4 ms·

Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will

Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.

stingraycharles 8mo ago
I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.
- FrankBooth 8mo ago
  We useless eaters are to be priced out of life soon enough.
  - dgxyz 8mo ago
    Traditionally that hasn't gone well for the rich folk.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
      It also hasn't gone well for the non-rich folk either.
  - brador 8mo ago
    Truer than even you dare to admit. How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population. What’s the opposite of survivor bias?
    - malfist 8mo ago
      It takes a profound lack of empathy to refer to your neighbors as "useless living humans"
      - scarecrowbob 8mo ago
        Furthermore, it's usually just plain dangerous.
      - brador 8mo ago
        It is meant in the capitalist sense. Your horror at the statement is the point.
        munksbeer 8mo ago
        Capitalism relies on consumers. It's pretty much central to the idea. That's why the world on average (median) has gotten wealthier and better off over the decades.
        brador 8mo ago
        Capitalism relies on the circulation of capital. Consumers are an anomaly. Citation: nvidia/openai circular loans network.
    - BobaFloutist 8mo ago
      > How many useless living humans do you know? Oh, I can think of about 77 million right off the top of my head.
- cube00 8mo ago
  >If it’s temporary I can live with it. Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.
  - dgxyz 8mo ago
    I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      Yup, when you can’t trust partners (or even nominal allies), what else is there but isolationism?
      - iso1631 8mo ago
        cooperation. Sure you have to isolate certain rogue states - North Korea, Russia, USA. Always the way.
      - dgxyz 8mo ago
        It's not really isolation but exclusion. Push all risks as far away from you as possible.
        lazide 8mo ago
        When everything ‘outside’ is a risk, what would you call a summary of that policy?
        dgxyz 8mo ago
        Well a risk has an abstract level and is either increasing or decreasing. You can look at your risk profile over time and work out how to define policy going forwards. It takes a long time to make changes at country level. US is medium risk and increasing rapidly. Run away quickly.
- roysting 8mo ago
  Traps tend to only go one way.
- buran77 8mo ago
  > I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. That's how inflation works. In this case it seems more narrow though, there's hope the prices will go down. Especially if the AI hype finds a reason to flounder.
- iso1631 8mo ago
  > I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025. CPI went up 30% in the same period. Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive. [0] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/ https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/
  - iso1631 8mo ago
    Amazing how many people on the internet refuse to accept basic facts
- stogot 8mo ago
  I am afraid my NAS will have a hard drive failure, and I won’t be able to order replacements. I should’ve bought a back up
  - wolvoleo 8mo ago
    Exactly, me too and at 10 years it's gonna happen :(
    - knowitnone3 8mo ago
      [dead]
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  > If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI. Hyperscalars refresh hardware and firesale old stock. ~2028 is going to see a lot of high power refurb supply hit the market.
  - Analemma_ 8mo ago
    Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?
    - ethbr1 8mo ago
      Non-standard racks (Meta?) started showing up on the aftermarket around the time that Meta and a few other folks were the only ones using them. Forget the details, as it's been a decade+, but everything gets junked at some point. They're almost always stripped down, then sold as board+chassis only.
    - phil21 8mo ago
      I've seen plenty of stuff from google and meta datacenters on the market. Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago. Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things. Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Many prices didn't really even come down much after COVID. GPU prices never went back to normal. Harddrives neither, I bought 14TB drives 10 years ago for €200, they've never been that low again.
b3lvedere 8mo ago
The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.
- roysting 8mo ago
  You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry? Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    One way of putting it, is the winners are ‘the good guys’.
  - louiskottmann 8mo ago
    People will find a way to not need as much RAM, and thus the devices that require it. Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.
    - iamnothere 8mo ago
      In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use. I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.
ckbkr10 8mo ago
> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again. No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.
- lazide 8mo ago
  A few places will have no choice - low price elasticity, combined with things that need to actually work.
dgxyz 8mo ago
Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway. Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.
- roysting 8mo ago
  It is one tiny sliver of silver lining that “storage/memory/compute is cheap” nonsense that has produced all kinds of outsourced human slop code. That mentality is clearly going to have to die. It could even become a kind of renaissance of efficient code… if there is any need for code at all. The five guys left online might even get efficient and fast loading websites. Honorable mention of the NO-TECH and LOW-TECH magazine site because I liked the effort at exploring efficient use of technology, e.g., their ~500KB solar powered site. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/
  - dgxyz 8mo ago
    I think your ideological perspective is spot on. We went from using technology to solve problems to the diametric opposite of creating new problems to solve with technology. The latter will have to contract considerably. As you say, many problems can be solved without code. If they even need to be solved in the first place. On the efficiency front, most of what we built is for developer efficiency rather than runtime efficiency. Also needs to stop. I'm a big fan of low tech. I still write notes on paper and use a film camera. Thanks for the link - right up my street!
lowdude 8mo ago
Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model
theandrewbailey 8mo ago
At least we can add "use the least amount of RAM and drive space" to our AI prompts. /s
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  Well you can do that, but then the AI won't be nearly as smart as it was before...
LoganDark 8mo ago
> so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks Since when have developers ever lowered hardware requirements? Prosumers will just cough up the extra money while casual users will continue to be left in the dust, like they have been for practically the last decade (or longer).
pseudohadamard 8mo ago
>so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again. Can you DM me your contact details? I have a nice shiny new bridge that I can get you a great deal on.

stingraycharles 8mo ago

I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.

