11 ms·

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardwar

by barrkel 7mo ago

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while. This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it. I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.

picture 7mo ago
It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years? Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech. The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs. That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
  - sfn42 7mo ago
    I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever. I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same job.
    - barrkel 7mo ago
      Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription. It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway. The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).
      - sfn42 7mo ago
        I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's even better is to not buy a new car, let some other sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it a few years after that for not much less than you paid for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going for more than I paid. I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really good deal, but it's really not much different than buying new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it. A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see any reason to buy brand new.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7mo ago
  Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/ https://permacomputing.net/ That’s for everyone
- bluedino 7mo ago
  I've always went way over on RAM, for the most part. 32, 64, then 128GB of memory. Never really used it all, usually only about 40%, but it's one of those better to have than not need, and better than selling and re-buying a larger memory machine (when it's something you can't upgrade, like a Mac or certain other laptops)
guessmyname 7mo ago
> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a single, non-upgradable machine anyway.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated push. Can control of compute be far behind? It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision. I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
  - jusssi 7mo ago
    > Can control of compute be far behind? How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
    - cesarb 7mo ago
      > How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).
      - balamatom 7mo ago
        Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance, this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"
    - balamatom 7mo ago
torben-friis 7mo ago
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
  - mettamage 7mo ago
    This is the way
  - tormeh 7mo ago
    For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.
    - skydhash 7mo ago
      That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
      - lpcvoid 7mo ago
        I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
        skydhash 7mo ago
        Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
echelon 7mo ago
Local is a dead end. Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete. When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to slow them down or even break them. If there was something 80-90% as good as Opus or Seedance or Nano Banana, more of the ecosystem would switch to open source because it offers control and sovereignty. But we don't have that right now. If we had really competitive open weights models, universities, research teams, other labs, and other companies would be able to collaboratively contribute to the effort. Everyone in the open source world is trying to shrink these models to fit on their 3090 instead, though, and that's such a wasted effort. It's short term thinking. An "OpenRunPod/OpenOpenRouter" + one click deploy of models just as good as Gemini will win over LMStudio and ComfyUI trying to hack a solution on your own Nvidia gaming card. That's such a tiny segment of the market, and the tools are all horrible to use anyway. It's like we learned nothing from "The Year of Linux on Desktop 1999". Only when we realized the data center was our friend did we frame our open source effort appropriately.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-based offload being worked on as of late you can even experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference platforms for these too.
- lpcvoid 7mo ago
  > Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill a bit?
  - nhecker 7mo ago
    In a similar vein: seek efficiency. I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.) Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.
raincole 7mo ago
We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  > People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho. They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).
- molszanski 7mo ago
  > We won't be in a supply crunch forever. This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut
  - drecked 7mo ago
    I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen. Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead. Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
    - bitmasher9 7mo ago
      If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.
shevy-java 7mo ago
> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article, but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously. Just compare them. That is fact. It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can afford something because the prices are now much higher than before. Add to this the oil crisis Trump started and we are now suddenly having to pay more just because a few mafiosi benefit from this. (See Krugman's analysis of the recent stock market flow of money/stocks.)
- bluGill 7mo ago
  General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM factories.
- SirMaster 7mo ago
  The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.
kgeist 7mo ago
>we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores, artificially. Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as consumer hardware?
- girvo 7mo ago
  Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself… SM121 on the GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100 hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10 has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.
motbus3 7mo ago
I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and commodities is a power move. We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry in china, oil in middle east, etc... This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with money and/or power enough to tilt the scale
- windexh8er 7mo ago
  It's not a power move, it's a cartel and they've done this before. Gamers Nexus did a fantastic piece on how where we're at today is very similar to the DRAM price fixing and market manipulation just a couple decades ago [0]. This is the big players taking full advantage of an opportunity for profit. [0] https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF
porkeynon 7mo ago
$20k? People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there’s this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore. But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just like the looksmaxxer.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless, it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  [dead]
Aurornis 7mo ago
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point? Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.
- chmod775 7mo ago
