Technology

I do think of them.

You can try games from 20 or even 30 years ago. Plenty of bangers in any genre.

Yep, the Chinese models are already up 10 times cheaper and now that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, all are increasing prices up to 10 more for models like Opus, it will make Chinese models anywhere from 50 to 100 times cheaper.

American corps. are betting that since people have their workflow already established they won't switch to other providers, but that's not the case. There's already a mass move to Chinese models.

Agreed. I am not longer paying token fees as I am running QWEN 3.6 27B MTP on my 4090 GPU and it is as good and as fast as the frontier models for agentic coding.

In a way it has actually.

Deepseek was big because not only did they publish the full model for everyone to use, but the MoE structure significantly brought down the hardware requirements in terms of processing power. As long as you have enough VRAM, you can run it on older hardware with no need for the latest Nvidia stuff.

Now they got v4 which many have found to be within a 10% margin of Claude and ChatGPT.

On top of that, China has cheapo VRAM GPUs available or soon to be released, like the MTT S80. Yeah it sucks as a Graphics card because the chip is behind, but you get 16Gb of GDDR6 for much cheaper than anything else.

But its not a conspiracy to fight China. The infinite scaling was just Nvidia solidifying themselves as the monopoly because they want all AI infrastructure to be dependent on them, which is why they still illegally export to China, despite an export ban attempting to reduce their potential competition.

Moore Threads (MTT) already has their own CUDA like system called MUSA, and I'm sure they'll be happy to put in proper hardware support for new stuff like Bf16 and FP8/4. It'll take a few years, but eventually China will catch up to the point where Nvidia gets shanked by cheaper hardware.

Hyper scaling was always about cornering the computer market, It was never about providing us some vastly new and superior service.

They should be strung up. And middle management needs to return to fucking school.

It’s like Kyle Kulinski said “I’m starting to understand re-education camps now”

The state of things is what if, that's true. It has not happened. :)

At some point, it should happen. Still not going to put a dent in the datacenter / dystopia rally though, since they will pick Nvidia and known brands.

Failure rates and RMAs might be more common when manufactuerers save a buck. Samsung SSDs for example are expensive AF, but they have a good reputation for reliablility and lifespan.

Of course, being diligent about backing up your data means that you might benefit from the savings with less worry about the risk. Or you could use the cheaper SSD for something like a Steam library where you may not care as much about long term data preservation.

Word of warning though: super cheap end might end up with you getting scammed, or things like SSDs without DRAM caches, which are slower than even HDDs.

From what I‘ve heard it‘s all about guarantees because SSDs have a tendency to just go bad sometimes. Some SSDs are more expensive because the manufacturer will offer a replacement for up to 5 years. You can expect these manufacturers to have better quality control too. They don‘t want to replace SSDs left and right after all.

Take this with a grain of salt because I never actually had to get an SSD replaced myself. But I would only trust a manufacturer that‘s been in business with a good reputation for 5 to 10 years. Cheap storage sounds tempting but for me it‘s not worth risking to lose my data over. Yes I make backups but still.

It depends on the use case. I use teamgroup high capacity SSD drives for short load things on my homelab but they are super slow for any kind of extended writing due to a number of factors such as cache writes. I had to warranty two of 5 that died within a few weeks but it has been fine once the duds were replaced and they were easy about honoring the warranty.

Again, fine for a homelab but I wouldn't use them in my gaming rig where speed matters. For things like readimg of stored video and Linux isos, they work pretty good.

YMMV.

You gotta look up reviews. Both buyer track records, and focused reviews that look at what controller/NAND they use.

Many SSDs are basically the same as other brands internally. A few are wonky. It just depends.

USA is the new Russia.

Crazy how USA seems unable to keep up

The decline started by the 70s.

Just look at the EV's. The CEO of Ford was shocked about the quality and innovation of the Chinese cars. He's driving a Xiaomi SU7 and refuses to give it up. At least Canada is now free of the US chains and letting Chinese EV's in. The movement is unstoppable in the rest of the world. The only place resisting innovation is the US with its current regime.

It's been coming for a long time. While the rest of us have been fighting among ourselves, China stayed out of it all, and improved their country. I'm not surprised that they've emerged as a powerhouse, while we volunteered to give a lunatic the nukes.

Not really that crazy when you consider that the people in charge could have had a sweetheart deal with manufacturers in China, but they cut off all trade partners and all soft power channels, because they're drooling buffoons who won't accept that the US shifted to a global economy decades ago nor do they grasp how global economies work—mainly because they fired every expert under the pretense of "government waste."

All they know how to do is grift and defraud, and the chance to maintain global hegemony is long past. It's China's time, now, and they know it.