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Posted by speckx 2 days ago

Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI(www.tomshardware.com)
293 points | 340 commentspage 4
palmotea 1 day ago||
Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters.

It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them.

Own nothing and be happy.

cryo32 1 day ago||
Sarcasm aside, yep. There will be three classes: the owned, the owners and the unownable. I aim to be unownable.
therepanic 1 day ago|||
There will be two classes: those who are part of the perpetual underclass and those who are not. And 98 percent of the population will be part of it.
psadauskas 1 day ago|||
There are _already_ two classes:

Those who earn their living from their labor, and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.

SoftTalker 1 day ago|||
You talk like this is new, it's the way it's always been.
palmotea 1 day ago||||
> Those who earn their living from their labor

If any of these people don't work or don't work enough, they undeserving immoral moochers and should be miserable and in pain.

> and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.

It totally fine if these people never lift a finger in their lives. In fact, they deserve it. NEVER question that. N-E-V-E-R! It's great! Capitalism is great! Capitalism is fair!

rokkamokka 1 day ago|||
The root of most of society's problems right there...
smokel 1 day ago||
[flagged]
yubblegum 1 day ago|||
> There will be two classes

That confident "will" in that prognosis may ultimately stimulate a consensus "why?" response in the population to explore alternative outcomes ..

badc0ffee 1 day ago||||
Sounds like my kid's friends talking about betas, alphas and sigmas. I think they aim to be sigmas.
gk-- 1 day ago||||
i've said something similar, but i shorten it to labour and capital. similar conclusion.
giraffe_lady 1 day ago||||
It will be the same two classes there are now and always have been. Those who need to sell their labor and those they sell it to. Class struggle is the only way out. Find some solidarity, you aren't exempt.
dmos62 1 day ago||||
How will you do that?
cryo32 1 day ago||
To be owned, someone needs leverage over you or the ability to coerce you.

I spent the last half a century making sure they have no leverage and I am not interested in being coerced.

It's called security.

dmos62 1 day ago|||
If you don't care to go into detail, that's fine, but your answer is vague. E.g. do you have a hidden, off-grid, underground lair?
cryo32 1 day ago|||
No. I don't need to work. I outright own my accomodation. I have no hard technology dependencies.
khimaros 1 day ago||
if you are on land, you are (or someone is) still paying rent to the government. rent can be raised and you will be evicted if you don't pay.

if you are living mobile, you probably need gas or batteries for warmth or cooling. if your climate is currently comfortable, temperatures can be raised.

or maybe you are a nomad hunting and gathering your own food? the wilderness can be pillaged and sold and "secured" until there's nothing left to eat.

there is no perfect security.

cryo32 1 day ago||
Correct. I just aim to get eaten last.
dexterdog 1 day ago||
And I aim to be the one that eats you
cryo32 1 day ago||
Good luck :)
overfeed 1 day ago|||
> If you don't care to go into detail, that's fine, but your answer is vague

No lairs necessary. You can read up on people who do FIRE.

dexterdog 1 day ago||
99% of people who follow that are still completely dependent on the world order and will be just as screwed as everybody else if everything goes tits-up.
cryo32 1 day ago|||
The aim is to be screwed last. That's a reasonable survival strategy.
overfeed 1 day ago|||
There's a lot of bullshit that can happen between the status quo and everything going tits up. Having FU money means you can say -all things being equal - "Fuck You" when it's appropriate, instead of worrying about becoming homeless or not having enough to eat
pllbnk 1 day ago|||
Hey guys, Richard Stallman is on HN!
cryo32 1 day ago||
Hey I clean my toes before they become snackable.
rexpop 1 day ago|||
[dead]
tru3_power 1 day ago|||
I kinda felt like this was coming so mid last year I built a local rig with the top of the line parts I could afford at the time lol (rtx5090/ryzen9 etc) now I just need to build out my inference setup (sadly m3 ultras r insanely expensive now) - I have a feeling they will try to lock down usage of open source LLMs too. I don’t get how token moat can exist if local inference rigs can be built out and serve open source models locally for nothing (besides power cost).
e2le 1 day ago|||
It's unfortunate but personal general-purpose computing has being under attack for a long time, this is only another nail in the coffin.
svachalek 1 day ago|||
I'm sure this makes the billionaire class happy but there are some legit economics involved. We all want frontier class models running on our home PC but that takes 100x or 1000x the computer we've been running. The market isn't going to instantly adapt and make that kind of machine for the same price we've been paying for 1% of it, so that we can leave it sitting idle 99% of the day.
2ndorderthought 1 day ago|||
[flagged]
elzbardico 1 day ago|||
Not to mention the comment agents. The true AI bro/sis won't waste her/his time commenting when an agent can do it for him/her.
2ndorderthought 1 day ago||
Have to efficiently trash the internet of course.
wg0 1 day ago||||
AI bros and crypto bros. One and the same thing. Same optimism. Same arguments. Same blind faith. Same zero knowledge of how economy, society or even the technology they are evangelizing works under the hood and what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow.
red75prime 1 day ago||
> what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow.

