Technology

My dumpster dive SELF-built NAS is getting up there. It really needs replacement but I’m waiting. I have three dying drives and a worn ssd in it right now, going to have to bite the bullet and overpay for some refurbished enterprise drives, and a small nvme ssd (2x 4TB and a. 10TB parity drive to be replaced with 2 10TB refurbs). Would have cost about 200 bucks previously (used to pay about 80 bucks for one) but today it’s totaling over 600.

I’ll limp it along for a couple more years anyway but damn, this will cost nearly as much as all the drives I’ve previously purchased.

I got my latest pc from the local uni's surplus sale. 32g with an i7 for 150$

I'm still on a computer from 2018 and I guess I'll have to wait for years to upgrade. There is no way I'm paying these prices for an upgrade unless I absolutely have to (meaning something breaks and needs to be replaced).

One day something will. Its 8 years old now and counting...

Everyday I realize that I don't hate capitalism enough.

I built my new PC in December 2024 because I knew Trump would fuck things up with tariffs, grifting, and general shitbaggery. So while all that did happen, I didn't anticipate the AI hype being an even bigger issue. If anything, I just wish I had bought more ram. I had planned on getting more later.

I priced out my build last week for "fun" to see how much it would be now. I paid $1,200 or so, now it would be around $2,150. I would have just not bothered at that price.

I dont agree with all the points but Collapse OS has a fascinating read: https://collapseos.org/civ.html

In this case its driven by greed...but if you cant get a hold of chips because of ANY factor, its going to look more and more like collapse os is more right than wrong.

Yeah, that's what happens when you triple the price of everything.

2TB drives were about £100 a few years ago and now they're close to £400. That's a fuckin' no from me dog.

I want to go back to November

It's a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the "winner takes all" approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it's likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.

Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.

It's not a question of if the party will end, it's just a question of when. Even if people don't think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we're already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.

So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I'd expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.

Can't buy an HDD, Can't buy an SSD, can't buy a Blu-ray drive, can't get head. Can't have shit.

It hasn't 'dissapeared', the demand is still there but we've been priced out.

One good thing about it is we're more inclined to recycle and buy secondhand. Or just make-do if its not essential.

Can't wait for the LLM bubble to pop and have RAM and SSDs become dirt cheap for at least a short time. I believe that other AI-related applications (machine learning, visual recognition, OCR etc. for robots/drones) are more practical and have good use cases but LLM companies themselves are certainly overvalued.

Future seems to be probably similar to concept as chromeos

You get 32gb internal storage and rest is cloud storage.

Thanks, AI.

AI is going to kill the enthusiast PC hardware community even more than it was before. Great. Love it. Super fantastic. 😑

You sure about that, bud? Because I'd hazard a guess that it's almost exactly the same as before, were there options. In fact, I'm moving components around and would love to do a spend on some memory. I need low-profile sticks but if necessary I'll just de-shield my current RAM. What a shame.

And now that data centers are financially collapsing left and right I'm sure they will be regretting thay decision.