AI won't just kill you-- it'll make sure you're broke for a while first

I've got to say I do enjoy reading about the billionaire overlords eating their own in their pursuit to find profitability.

Off topic, but about the article: Are the articles getting shorter and shorter? The rest of the page has more content than the entire article body. I've seen some longer Lemmy replies. :D

A lot of the DIY PC market is already under pressure. I worry that this will further strain the component makers (like cases and power supplies and such) and builders.

Hmm. The Ars Technica article from earlier wasn't willing to lay the blame so wholly on memory prices. I wonder why this publication is.

Off topic as it is not gaming related:

I figured this was coming so I bought four System76 Meerkats with AMD processors, 4TB nvmes and 96GB of RAM. Each actively runs six to seven Win 11 VMs on ProxmoxVE, with many more on standby (each VM takes 128gb of disk space). Each VM runs large chunks of the client workloads that caused us to have to constantly upgrade our laptops. Now, by offloading the majority of the workload to these self-hosted virtual desktops (VDIs), we can extended the life of our "daily drivers" by years. My main PC is a 2019 Thinkpad andnat this rate, I might easily get another five years out of it (barring hardware failure). When we do need to replace, we no longer have to buy laptops with top tier specs.

I looked at HDD prices last week for the first time in a few months. It legitimately fucked up my mental state for a few hours. They were charging the same for 2tb that I paid for 8 last time I bought them.

Nice

Lmao calling it a "crisis" like it's some natural phenomenon and not just ten assholes hoarding everything.

Imagine just throwing away your consumers like their trash.

What a business model...

Thing is, I'd like to never buy memory from these three asshole companies ever again, but right now it looks like that's an impossible proposition.

$200 for 8TB back in 2022

$545 for the same damn drive now.

I'm actually glad I went a little crazy buying storage back then, sitting on 40TB locally, but I recoil at the thought of replacing any of them.

it's almost like there should be dedicated modules for each purpose, rather than the GPU being the one-stop-shop for high-demand computing.

Who ever would have seen that coming? It's almost like the poor decisions of dickheads made an important commodity prohibitively expensive.

I don't understand. The GPU was created as a dedicated module. It just happened that the parallel tasks needed for rendering games could be used first for crypto and later LLM's.

The problem is factory capacity. It doesn't matter how you divide up the components based on purpose if one company prepays all factories to only make components for themselves.

I sort of know the feeling. I got some good memory and storage a few years ago.

Raspberry Pi foundation looks wistful

I'm pretty sure $15/TB for HDDs was considered the standard not too many years ago

Edit: the last time I bought an HDD (2023) it was 20 TB for $280, so $14/TB.

Friend of mine has an ssd fail. Amazon refused to replace and instead gave him a a refund. He only got half of what it now costs back. Insane.

"Is it"?

Proofreading is dead.

What a mistake-a to make-a. :(

That itself should be fucking illegal tbh.

These aren't mistakes. They want to sell you shitty tablets and stream your computer to you for a monthly subscription. That's the endgame.

I went crazy buying storage and other products before the US president took office because of tariff threats.

There was a short period when AI led to minimum ram offerings increasing like the MacMini going from 8 gigs to 16 gigs. That was shortlived as AI vacuumed up all the ram and storage.

Specialized AI chips are coming.... AIUs lol or SIUs (is you're stupid as F)

Its an incentive for me to only take good photos and delete photos I don't like.

Before the world firmly settled in the bad place, deals multiple times a year put shuckable external drives at $10/TB. I have a few left and am just hoping I don't run out before Pop+2 years, which is probably how long it'll take to make drives anywhere near affordable.

eventually there will be infighting.

I was referring to the mistake of the heavy investment into 'AI'.

I had to decom a bunch of hardware for work last year. I decided the well-used but not bad enterprise storage needed to come home with me. Sitting on 40tb of spinning disk and 15tb of flash (in raidz2) with spares. Only worry I have is my parity drive is a 12tb and larger than the rest.

Not due to "Windows 11" forcing users to buy new hardware if they want to continue their windows experience? I think a lot of the old "Windows 10" computers are now Linux machines. But you're saying it's because the tech bros billionaires are artificially creating demand for RAM? Okay then.

It isn't a mistake; it's the excuse to consolidate and take the monopoly on compute power.

Year over year. Okay

Last quarter... What

NPU are kinda useless

Q3 2026 sales were 20% lower than Q3 2025 sales .

That's even worse. It means there will be no left over GPUs for gaming. Factories will produce AI specific chips and nothing else because gamers won't pay $10k for a GPU card.

Oh, I know it's on purpose, but doing something stupid without it being an accident doesn't make it not a mistake for everyone else involved.

Just a bizarre way to phrase it then

Thanks captain obvious.

Good moaning!

Aside from popular headlines; I think people are realizing they don't need the latest hardware to do tasks or play video games.

A-Mario, is that-a you?!

That's the thing. We aren't their consumers. 70% of memory right now is going straight to AI. 30% is to normal people

I seriously doubt the can confortably control that bias.

It's the memory crisis AND the massive fucking layoffs in the tech sector who actually buy fucktons of pc's/

infighting or... tenderizing

should have used AI.... tsk tsk

/s