The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*.

Charlie Stross

RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853

The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.

Charlie Stross

I just noticed I have 18Tb of storage plugged into my desktop (a laptop with its own 2Tb of built-in SSD) and WTF am I doing with it all?!?

@blogdiva

HP van Braam

@cstross Yeah, I recently came to a similar conclusion.

I had replaced the fans in my 4 year old laptop and now it is ... just fine. Like I'm actually no longer even considering replacing it.

Now I did buy a ridiculous laptop 4 years ago, but still.

I wonder how many people could extend the life if their machines by just cleaning out the dust/replacing the fans.

Oblomov

@cstross @blogdiva I have such large storage, where I keep all my audio and film and game installer backups because fuck streaming.

Charlie Stross

@Kierkegaanks It probably *will* kill the industry. A lot of smaller VARs will go out of business, bigger ones will see sales stagnate and be forced to put up prices b/c the data center futures bids are ramping prices, then the bubble will burst and we're in Great Depression 2.0. Not much will come through that intact.

Mark Dennehy

@cstross @blogdiva Tell me you have an oversized porn library without telling me you have an oversized porn library

Charlie Stross

@markdennehy @blogdiva Actually most of that storage is redundant backup drives

furicle

@graydon @cstross that's not fair - there was no attempt to kill aftermarket parts, the aftermarket is thriving.

A poor comparison

Jack William Bell

@bithive @cstross

I thought that went into /dev/null?

Jack William Bell

@oblomov @cstross @blogdiva

Same. Fuck streaming.

⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️

@furicle @graydon @cstross indeed. My car is in the shop *right now* having 3rd party parking sensors added.

Mark Dennehy

@cstross @blogdiva A redundantly backed up porn archive, you say?

mbpaz

@cstross ...which only works for as long as nobody else can start producing alternative hardware.

And, come on: decades-old DDR3 is barely 5 times slower than modern DDR5. For most practical uses, cheap and somewhat slower than top-end memory would be perfectly fine.