According to Taiwan tech publication DigiTimes, most AI firms are unwilling to wait two years for HDD supplies to stabilize and are shifting to SSDs instead. To contain costs, they are choosing QLC NAND-based drives over the faster, more durable, and more expensive TLC variants.
The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.
Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless “instant gratification” impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).
The social dynamic would flip overnight if Americans suddenly had self control. The oligarchs control us by controlling our habits, and so many people are mindless about their habits and are impulsive and subservient as a result.
Just buy essentials and make your fun with what you have. Call it “soft striking”.
The social dynamic would flip overnight if Americans suddenly had self control.
“If only everyone would get together and collectively do <insert whatever>” we could actually fix a lot of problems.
There is no solidarity in society. Much of that is by design, but a lot of it is human nature.
More of it is by design than you seem to think. Look at all the effort and money being put into dividing people… if entropy was humanity’s natural state, why all the effort to make it happen? And I didn’t say some silver bullet would do it, but that the more people take control over their habits, the less they inherently give up control to the wire pullers…
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”
Tribalism is an inherent part of human nature. Capitalism and nationalism certainly exacerbate and exploit this though, no doubt about it.
Exactly.
People behaving as “consumers” supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.
Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are “nudged” or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is “impulse” or “deriving a momentary pleasure from buying” are the latter kind of thing.
you’ll end up better
…maybe not if you are part of that bubble in some way, e.g. by participating in the corresponding stock markets that are currently dominated by those tech companies.
So best change your investment strategy, then.
If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it’s only fair if they get burned when it blows up.
How do we make the AI firms bankrupt faster?
At this moment I am seriously considering if we mayhaps need a tool that automatically queries the AI tools with random garbage just to eat up their budget.
That counts as usage, they’ll use it to convince investors.
Yeah, that’s kinda like trying to DDoS a Cloudflare protected server in hopes that they would drop Cloudflare.
It is useless to play this game against them. All the top players are already in.[1]
Best, find your own way to create ICs and make them for community purposes.
There will be much less money and you will be tempted to sell to AI chaps, so you will need willpower.
Specially after putting the time and effort to manufacture yourselves.
they have won against local textiles in almost all places and against little food industries in enough places. They start by destroying the incentive to produce locally and continue with centralising the means of production. All the while, using the fruits of your labour against you. Eventually they want to destroy your ability to walk away, by being the only option everywhere. ↩︎
It does somewhat feel like all the levers of power are in the hands of people who have little to no reliance on the consumer market anymore. Your money is no good here.
They can all enjoy the perfect financial circlejerk with most of the world’s money whilst the rest of us scratch at the window.
scratch at the window
I have read this thing 2 times today and I can’t find a meaning for this.
What does this idiom mean?I mean, in essence, it refers to you trying to get someone else’s attention when you are outside of a situation and looking in.
It’s an old saying, longer version I know is:
“Saddest thing in the world is a cat scratching at the window because it used to be an inside cat.”
Man, fuck those guys
“Why does the population hate us? We’re only completely destroying the consumer electronics market, accelerating climate change, aiming to eliminate countless jobs, increasing power costs, and stealing the works of millions of people to feed our system all so we can get even more obscenely wealthy? Please clap.”
It’s a mystery!
Didn’t forget draining all their drinking water. Violating everyone’s copyright. Driving teens to suicide. Giving terrible medical advice. And Generating csam.
The water things still baffles me. Like…just…cycle it. It’s a heat exchange system.
What do they do with the water? Pump thru once and then dump it? Why can’t they repurpose it? Why can’t they use gray water?
I don’t get it but that’s likely a me problem.
Evaporative cooling. They’re trying to save on their electric bills by not using AC. Or sometimes they’re cooling the AC condensers themselves this way.
The amount of heat generated is so large they can’t properly cool it with a closed loop system.
And clean water just reduces duct maintenance costs.
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I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.
Not the other things, though.
Except the ones feeling the hurt the most are the little guys
Agreed.
One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.
My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.
You forgot to mention that the product they’re sacrificing everything for is widely failing to meet expectations and that they will likely expect taxpayers to bail them out when their investments fail and threaten to take out the entire economy with themselves
Also in a few years when the AI generated nonsense code reaches a critical point and a ton of important systems grind to a halt, we’ll expect all of you that we fired to come back and un-fuck it for us so we can keep on making money. On temporary contracts and at reduced wages of course because times are tough.
