- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
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.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Please tell me more.
IMHO there’s much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for “outdated” hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
What does a kitchen server do?
Serves kitchens
“Your kitchen, sir”
“Our special today, is silverfish and granite, served with a side of wood chips, garnished with table salt.”
Discworld?
?
🤔 ah, I suppose that makes sense
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn’t want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.
What’s funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
Software has also gone to shit performance wise, few things really get optimized anymore and there’s frameworks and containers behind everything.
For sure. Buying higher performance machines didn’t get us better performing games, it just got us lazy developers.
> has an AI slop summary
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.
That’s exactly what they’re aiming for.
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.
I hope that will prompt many more people to adopt Linux then
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.
Yeah but your TAM (who you could possibly sell to) is the biggest concentric circle, inside that is the Servicable Addressable Market (who you could feasibly sell to) and your SOM (serviceable obtainable market, who you are actually selling to) and the consumer market is who you were actually selling to.
It could be that these data centers never become serviceable or obtainable, and this is all just predictions with no actual product making it into a machine.
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
chuckles
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
Yeah, some honesty would be refreshing.
Though to be fair, when that actually happens you know what we call that? “X company just said the quiet part out loud”.
So yeah, there’s kinda no pleasing us either…
LOL If companies were honest we’d have a socialist revolution within 48 hours.
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.
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”
Huh, til
Well shit, that’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
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.
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
It’s exactly what monopolies and oligopolies end up doing, whatever is in their interest to do. If anti-trust laws were actually used to enforce competition, we wouldn’t be here. But since we can’t compete with the campaign donations of the companies those laws should be regulating, we get no regulation at all and end up here. Selfish people, being selfish, making everything worse for everyone else.
And all these memory are spent on the generation of pornographic content in the highest quality.
Idk I’ve seen better in the amateur section
In the “amateur” section with professional cameras and pretty experienced (one could say glorified) “amateurs”.
All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it’s not physically possible to [xyz].
Are they really able to replicate pornography like that? I know that for normal stuff, the videos are only under ten seconds or so.
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 might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.
weird emotional appeals
“I think we’ve done a lot of damage lately with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. […] It’s not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments.”
“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.”
They are going to kill an industry and damage peoples ability to access technology.
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 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/