  They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do. A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    > The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close. This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage. For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for multi threaded work. Anyone claiming laptop CPUs can’t keep up with desktop CPUs hasn’t been paying attention. The latest laptops are amazing.
    - chmod775 7mo ago
      > The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here. I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024. Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though. It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.
TheRoque 7mo ago
We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is, we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.
- margalabargala 7mo ago
  Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
  - globalnode 7mo ago
    Hilarious how comments like this consistently get downvoted, theres a lot of special interest lurkers on this forum
  - TheRoque 7mo ago
    Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas. And even if we figured out how to electrify everything (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.), nuclear fuel (uranium)...
    - kogasa240p 7mo ago
      Keep your eye on butanol https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.html https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol....
danaris 7mo ago
> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. What are you talking about? My laptops are, and always have been, primarily places where I do local computing. I write code there, I watch movies there, I listen to music there, I play games there...all with local storage, local compute, and local control (though I do also store a bunch of my movies on a personal media server, housed in my TV stand, because it can hold a lot more). My smartphone is similar. If you think that the vast majority of the work most people do on their personal computers is moving to LLMs, or cloud gaming, then I think you are operating in a pretty serious bubble. 99.9% of all work that most people do is still best done locally: word processing, spreadsheets, email, writing code, etc. Even in the cases where the application is hosted online (like Google Docs/Sheets), the compute is still primarily local. The closest to what you're describing that I think makes any sense is the proliferation of streaming media—but again, while they store the vast libraries of content for us, the decoding is done locally, after the content has reached our devices. It doesn't matter if a cutting-edge AI-optimized server can perform 10, 100, or 1000 times better than my laptop at any particular task: if the speed at which my laptop performs it is faster than I, as a human, can keep up (whatever that means for the particular task), then there's no reason not to do the task locally.
- barrkel 7mo ago
  Single biggest problem with doing compute on a laptop is it stops when you shut the lid.
NoSalt 7mo ago
> "I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop" This absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to yourself?
- distances 7mo ago
  I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, and tablets is way under 20k. I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than buying a top system once.
  - NoSalt 7mo ago
    I haven't purchased a new computer in, at least, 10 years. I take pride (i.e., I have a sickness) in purchasing used laptops off eBay, beefing them up, and loading Debian on them. My two main computers are a Dell E5440 and a Lenovo ThinkPad T420. I, too, am a software developer, but [apparently] not as much of a rock star software developer at this gentleman. :-D
- barrkel 7mo ago
  Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop. I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines. All sorts really. I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes. Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools. The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down. YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.
- snypher 7mo ago
dmitrygr 7mo ago
> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute Are you kidding? Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.
- aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
  > Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did. Most applications don't make aggressive use of the SIMD instructions that modern x86 chips offer, thus you get this impression. :-(
  - dmitrygr 7mo ago
    Users do not care why the perf they get is what they get. What good is AVX2048 if nobody uses it?
clusterhacks 7mo ago
"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . " This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . . . I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.
- throwawaytea 7mo ago
  Professional mechanics might do that, but a home mechanic can get very far one one $200 set, and then another $300 spent over years buying several useful things for each project. I've replaced transmissions, head gaskets, and done all work for our family cars for two decades based on a Costco toolkit, and 20 trips to the autoparts store or Walmart when I needed something to help out. Maybe I'm being a little forgetful that yes I bought a jack, and Jack stands, and have a random pipe as a breaker bar, and other odds and ends. But you can go very far for $1k as a DIYer.
doctorpangloss 7mo ago
You're responding to an LLM authored article that doesn't know anything. "Let that sink in for a moment."
randusername 7mo ago
This will be me. Bestowing upon my descendants a collection of Mighty Beanz, a few unkillable appliances, and the best consumer computing hardware the early 2020s could buy. And I fear they will be equally confused and annoyed by disposing of all of them.
nayuki 7mo ago
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. It really feels like we're slowly marching back to the era of mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Maybe the democratization of hardware was a temporary aberration.
wat10000 7mo ago
I think you're probably right, but I'm not so confident the supply crunch will end. Tech feels increasingly fragile with more and more consolidation. We have a huge chunk of advanced chip manufacturing situated on a tiny island off the coast of a rising superpower that hates that island being independent. Fabs in general are so expensive that you need a huge market to justify building one. That market is there, for now. But it doesn't seem like there's much redundancy. If there's an economic shock, like, I dunno, 20% of the world's oil supply suddenly being blockaded, I worry that could tip things into a death spiral instead.
efficax 7mo ago
i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram
- account42 7mo ago
  Same, but that was over 5 years ago.
WheelsAtLarge 7mo ago
[dead]
rkagerer 7mo ago
Care to share some more detailed specs?
pedalpete 7mo ago
I think the thin-client/flat-client is a pendulum that swings every few years. Main-frame (thin) -> PC (fat) -> Internet/Cloud (thin) -> Mobile (fat) -> AI (thin) I expect this to continue until the next technology transition. In each of these shifts, and there have been others, things are not completely fat or thin, more of an in-between state but leaning to local vs cloud.
didgetmaster 7mo ago
I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time. Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!

by barrkel 7mo ago

picture 7mo ago

It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years? Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.

