of parking sensors, my mother bought a new car 3 years ago. The model she chose included parking sensors, and had to be sold with them – except thanks to the shortages, Opel couldn't actually include them, so the dealership had to add aftermarket sensors to the car.
@jernej__s @falken @graydon @cstross
GM supplied them for my truck a good nine months after purchase, along with the seat warmer controller computer.
Gave me a discount for it at least. -
@cstross @blogdiva My desktop computer broke a year ago. I replaced the required parts and now it’s working again, of course on paper, as the old one was over ten years old — mostly.
But in practice, the difference is not very much. Disk access is faster as I upgraded the spinning metal with SSDs, but mostly it does what its previous incarnation did.
And I’ve also been running a Thinkpad over a decade old (with debian), and it, too, does most of the things I want a computer to do.
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A Angela shared this topic
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@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.)
@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.
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@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 …
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@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 this is the way
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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.
@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.
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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.
@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.
