6 ms·

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - har

by caycep 11mo ago

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe. I am hoping some of that Clayton Christensen disruption the tech theocracy keep preaching about comes along with some O(N) decrease in transformer/cDNN complexity that disrupts the massive server farms required for this AI boom/bubble thing.

timschmidt 11mo ago
One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as this has had the effect of increasing production capacity with fixed wafer volume.
- HPsquared 11mo ago
  Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.
  - timschmidt 11mo ago
    SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
    - whizzter 11mo ago
      Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga. Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
      - timschmidt 11mo ago
        > Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case. Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications. No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
        HPsquared 11mo ago
        It's symbiotic, I suppose.
        whizzter 11mo ago
        Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho. Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point). And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips). Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today. But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's. In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine). Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.
  - codebje 11mo ago
    The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. 3dfx didn't invent the voodoo for B2B sales. IBM didn't branch out from international business machines to the personal computer for business sales. The compact disc wasn't invented for corporate storage. Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s. There's a lot more of us than them. There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.
    - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
      > The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. The iPhone isn't exactly a consumer computation device. From that perspective, it does less work at a higher cost.
      - codebje 11mo ago
        I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if you're implying you dislike Apple's approach to what the user is allowed to do, or suggesting we should only talk about general purpose computing devices. If it's the latter, sure, the iPhone's not an innovation in that space, discard it from my list of examples. If it's the former, I'll give you that too, but it was still the first of its kind, by a large margin. (I remember the huge window in which phone companies desperately put out feature phones with sub-par touch screens, completely missing the value to consumers. The iPod Touch should've been warning enough... and should've been (one of) my signal(s) to buy Apple stock, I guess :-)
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  100%. We’ve seen crazy swings in RAM prices before. A colleague who worked with me about 10 years ago on a VDI project ran some numbers and showed that if a Time Machine were available, we could have brought like 4 loaded MacBook Pros back and replaced a $1M HP 3PAR ssd array :)
NedF 11mo ago
[dead]
immibis 11mo ago
It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  > Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker. Hard disagree. A $600 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM runs everything insanely faster than even my $5000 company-purchased developer laptops from 10 years ago. And yes, even when I run Slack, Visual Studio Code, Spotify, and a gazillion Chrome tabs. The HN rhetoric about modern computing being slow is getting strangely disconnected from the real world. Cheap computers are super fast like they've never been before, even with modern software.
  - Aerroon 11mo ago
    You brought up a light computing load that a laptop from like 2005 wouldn't struggle with? People ran multiple browser windows, a 3D video game, irc (chat application), teamspeak/ventrilo (voice chat) and winamp (music) all at once back in the early 2000s. This is something an 8 year old phone can do these days.
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      I’m responding to the comment above claiming that modern software is slow on modern hardware. It’s an HN meme to claim that Electron apps are unusable.
      - Aerroon 11mo ago
        They are slow though. There are noticeable delays on any machine I've used with them compared to native desktop applications. It's absolutely not just a meme.
- vel0city 11mo ago
  > We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases, but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home multimedia work a lot better.
Aurornis 11mo ago
> This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe. Compute is cheaper than ever. The ceiling is just higher for what you can buy. Yes, we have $2000 GPUs now. You don't have to buy it. You probably shouldn't buy it. Most people would be more than fine with the $200-400 models, honestly. Yet the fact that you could buy a $2000 GPU makes some people irrationally angry. This is like the guy I know who complains that pickup trucks are unfairly priced because a Ford F-150 has an MSRP of $80,000. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that the $80K price tag only applies to the luxury flagship model, he anchors his idea of how much a pickup truck costs to the highest number he can see. Computing is cheaper than ever. The power level is increasing rapidly, too. The massive AI investments and datacenter advancements are pulling hardware development forward at an incredible rate and we're winning across the board as consumers. You don't have to buy that top of the line GPU nor do you have to max out the RAM on your computer. Some times I think people with this mentality would be happier if the top of the line GPU models were never released. If nVidia stopped at their mid-range cards and didn't offer anything more, the complaints would go away even though we're not actually better off with fewer options.
- ed_elliott_asc 11mo ago
  The thing about being annoyed about the top of the range prices, for me, it irritates as it feels like it drags the lower models prices upwardsz
  - woodson 11mo ago
    But it’s not like the lower priced models are subsidizing the high-end models (probably the opposite; the high-end ones have greater margins).
  - nottorp 11mo ago
    It does. If the top range is 80k you'll feel you're getting a deal for 40k. So no one makes a 25k model.
Barrin92 11mo ago
>We all had supercomputers in our pockets. You still do. There is no "AI movement" you need to participate in. You can grab a copy of SICP and a banged up ten year old thinkpad and compute away, your brain will thank you. It's like when people complain that culture is unaffordable because the newest Marvel movie tickets cost 50 bucks, go to the library or standardebooks.org, the entire Western canon is free
- ManuelKiessling 11mo ago
  Living on the edge is expensive, and always has been. Living on the edge from 4 years ago is basically free.
RachelF 11mo ago
Well put. Since the 1980's consumer has been driving the segment. Even supercomputers were built out of higher end consumer hardware (or playstations in one example). The move to cloud computing and now AI mean that we're back in the mainframe days.
blablabla123 11mo ago
True, it is reminiscent of a time before me when people were lucky to have mainframe access through university. To be fair this was a long time in the making with the also quite aggressive move to cloud computing. While I don't mind having access to free AI tools, they seem to start taking possession of the content as well