barrkel 7mo ago
People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech. The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs. That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
- sfn42 7mo ago
  I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever. I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same job.
  - barrkel 7mo ago
    Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription. It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway. The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).
    - sfn42 7mo ago
      I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's even better is to not buy a new car, let some other sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it a few years after that for not much less than you paid for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going for more than I paid. I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really good deal, but it's really not much different than buying new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it. A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see any reason to buy brand new.
9wzYQbTYsAIc 7mo ago
Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/ https://permacomputing.net/ That’s for everyone
bluedino 7mo ago
I've always went way over on RAM, for the most part. 32, 64, then 128GB of memory. Never really used it all, usually only about 40%, but it's one of those better to have than not need, and better than selling and re-buying a larger memory machine (when it's something you can't upgrade, like a Mac or certain other laptops)

guessmyname 7mo ago

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […] 768GB of RAM is insane… Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a single, non-upgradable machine anyway.

barrkel 7mo ago
Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated push. Can control of compute be far behind? It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision. I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
- jusssi 7mo ago
  > Can control of compute be far behind? How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
  - cesarb 7mo ago
    > How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).
    - balamatom 7mo ago
      Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance, this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"
  - balamatom 7mo ago

torben-friis 7mo ago

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
- mettamage 7mo ago
  This is the way
- tormeh 7mo ago
  For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.
  - skydhash 7mo ago
    That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
    - lpcvoid 7mo ago
      I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
      - skydhash 7mo ago
        Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.

echelon 7mo ago

Local is a dead end. Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete. When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to slow them down or even break them. If there was something 80-90% as good as Opus or Seedance or Nano Banana, more of the ecosystem would switch to open source because it offers control and sovereignty. But we don't have that right now. If we had really competitive open weights models, universities, research teams, other labs, and other companies would be able to collaboratively contribute to the effort. Everyone in the open source world is trying to shrink these models to fit on their 3090 instead, though, and that's such a wasted effort. It's short term thinking. An "OpenRunPod/OpenOpenRouter" + one click deploy of models just as good as Gemini will win over LMStudio and ComfyUI trying to hack a solution on your own Nvidia gaming card. That's such a tiny segment of the market, and the tools are all horrible to use anyway. It's like we learned nothing from "The Year of Linux on Desktop 1999". Only when we realized the data center was our friend did we frame our open source effort appropriately.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-based offload being worked on as of late you can even experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference platforms for these too.
lpcvoid 7mo ago
> Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute. Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill a bit?
- nhecker 7mo ago
  In a similar vein: seek efficiency. I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.) Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.

raincole 7mo ago

We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.

TeMPOraL 7mo ago
> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho. They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).
molszanski 7mo ago
> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut
- drecked 7mo ago
  I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen. Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead. Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
  - bitmasher9 7mo ago
    If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.

shevy-java 7mo ago

> We won't be in a supply crunch forever. I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article, but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously. Just compare them. That is fact. It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can afford something because the prices are now much higher than before. Add to this the oil crisis Trump started and we are now suddenly having to pay more just because a few mafiosi benefit from this. (See Krugman's analysis of the recent stock market flow of money/stocks.)

bluGill 7mo ago
General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM factories.
SirMaster 7mo ago
The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.

kgeist 7mo ago

>we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores, artificially. Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as consumer hardware?

girvo 7mo ago
Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself… SM121 on the GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100 hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10 has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.

motbus3 7mo ago

I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and commodities is a power move. We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry in china, oil in middle east, etc... This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with money and/or power enough to tilt the scale

windexh8er 7mo ago
It's not a power move, it's a cartel and they've done this before. Gamers Nexus did a fantastic piece on how where we're at today is very similar to the DRAM price fixing and market manipulation just a couple decades ago [0]. This is the big players taking full advantage of an opportunity for profit. [0] https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF

porkeynon 7mo ago

$20k? People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there’s this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore. But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just like the looksmaxxer.

barrkel 7mo ago
Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless, it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.
embedding-shape 7mo ago
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Aurornis 7mo ago

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point? Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.

chmod775 7mo ago
They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do. A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close. This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage. For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for multi threaded work. Anyone claiming laptop CPUs can’t keep up with desktop CPUs hasn’t been paying attention. The latest laptops are amazing.
  - chmod775 7mo ago
    > The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling. Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here. I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024. Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though. It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.

