Technology

Definitely won't do anything to hurt the common person

Well, we’re not even anywhere close to AGI yet, and the underlying problem of “the people running everything these days are not programmed to value living things - only money” Is pretty fucking obvious at this point

Funnily enough, I was just introduced to this fascinating little game about being a paperclip making machine.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

I spent a good 3 or 4 hours playing instead of sleeping.

I regret so much that I didn't, I was planning to build a new PC now or in the beginning of next year. But with the current RAM prices I will stick to my 5 years old AMD 5600x. I will have to start playing games in my backlog if the framerate in new games becomes too low.

I wasn't sure how bad it was until I just checked.

last December I bought a 2x32gb DDR5 kit for $160. right now, same kit, almost $600.

this is fucking insane man.

fuck AI.

I'm in the exact opposite position... hoarding bits on the cheap, all I need is ram and psu but ram now costs more than I paid for everything else put together and scavenging sources have dried up completely

No kidding! I postponed replacing my old Sandybridge in 2020 because of pandemic prices and then jumped on building my new rig in early 2024 when prices were the lowest I'd seen in some time. Also, grabbing a couple more sticks of 32 Gb DDR4 for my homelab this spring now seems like it was a good choice.

Me too, the only regret that I stayed with 16Gb instead of going for 32Gb or more

El Chavo del Ocho Reference!!!!!! Elite ball knowledge 🤝🤝🤝

OpenAI abruptly bought 40% of global supply, and announced it.

Other companies found out about it when OpenAI announced and thought holy shit, if we hadn't heard of this massive deal, what else haven't we heard of?!, and so they started panic buying.

On top of that, because of US tariffs and trade restrictions, the Chinese "B-tier" memory companies, who usually buy old machines from the big 3 (SK-Hynix, Samsung, Micron) and sell this lower spec RAM at lower margins, didn't buy up these machines as much as they usually do. They weren't sure they'd be able to make a profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.

Fucking slop factories.

Basically as I understand it sam altman made a deal to buy a majority of the semiconductor wafers needed to make ram from the two biggest manufacturers, and the third biggest saw that and went "oh ok time to make a killing selling tam to businesses" qnd pulled out of the consumer market so now there's just fucking none being made for consumers because of one giant fucking dickwad

Nope. A couple of them have been built and they're just sitting there unpowered

Imagine you had infinite money and no consequences

I mean you could like— build entire city size data centers right?

But this infinite money goes away if you're not building them

So your choices are to build something that you don't need or to have no money

You see, humans were not very evolved or adapted to their planet, given their own social structures

Of course, you just turn off the power for all the poor people

No, some of them are running generators on site to get more power.

There's many new jobs opening in the AI sector, pedalling on dynamo bikes.

Power availability is actually a primary consideration when choosing a location for a Data Center. Sometimes they'll site a DC even if there isn't enough power and then build out the power generation that they need.

An example are the two DCs that Microsoft is building in Cheyenne, Wyoming and the absolutely massive 1.2 Million panel solar farm being built to power them. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/05/11/massive-1-2-billion-1-2-million-panel-solar-farm-planned-for-south-cheyenne/

This is at least the second time that Microsoft has done this in Cheyenne. In 2016 they contracted for 237 MW of Wind Energy, which led to the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms being built / expanded. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/11/14/latest-energy-deal-microsofts-cheyenne-datacenter-will-now-powered-entirely-wind-energy-keeping-us-course-build-greener-responsible-cloud/

No matter what you think of AI the folks that engineer these DCs aren't stupid. They are well aware of their extreme power requirements.

Depends how dirty you accept the power.

They'll pivot to being the world's largest RAM re-saler and clean up.

46 gb should suffice for the next years.

You always can move your swap onto the cloud.

Or actually put it on a fast nvme

You chaebols sure are a contentious people.

Memory should always be purchased in pairs, anyway, so your plan wasn't really an option to begin with.