Have you intended to say "because reasons"? There should be a long chain of reasoning connecting "LLMs will never be able to strictly follow instructions written in natural language (as agreed by 90% consensus of experts or some such, because you can't formally verify adherence to informal natural language instructions)" and "physics doesn't allow that." And I can't find it anywhere. Neither in your comment history, nor in literature.

wg0 1 day ago||
Because it is next token predictions and there is no logical part into that. It is like saying I cannot find any research paper on the fact that car collusion might cause fire because gasoline is in the tank.

But the fact is that there's plenty of literature out there on hallucination and unreliability of LLMs already. If you know otherwise, let us inform Dario before next funding round.

red75prime 1 day ago||
Next token prediction is a pretraining objective that doesn't tell anything about behavior and activation structure of the resultant network. The literature that explores a hallucination problem has little to do with your claim about physical impossibility.
stavros 1 day ago|||
If you want it to be sarcasm, treat it like sarcasm. What's the worst thing that could happen?
cortesoft 1 day ago||
Well, the last time I assumed everyone was being sarcastic and ironic, until they actually elected the guy president.
stavros 1 day ago||
Haha, ah yes, good old GWB.
martinwilly34 1 day ago|||
[dead]
nickpp 1 day ago|||
PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.

So what are you ranting against?!

> Own nothing and be happy.

Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…

harvey9 1 day ago|||
In the digital age corporations can and do confiscate things we thought we owned. Amazon removing paid-for kindle books, devices getting bricked, paying a recurring fee to use some features in your car.
nickpp 1 day ago||
Every year, the government comes around, reassesses my house value (always up, never down) and ask me to pay a percentage (always increasing) or they will take away my house which shelters my kids and family.

So, no, I am not too worried about Amazon removing my $9.99 book.

hn_throw2025 1 day ago||||
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.

It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.

bluefirebrand 1 day ago|||
> Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that.

... Do you want corporations to have that power too or something? What are you saying here?

mannanj 1 day ago||
You sound like a useless-eater manager. Just the kind of roles we'll be happy to have in our future Utopia. The people will be happy to be led by such visionaries such as yourself.
teachrdan 1 day ago||
Hey, I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to is being satirical, and you're both in alignment on this one.
mannanj 1 day ago||
We were both being satirical. Seems like people couldn't seem to attribute me the same generosity and benefit of the doubt as the OP. Funny and yet the starkness of the hostility onto my post and not his is real.
rahadbhuiya 1 day ago||
And flying pugs gonna fall from teh sky too.
rf15 1 day ago||
considering how unsustainable this whole AI Business is and how much it ruins everything, I can't wait for the crash.

Why did we listen to the Worldcoin guy again?

wao0uuno 1 day ago||
I can't wait for this to happen. I live far enough from the US to not be super affected by this crash and hopefully I will be able to stock up on disks and parts once the prices drop.
downrightmike 1 day ago||
Because he killed the Open part of openai and the PEs went nuts
xg15 1 day ago||
Waiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...
2ndorderthought 1 day ago||
That does seem to be where this is headed. Especially after googles last announcement possibly bricking 99% of the phones from accessing the internet
lifestyleguru 1 day ago||
This looks like a consumer choice and producers are following up with the demand.
wtetzner 1 day ago||
Given that the AI companies are still operating at a loss and running on investor money, I'm not sure it's actually driven by consumer choice.
lifestyleguru 1 day ago||
Consumers are not helping though. They do everything on a smartphone and don't even blink when mobile app is required for most trivial things.
buellerbueller 1 day ago||
To echo the post you are responding to: when the app is required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?
lifestyleguru 1 day ago||
> required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?

No one really resists or pushes back. When I resist I hear "that's what consumers want", "it's for security", or that I'm the problem. There is no one to complain to even, except to low paid kiddos in customer service.

buellerbueller 1 day ago||
At massive scale, change can only come in two ways: regulation or mass action. The former is unlikely because of regulatory capture (which itself is due in some part to the latter). The latter requires very serious violations, in order to come about.
oybng 1 day ago||
It's not just new hardware, even used hard drives manufactured a decade ago have at least doubled in price. Scam Altman has effectively killed personal computing for all but the most affluent
hackernudes 1 day ago||
Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite.

Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.

hx8 1 day ago|
I think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter.

Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely).

EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.

romaniv 1 day ago||
PCs and higher-end IoT devices (like RPi) are becoming less and less affordable. The web is saturated with slop and bot traffic. I wonder how many people think about what this means. We are rapidly losing several of our major technological ecosystems that have driven economic growth in the past few decades. It's not at all clear what economic benefits we will be getting in return.
wao0uuno 1 day ago|
I think people are slowly realizing this and that's why projects like Meshtastic are so popular. Too bad none of that crap actually works at scale.
LoganDark 1 day ago||
It looks like we are going to start to see consumer components stop being created in the first place, as demand dries up to the point where it's no longer worth it to serve the consumer market at all. Almost purely because the supply is already so low that almost no one is willing to pay the price.
eklavya 1 day ago|
I would say that since more and more of the world wants/needs sovereignty in this space, more and more options would come up in the next 5 years. They will probably not be the cutting edge we have now but personal computing will not die. It will just get a (healthy) reset.
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