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10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to act
by xbmcuser 5mo ago
10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.
- tetris11 5mo agoIt's an active attack on the Hobbyist space. Qualcomm buying Arduino solidified this idea in my head. They literally want us to own nothing.
- jmclnx 5mo agoTin foil hat :) But in a way I do agree with you, I doubt it is as organized as you imply. Yes, companies and governments do not way anyone on a General Computing Device at all. They want to see exactly what content you are viewing and responding to. Microsoft and Apple have been slowly adding various forms of spyware and locking down what applications you can use. And Cell Phones ? Those are the Holy Grail of what Microsoft and Apple want to move your Laptop/PC to. Right now Linux and BSD are the only games in town for non-spyware systems. But the new Age Verification Laws seems to be a first attempt to lock-down even Linux :( Since the Linux Foundation is owned by large corporations, I feel that will succeed. For the BSDs ? Right now seems they are flying under the radar.
- ButyTh0 5mo agoWhy do you doubt this when the rich also have Signal? They meet and talk out of view? The insider trading coming out of Washington? Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?
- ButyTh0 5mo agoBecause they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them. The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis. Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth. "Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!" Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!
- GolfPopper 5mo ago>May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis. Why associate them with roles that have a degree of positive association and human connection? Treating them as faeries, vampires, or demons seems more accurate.
- fzeroracer 5mo agoI think treating them as the fae, vampire or demons is sort of insulting. Those creatures are at least bound by supernatural laws and can be negotiated with in some way.
- ButyTh0 5mo ago[flagged]
- vkou 5mo agoNah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily. It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now. Now we are just playing with fire.
- ButyTh0 5mo ago[dead]
- andrekandre 5mo ago> we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now sometimes i wonder if this is what happens when organic growth stops/slows; when (for lack of a better word) desperate people just start looking for any alternative to keep the growth train running...
- vkou 5mo ago
- armchairhacker 5mo agoHobbyist equipment is still relatively cheap. You can get previous-gen hardware for formerly current-gen prices, you can run lots of “hobbyist” software on low RAM and no GPU. It’s bad, but it’s not “literally own nothing”.
- jauntywundrkind 5mo agoThe second hand market is going to have much much more lag. But it's very unclear that this is going to sustain indefinitely.
- MostlyStable 5mo agoYeah, I'm not sure that fewer people will own computers, I do think people will shift to much longer upgrade cycles.
- serf 5mo agoit just depends on how you define computer. people will own an increasing number of dumb terminals connected to rented services. does that reduce the number of computers? well, no.. so, imo : the trick isn't to reduce physical ownership of devices, the trick is to make it so that you need Big Iron in order to do anything. One way that might be achieved is by forming social and cultural dependence on models so large that no one individual could possibly run them...
- laughing_man 5mo agoOr live with lower specs. You can still get a Chromebook for $200 and install Xubuntu on it. I did that, and it's perfect for video conferencing and web surfing. You certainly can't play CoD on it, but even if you're looking to play games there are some older games that run on it just fine.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo agoWho cares if Qualcomm owns Arduino. It has never been cheaper to get into embedded computing. You can buy Arduino-compatible STM32 Nucleo boards straight from STMicroelectronics for $15-20, and that's first party. If you're willing to buy third party clones there are boards on AliExpress for $10 or less.
- Tepix 5mo agoMost things were cheaper last year. But you can still get RP2049 Zero for less than a buck each and run FUZIX. Neat.
- varispeed 5mo ago[dead]
- ahartmetz 5mo agoAt current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoIt would unfortunately be considered contraband in the US or tariffed 500%
- ahartmetz 5mo agoIf only the rest of the world could buy it, it would probably work almost as well (edit: to lower prices in the US). Besides, I'm in the rest of the world ;)
- donmcronald 5mo agoIt'll be the same for Canada. We're already seeing satanic panic style action against things like TP-Link networking equipment and Hikvision cameras. Funny how those are a couple of the brands that can run 100% locally without a connection to the internet.
- Gathering6678 5mo agoChina is also short on supply... Capex for these are planned years ahead and just not flexible enough to deal with the supply squeeze right now.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoChina is famously fast at building things, but maybe not semiconductor factories... especially with long lead times from Western suppliers.
- laughing_man 5mo agoI'm not sure that's going to change unless the LLM stuff slumps. Chip makers get burned every few decades by building boom-time capacity that comes online just after the crash. They're going to be reluctant to make big capex spends unless they think the demand is durable.
- sokoloff 5mo agoAfter the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019? Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway. Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.
- marshray 5mo agoI just looked at some low-end NAS-oriented HDDs. The cost $/TB is 2x similar ones I bought 5 years ago. That has never before happened in the history of computing, and it violates long-held, fundamental assumptions.
- AshleyGrant 5mo agoI think your idea of what "normal people" can afford is a bit off. Normal people aren't buying $1500 computers. And they definitely aren't buying $3000 computers.
- sokoloff 5mo agoAn 4K Apple ][ cost the equivalent of around $7K when released. A C64 cost the equivalent of around $2K when released. Both were fairly popular and vastly less useful than a computer today. If the cheapest useful computer ends up costing $3K, it will still be purchased and will still be worth it at around $1/day of useful life.
- cogman10 5mo agoAnd currently the US government is actively trying to ban chinese hardware from the consumer market [1]. So gonna be real fun. Maybe we'll get a chinese hardware black market. [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/fcc-banning-imports-new-chinese-made-routers-citing-security-concerns-2026-03-23/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...