by caycep 11mo ago

timschmidt 11mo ago

One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as this has had the effect of increasing production capacity with fixed wafer volume.

HPsquared 11mo ago
Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.
- timschmidt 11mo ago
  SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
  - whizzter 11mo ago
    Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga. Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind of computation needed for neural networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could have.
    - timschmidt 11mo ago
      > Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case. Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications. No question that chip companies are happy to take consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of a new technology which was invented and marketed to consumers first.
      - HPsquared 11mo ago
        It's symbiotic, I suppose.
      - whizzter 11mo ago
        Computers themselves were non-consumer to begin with, but the Personal Computer broke the technology moat to consumers before anything else and once that had passed it was mostly a matter of time imho. Many 3d games like doom, quake1, flight unlimited,etc ran purely on software rendering since CPU's were already providing enough oomph to render fairly useful 3d graphics in the mid 90s. CPU power was enough but consoles/arcades showed that there was more to be gotten (but nothing hindered games at that point). And already there, the capital investment for game consoles (Atari,NES,SNES,PS1,PS2, etc) and arcade games(like the above mentioned 3d games) were big enough to use custom chipsets not used or purposed for anything else (I think also that in the 80s/90s the barrier of entry to making competitive custom chips was a tad lower, just consider the cambrian explosions of firms during the 90s making x86 and later ARM chips). Yes, there was vendors that focused on the high end commercial customers, and yes many alumnis of those firms did contribute a ton of expertise towards what we have today. But if you look at what companies survived and pushed the envelope in the longer run it was almost always companies that competed in the consumer market, and it was only when those consumer chips needed even more advanced processing that we breached the point where the chips became capable of NN's. In fact I'd say that had the likes of SGI prevailed we would've had to wait longer for our GPU revolution. Flight simulators,etc were often focused on "larger/detailed" worlds, PS2-era chips with higher polycounts and more memory would have been fine for simulator developers for a long time (since more details in a military scenario would have been fine). Leisure games has always craved fidelity on a more "human" level, to implement "hacks" for stuff with custom dynamic lighting models, then global illumination, subsurface scattering,etc we've needed the arbitrary programmability since the raw power wasn't there (the most modern raytracing chips are _starting_ to approach that levels without too ugly hacks).
Aurornis 11mo ago
> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.
- codebje 11mo ago
  The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. 3dfx didn't invent the voodoo for B2B sales. IBM didn't branch out from international business machines to the personal computer for business sales. The compact disc wasn't invented for corporate storage. Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s. There's a lot more of us than them. There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.
  - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
    > The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. The iPhone isn't exactly a consumer computation device. From that perspective, it does less work at a higher cost.
    - codebje 11mo ago
      I'm sorry, but I'm not sure if you're implying you dislike Apple's approach to what the user is allowed to do, or suggesting we should only talk about general purpose computing devices. If it's the latter, sure, the iPhone's not an innovation in that space, discard it from my list of examples. If it's the former, I'll give you that too, but it was still the first of its kind, by a large margin. (I remember the huge window in which phone companies desperately put out feature phones with sub-par touch screens, completely missing the value to consumers. The iPod Touch should've been warning enough... and should've been (one of) my signal(s) to buy Apple stock, I guess :-)
Spooky23 11mo ago
100%. We’ve seen crazy swings in RAM prices before. A colleague who worked with me about 10 years ago on a VDI project ran some numbers and showed that if a Time Machine were available, we could have brought like 4 loaded MacBook Pros back and replaced a $1M HP 3PAR ssd array :)

