- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
> has an AI slop summary
What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Your TAM is about to go bam, so cut the shit and make us some RAM.
I can’t take anything that uses the word “tremendously” seriously any more.
Slammed!
They gotta get while the getting’s good or they’ll miss out on that margin
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
These people keep saying “it’s the future” but it just seems like they’re chasing pink elephants and forcing us to partake in the delusion.
That delusion keeps pumping up stocks.
Forget ram. Wait until there’s widespread power outages yet you’re somehow paying 10x for your electricity bill because of the new data center down the street.
this is actually happening
my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after
we have a power making dam in town
historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA
Combined over 20% last November, great times!!
Combined means we have:
first 1k kwh rate Above 1k kwh rate
And the above 1k kwh changes seasonally.
they send us these cute charts and stuff about our usage
they show you a “you are using xyz% more then previous year” type stuff
but my wife keeps it and their little bullshit is because they keep changing the rate and then using the new rate against your old usage as comparison. Looks like OMG we used a lot more power then last year! We should consider cutting something out.
But the actual meter reading numbers are almost always the same year after year
Wenatchee?
I like the suggestions to save money and low usage.
“Have you tried living in complete darkness this month? You could save $2 off your bill!”
“Perhaps try not using electricity this month. Or, consider getting a second source of income to turn on your fridge for a few hours a day!”
Inb4 we get astroturfed “Luddites” telling us to just abandon electricity and live like the Amish.
With gas prices at multiyear lows and electricity being so expensive it’s really hard to justify electrifying appliances. I was considering doing so (gas dryer, stove, water heater, furnace), but I think if I did I’d be paying an extra $300/month for quite a long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
But think of the (big tech) shareholders!
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
IMHO there’s much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for “outdated” hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
What’s funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
What does a kitchen server do?
Serves kitchens
“Your kitchen, sir”
“Our special today, is silverfish and granite, served with a side of wood chips, garnished with table salt.”
Discworld?
?
🤔 ah, I suppose that makes sense
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn’t want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
It is and it isn’t. There’s a ton of tech waste and lots of people get rid of systems that are still quite capable. Obviously there’s less power but even a 6 year old gaming rig can still run most games, just at lower framerates
Not copium when the purpose is different.
I really need to get a new display replacement for my old vaio f series laptop. The screen layers are doing the funny vinegar thing. That and some sort of ssd. Maybe a USB Dom or some msata thing with a converter board.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Please tell me more.
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
One of the classics
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
[email protected] looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.
Micron reported a revenue of $37.38 billion for fiscal year 2025. Nvidia reported a revenue of $57 billion for just its latest quarter. AI is hot. Meanwhile, inflation and interest rates continue to depress consumer spending power here in the U.S., which is reflected abroad as well. AI has also torched jobs—it’s fueled thousands of layoffs already.
Torched jobs, the environment, and climate.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the fevered pace of tech often has led to good outcomes in the end.
Only when it’s well-planned and well executed, with people and our habitat treated well.
But that doesn’t change the individual impact of incomes lost, plans destroyed, security evaporated. So when a company makes a play for my agreement through emotion, I always wonder: Who benefits from this vision?
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
chuckles
weird emotional appeals
“I think we’ve done a lot of damage lately with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. […] It’s not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments.”
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
deleted by creator
They ain’t gonna optimize shit, they’ll tell us to turn on DLSS/FSR/XeSS to exceed 20-30 FPS, or for just $59.99 a month here’s time limited access to a streaming computer that can run at decent framerate (no games included)
It’s not a win-win, it’s a silver lining amongst a shitstorm of suck.
Why? Because what if you’re not trying to upgrade but just maintain? What if your RAM fails? Or your GPU? Now you’re out there with the AI tech bros vying for a piece of a production line that you have no influence over, but they do. If you just built your rig, you might be safe to wait a while, but what if you built in 2020? Those parts are getting old, by computer standards; they don’t last forever.
We don’t actually know when prices will normalize, because nobody is calling in the IOUs, and nobody is clamping down on that circular economy; 2027 is just a guess. We might be waiting even longer.