On temporary contracts and at reduced wages of course because times are tough.
Software engineers predicted this would happen. The percentage of developers that love fixing other people’s code is essentially zero, fixing ai code is even smaller.
If they require low wages, they’ll only get the worst of the worst. Expect this phase to repeat until they are forced to hire for competence and pay above market rate required to convince senior developers to deal with not just the ai mess but all the failed attempts to turn it around.
But the crash is the moment where the people with actual tech knowledge will have leverage to say them: “pay me 10 times my standard rate or get bent”
I hope so! But if the economy gets bad enough I can see people getting desperate enough that they’ll all scramble and under-cut each other into oblivion just to secure the work. Time will tell I guess.
I have a feeling, that the tech sector has enough kompromat on a lot of important people to keep the bubble from bursting.
To be clear, it only wildly fails to meet expectations in sectors that you hear about.
It’s most definitely medium expectations in sectors you don’t hear about because news and social media have a huge negativity bias because that gets views and engagement.
If we want to fight this scourge, we need to be more informed about it.
Like what sectors?
Law enforcement and military
Oh yeah I just read how AI keeps suggesting nuking everyone. That sounds like a great success. (I get what you mean, I just wanted to be a wiseass)
I certainly expect that the visual models are meeting expectations in the racial profiling department.
I think it’s more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It’s not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it’s doing a fine job at that.
Doesn’t seem to be meeting expectations in that sector either.
Contact centers, software development, automation, images and video analysis, data analysis, semantic search, entity recognition, advertising, misinformation campaigns, social media, security scanning & automation…etc
Many of these are cross-cutting across many sectors, some of these are sectors you don’t think of as they are driven by government entities.
And many of these have boring quiet tools and integrations that you don’t hear about because they “just work”.
You only hear about the shit that doesn’t work. Not the shit that does work.
Edit: inb4 a reply of a narrow use case or shitty implementation that, obviously, doesn’t work, which I already called out as a bias.
Most of these aren’t generative AI, tho?
I am start to think they are going on the acceleroism theory to push the society to the limits and destroy all for change
Some think this could lead to a more equallytary society, some wants to make a more centralized and controlled by one power sort of society, there is 2 different school of thought on this.
But we are clearly going to have big changes
Next year’s CES is gonna be every AI product from this year’s CES but with no progress on release date because they can’t even buy the consumer grade hardware to produce it since it all went into data centers lol.
Back to punch cards we go. Or are they hoarding paper too?
“This just in. Panic buying of paper has led to shortages in timber, resulting in another round of toilet paper scarcity.”
Cue that guy laughing in between mountains of toilet paper
Tariffs already gutted the barley starting to recover from the pandemic wood shortage.
the consumer hardware market is so tiny. It has almost no buying power or pull. Its hard to expect them to cater to it when its single digit % of their overall sales.
I have one in my basement
youre rich
Are now? Haven’t they been using flash first?
Hard drives suck for that work load. Their seek times are huge, their throughput is awful, and they’re worse storage density than HDDs. You can fit 24 2.5" ssds into a 2u server. 16TB in a 2.5" > 24TB in 3.5" SSDs were first to skyrocket in price vs HDDs.
No. AI companies have huge storage requirements for training data. Flash storage is not cost efficient for mass storage quantities.
For massive companies space is as costly as the price of the storage. Especially these AI companies don’t care much about the price of things.
Something tells me you’ve never worked for a massive company.
These aren’t massive companies. They’re startups. (and some branches inside of massive companies acting like startups)
… it’s Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook building all these huge datacenters. The biggest companies on the planet
Bruh, you’re the one who called them massive companies
A"I" companies want to store petabytes of “good” training data
Exabytes. Petabytes are easily surpassed by a lot of companies these days.

On the upside, we consumers get to have the superior TLC SSDs (better write durability).
But at double the price that they were a few months ago.
Assuming that the chip manufacturers don’t drop TLC production to fill AI orders.
Let’s hope not
Compared to microns?
TLC is the technology, not the manufacturer. TLC means three bits per cell, versus QLC which has 4 bits per cell. Every extra bit the cell has to store exponentially reduces its write cycle.