NedF 11mo ago

[dead]

immibis 11mo ago

It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker.

Aurornis 11mo ago
> Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker. Hard disagree. A $600 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM runs everything insanely faster than even my $5000 company-purchased developer laptops from 10 years ago. And yes, even when I run Slack, Visual Studio Code, Spotify, and a gazillion Chrome tabs. The HN rhetoric about modern computing being slow is getting strangely disconnected from the real world. Cheap computers are super fast like they've never been before, even with modern software.
- Aerroon 11mo ago
  You brought up a light computing load that a laptop from like 2005 wouldn't struggle with? People ran multiple browser windows, a 3D video game, irc (chat application), teamspeak/ventrilo (voice chat) and winamp (music) all at once back in the early 2000s. This is something an 8 year old phone can do these days.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    I’m responding to the comment above claiming that modern software is slow on modern hardware. It’s an HN meme to claim that Electron apps are unusable.
    - Aerroon 11mo ago
      They are slow though. There are noticeable delays on any machine I've used with them compared to native desktop applications. It's absolutely not just a meme.
vel0city 11mo ago
> We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases, but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home multimedia work a lot better.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe. Compute is cheaper than ever. The ceiling is just higher for what you can buy. Yes, we have $2000 GPUs now. You don't have to buy it. You probably shouldn't buy it. Most people would be more than fine with the $200-400 models, honestly. Yet the fact that you could buy a $2000 GPU makes some people irrationally angry. This is like the guy I know who complains that pickup trucks are unfairly priced because a Ford F-150 has an MSRP of $80,000. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that the $80K price tag only applies to the luxury flagship model, he anchors his idea of how much a pickup truck costs to the highest number he can see. Computing is cheaper than ever. The power level is increasing rapidly, too. The massive AI investments and datacenter advancements are pulling hardware development forward at an incredible rate and we're winning across the board as consumers. You don't have to buy that top of the line GPU nor do you have to max out the RAM on your computer. Some times I think people with this mentality would be happier if the top of the line GPU models were never released. If nVidia stopped at their mid-range cards and didn't offer anything more, the complaints would go away even though we're not actually better off with fewer options.

ed_elliott_asc 11mo ago
The thing about being annoyed about the top of the range prices, for me, it irritates as it feels like it drags the lower models prices upwardsz
- woodson 11mo ago
  But it’s not like the lower priced models are subsidizing the high-end models (probably the opposite; the high-end ones have greater margins).
- nottorp 11mo ago
  It does. If the top range is 80k you'll feel you're getting a deal for 40k. So no one makes a 25k model.

Barrin92 11mo ago

>We all had supercomputers in our pockets. You still do. There is no "AI movement" you need to participate in. You can grab a copy of SICP and a banged up ten year old thinkpad and compute away, your brain will thank you. It's like when people complain that culture is unaffordable because the newest Marvel movie tickets cost 50 bucks, go to the library or standardebooks.org, the entire Western canon is free

ManuelKiessling 11mo ago
Living on the edge is expensive, and always has been. Living on the edge from 4 years ago is basically free.

RachelF 11mo ago

Well put. Since the 1980's consumer has been driving the segment. Even supercomputers were built out of higher end consumer hardware (or playstations in one example). The move to cloud computing and now AI mean that we're back in the mainframe days.

blablabla123 11mo ago

True, it is reminiscent of a time before me when people were lucky to have mainframe access through university. To be fair this was a long time in the making with the also quite aggressive move to cloud computing. While I don't mind having access to free AI tools, they seem to start taking possession of the content as well