TheRoque 7mo ago

We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is, we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.

margalabargala 7mo ago
Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
- globalnode 7mo ago
  Hilarious how comments like this consistently get downvoted, theres a lot of special interest lurkers on this forum
- TheRoque 7mo ago
  Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas. And even if we figured out how to electrify everything (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.), nuclear fuel (uranium)...
  - kogasa240p 7mo ago
    Keep your eye on butanol https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol.html https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol....

danaris 7mo ago

> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. What are you talking about? My laptops are, and always have been, primarily places where I do local computing. I write code there, I watch movies there, I listen to music there, I play games there...all with local storage, local compute, and local control (though I do also store a bunch of my movies on a personal media server, housed in my TV stand, because it can hold a lot more). My smartphone is similar. If you think that the vast majority of the work most people do on their personal computers is moving to LLMs, or cloud gaming, then I think you are operating in a pretty serious bubble. 99.9% of all work that most people do is still best done locally: word processing, spreadsheets, email, writing code, etc. Even in the cases where the application is hosted online (like Google Docs/Sheets), the compute is still primarily local. The closest to what you're describing that I think makes any sense is the proliferation of streaming media—but again, while they store the vast libraries of content for us, the decoding is done locally, after the content has reached our devices. It doesn't matter if a cutting-edge AI-optimized server can perform 10, 100, or 1000 times better than my laptop at any particular task: if the speed at which my laptop performs it is faster than I, as a human, can keep up (whatever that means for the particular task), then there's no reason not to do the task locally.

barrkel 7mo ago
Single biggest problem with doing compute on a laptop is it stops when you shut the lid.

NoSalt 7mo ago

> "I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop" This absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to yourself?

distances 7mo ago
I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, and tablets is way under 20k. I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than buying a top system once.
- NoSalt 7mo ago
  I haven't purchased a new computer in, at least, 10 years. I take pride (i.e., I have a sickness) in purchasing used laptops off eBay, beefing them up, and loading Debian on them. My two main computers are a Dell E5440 and a Lenovo ThinkPad T420. I, too, am a software developer, but [apparently] not as much of a rock star software developer at this gentleman. :-D
barrkel 7mo ago
Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop. I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines. All sorts really. I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes. Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools. The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down. YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.
snypher 7mo ago

dmitrygr 7mo ago

> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute Are you kidding? Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.

aleph_minus_one 7mo ago
> Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did. Most applications don't make aggressive use of the SIMD instructions that modern x86 chips offer, thus you get this impression. :-(
- dmitrygr 7mo ago
  Users do not care why the perf they get is what they get. What good is AVX2048 if nobody uses it?

clusterhacks 7mo ago

"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . " This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . . . I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.

throwawaytea 7mo ago
Professional mechanics might do that, but a home mechanic can get very far one one $200 set, and then another $300 spent over years buying several useful things for each project. I've replaced transmissions, head gaskets, and done all work for our family cars for two decades based on a Costco toolkit, and 20 trips to the autoparts store or Walmart when I needed something to help out. Maybe I'm being a little forgetful that yes I bought a jack, and Jack stands, and have a random pipe as a breaker bar, and other odds and ends. But you can go very far for $1k as a DIYer.

doctorpangloss 7mo ago

You're responding to an LLM authored article that doesn't know anything. "Let that sink in for a moment."

randusername 7mo ago

This will be me. Bestowing upon my descendants a collection of Mighty Beanz, a few unkillable appliances, and the best consumer computing hardware the early 2020s could buy. And I fear they will be equally confused and annoyed by disposing of all of them.

nayuki 7mo ago

> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been. It really feels like we're slowly marching back to the era of mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Maybe the democratization of hardware was a temporary aberration.

wat10000 7mo ago

I think you're probably right, but I'm not so confident the supply crunch will end. Tech feels increasingly fragile with more and more consolidation. We have a huge chunk of advanced chip manufacturing situated on a tiny island off the coast of a rising superpower that hates that island being independent. Fabs in general are so expensive that you need a huge market to justify building one. That market is there, for now. But it doesn't seem like there's much redundancy. If there's an economic shock, like, I dunno, 20% of the world's oil supply suddenly being blockaded, I worry that could tip things into a death spiral instead.

efficax 7mo ago

i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram

account42 7mo ago
Same, but that was over 5 years ago.

WheelsAtLarge 7mo ago

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rkagerer 7mo ago

Care to share some more detailed specs?

pedalpete 7mo ago

I think the thin-client/flat-client is a pendulum that swings every few years. Main-frame (thin) -> PC (fat) -> Internet/Cloud (thin) -> Mobile (fat) -> AI (thin) I expect this to continue until the next technology transition. In each of these shifts, and there have been others, things are not completely fat or thin, more of an in-between state but leaning to local vs cloud.

didgetmaster 7mo ago

I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time. Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!