FrankBooth 8mo ago
We useless eaters are to be priced out of life soon enough.
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  Traditionally that hasn't gone well for the rich folk.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 8mo ago
    It also hasn't gone well for the non-rich folk either.
- brador 8mo ago
  Truer than even you dare to admit. How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population. What’s the opposite of survivor bias?
  - malfist 8mo ago
    It takes a profound lack of empathy to refer to your neighbors as "useless living humans"
    - scarecrowbob 8mo ago
      Furthermore, it's usually just plain dangerous.
    - brador 8mo ago
      It is meant in the capitalist sense. Your horror at the statement is the point.
      - munksbeer 8mo ago
        Capitalism relies on consumers. It's pretty much central to the idea. That's why the world on average (median) has gotten wealthier and better off over the decades.
        brador 8mo ago
        Capitalism relies on the circulation of capital. Consumers are an anomaly. Citation: nvidia/openai circular loans network.
  - BobaFloutist 8mo ago
    > How many useless living humans do you know? Oh, I can think of about 77 million right off the top of my head.
cube00 8mo ago
>If it’s temporary I can live with it. Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
  - lazide 8mo ago
    Yup, when you can’t trust partners (or even nominal allies), what else is there but isolationism?
    - iso1631 8mo ago
      cooperation. Sure you have to isolate certain rogue states - North Korea, Russia, USA. Always the way.
    - dgxyz 8mo ago
      It's not really isolation but exclusion. Push all risks as far away from you as possible.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        When everything ‘outside’ is a risk, what would you call a summary of that policy?
        dgxyz 8mo ago
        Well a risk has an abstract level and is either increasing or decreasing. You can look at your risk profile over time and work out how to define policy going forwards. It takes a long time to make changes at country level. US is medium risk and increasing rapidly. Run away quickly.
roysting 8mo ago
Traps tend to only go one way.
buran77 8mo ago
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. That's how inflation works. In this case it seems more narrow though, there's hope the prices will go down. Especially if the AI hype finds a reason to flounder.
iso1631 8mo ago
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025. CPI went up 30% in the same period. Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive. [0] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/ https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/fuel-watch/
- iso1631 8mo ago
  Amazing how many people on the internet refuse to accept basic facts
stogot 8mo ago
I am afraid my NAS will have a hard drive failure, and I won’t be able to order replacements. I should’ve bought a back up
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Exactly, me too and at 10 years it's gonna happen :(
  - knowitnone3 8mo ago
    [dead]
ethbr1 8mo ago
> If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI. Hyperscalars refresh hardware and firesale old stock. ~2028 is going to see a lot of high power refurb supply hit the market.
- Analemma_ 8mo ago
  Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
    Non-standard racks (Meta?) started showing up on the aftermarket around the time that Meta and a few other folks were the only ones using them. Forget the details, as it's been a decade+, but everything gets junked at some point. They're almost always stripped down, then sold as board+chassis only.
  - phil21 8mo ago
    I've seen plenty of stuff from google and meta datacenters on the market. Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago. Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things. Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.
wolvoleo 8mo ago
Many prices didn't really even come down much after COVID. GPU prices never went back to normal. Harddrives neither, I bought 14TB drives 10 years ago for €200, they've never been that low again.

b3lvedere 8mo ago

The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.

roysting 8mo ago
You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry? Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
- lazide 8mo ago
  One way of putting it, is the winners are ‘the good guys’.
- louiskottmann 8mo ago
  People will find a way to not need as much RAM, and thus the devices that require it. Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.
  - iamnothere 8mo ago
    In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use. I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.

ckbkr10 8mo ago

> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again. No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.

lazide 8mo ago
A few places will have no choice - low price elasticity, combined with things that need to actually work.

dgxyz 8mo ago

Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway. Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.

roysting 8mo ago
It is one tiny sliver of silver lining that “storage/memory/compute is cheap” nonsense that has produced all kinds of outsourced human slop code. That mentality is clearly going to have to die. It could even become a kind of renaissance of efficient code… if there is any need for code at all. The five guys left online might even get efficient and fast loading websites. Honorable mention of the NO-TECH and LOW-TECH magazine site because I liked the effort at exploring efficient use of technology, e.g., their ~500KB solar powered site. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/
- dgxyz 8mo ago
  I think your ideological perspective is spot on. We went from using technology to solve problems to the diametric opposite of creating new problems to solve with technology. The latter will have to contract considerably. As you say, many problems can be solved without code. If they even need to be solved in the first place. On the efficiency front, most of what we built is for developer efficiency rather than runtime efficiency. Also needs to stop. I'm a big fan of low tech. I still write notes on paper and use a film camera. Thanks for the link - right up my street!

lowdude 8mo ago

Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model

theandrewbailey 8mo ago

At least we can add "use the least amount of RAM and drive space" to our AI prompts. /s

zozbot234 8mo ago
Well you can do that, but then the AI won't be nearly as smart as it was before...

LoganDark 8mo ago

> so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks Since when have developers ever lowered hardware requirements? Prosumers will just cough up the extra money while casual users will continue to be left in the dust, like they have been for practically the last decade (or longer).

pseudohadamard 8mo ago

>so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again. Can you DM me your contact details? I have a nice shiny new bridge that I can get you a great deal on.