4 ms·

They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a compu

They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine. What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.

tptacek 4mo ago
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
  Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions? Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.
    - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
      Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation. Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
      - tptacek 4mo ago
        What's the thing that relies on servers that got 4x more expensive for consumers? I think this is something you want to be true more than it's something that is true.
        applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
        I didn't make that exact claim, and I also spoke of future tense "will be". Obviously, the budget prices just raised. You can see some anecdotes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965 ...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers. For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices. --- rate-limited, so: > Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad". I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
- lovich 4mo ago
  its anecdotal, but the non software engineers in my social circles wont even consider trying games with rumors of breaking hardware like Jumpspace with GPU bricking[1] because they feel they can no longer afford to replace the hardware in their gaming rigs. I have had several people independently complain to me that they are locked out of the hobby whenever their GPU or ram dies. [1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/591783109130732727/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...

tptacek 4mo ago

I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.

applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions? Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.
  - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
    Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation. Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
    - tptacek 4mo ago
      What's the thing that relies on servers that got 4x more expensive for consumers? I think this is something you want to be true more than it's something that is true.
      - applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
        I didn't make that exact claim, and I also spoke of future tense "will be". Obviously, the budget prices just raised. You can see some anecdotes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965 ...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers. For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices. --- rate-limited, so: > Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad". I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
lovich 4mo ago
its anecdotal, but the non software engineers in my social circles wont even consider trying games with rumors of breaking hardware like Jumpspace with GPU bricking[1] because they feel they can no longer afford to replace the hardware in their gaming rigs. I have had several people independently complain to me that they are locked out of the hobby whenever their GPU or ram dies. [1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/591783109130732727/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...