I hope you are correct, but I don’t think you are.
I don’t think game devs (or web devs or any dev really) even remember what optimization means, at this point. They sure aren’t going to start prioritizing it now, especially if major companies continue to be out of touch about what gamers actually want.
I mean we have microtransactions, we have games as service, we have single player games with online connection requirements, we have games that need logins to other services, etc etc etc. no gamers want these things, but it doesn’t matter because companies do. And companies aren’t going to care if you can’t afford to play their game on your own equipment, they’ll offer you a subscription to stream it from theirs.
You just described the AAA gaming market almost to a T.
The indie market, on the other hand, typically cares about what they produce, and you’re far more likely to get optimized games there that don’t require extra launchers, internet connections, or a massive GPU—not that it doesn’t happen there, mind you, but it’s going to tend to be more of a skill issue than a profit-driven one.
Also, there’s still very good games in the retro space.
Its just personal evidence but i see more and more indie games using UE5 and a lot of them run like shit. Most games dont need real time lighting, global illumination, software or hardware raytracing based solutions etc. But instead of baking that stuff once onto textures like its 2004 on the developers rig we now have indie titles with artstyles and visuals which were achievable 20 years ago but done with bleeding edge graphics technologies which dont even run well on modern mid tier GPUs.
Dont get me wrong we still have tons of indie titles which run on a potato. But more hardware demanding titles really picked up recently even in the indie space.
Absolutely, I agree. I think we are likely to see a shift in what indie devs use for their game engines (love2d, Godot, etc.) as PC specs stagnate, and I am of the opinion that GOG will see an increase in sales, too.
The “runs like shit” games have a shrinking market.
It’s certainly true that the indie market is better about that stuff, but the indie market also generally isn’t considered the driver or trend-setter of the overall games market the way AAA studios are. It would be amazing if that trend shifts, don’t get me wrong, but until or unless it does, I don’t see this going well overall. It does, though, mean that people who care will still have options, and that’s good, so solid point.
I figure the digital-only consoles are a stepping stone toward this. I’d never consider one myself because if I don’t own a copy of the game that I can sell, I’m not paying for it just in principle. But a ton of people wanted the convenience over the practicality of resale. Digital-only consoles have basically killed the physical game market going forward, since it’s been basically dead on PC for ages. I see the same thing happening with the consoles themselves. I mean ps+ already has a streaming option and a substantial portion of their catalogue is only available to play that way. I’m sure Xbox has the same thing, probably with a similar portion of content locked behind streaming from their servers. I don’t even really understand why they would do this since the bandwidth to stream is far higher than to download and play offline, so I have to assume there’s something behind it like a push toward that model. Get people used to it as an option, then make it the only option.
And there’s nothing indie studios can really do about those big trends led by big studios/companies, except to quietly keep doing what they were already doing, and make a huge fuss about it when they get their 15 minutes like larian has done. Wake up as many people as you can sort of thing.
I agree it’s not a win-win, it’s more of a win-lose tradeoff, but it will certainly drive customers away from those shitty companies, and towards the indie developers who don’t do microtransactions and unoptimized PC-crushing graphics-fests with 16-billion-K textures and Nvidia’s latest 600x FSXLAA running on every pixel 3 million times per second.
Indie developers may not prioritize optimization, but if there’s a need to, they will, and most of the time, they simply don’t have to. Balatro and Vampire Survivors are going to be doing just fine on any hardware.
Bizarre logic, and I almost exclusively play older games. Consumers being priced out of consumption is never good no matter how hard anyone tries to spin it.
I really don’t know, man. I want to believe that but at the same time I think it will simply be a mediocre situation.
Cheap prices mean a lot of people upgrade and the game companies increase performance demands.
Big prices mean people often can’t even get into gaming.
Consumerism is the issue in the first case and greedy companies is the issue in the second… Idk…
I only play PCVR games and i can tell you we are still in a very early stage or development and we need a lot more power. New headsets coming out with insane display resolutions make games need way more power and the games are getting bigger and look better. I’m lucky i need a beefy PC for both work and play so it’s a necessary expense for me anyway.
