Mastodawn

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦Feb 24

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/116127090589590254

which is why there is no hoarding of all the computers and RAM for data centers that don’t even exist. what we are witnessing is a mafia-type collusion to remove from commercial circulation all the computational power people need to continue about their daily digital lives without paying rents to IP-thieving techbro clouds.

THERE IS NO RAM SHORTAGE.

THERE IS A BIG TECH COLLUSION TO CREATE A PC TECH SHORTAGE

memory is just the beginning. techbros are out to kill the PC market

Will they manage to kill the PC market? Or will they manage to give birth to tens of thousands of small, local computer recycling, refurbishing, and building companies/centers?

All of it is going to collapse in on itself. It's just Theranos except instead of a couple billions of dollars it's a couple trillions of dollars.

Fluffy Kitty Cat Feb 25

@johnzajac @blogdiva that, and diversification of production. Things like RISC-V aren't just for nerds, it's the key to a resilient supply chain.

The computer market's getting fundamentally upended and old hardware won't be automatically obsolete anymore

Fluffy Kitty Cat Feb 25

@johnzajac @blogdiva now is the time for right to repair anything with a chip in it

@fluffykittycat @johnzajac @blogdiva

fuck yeah, I didn't expect analog nowhere to be the dystopia we were headed towards

John Timaeus Feb 25

@johnzajac @blogdiva

Unfortunately, they're monopolizing the supply chains and having them build big industrial equipment.

Most consumers need consumer gear. We need lawnmowers and hand pushed snowblower. Everything being built for the AI bubble is a 10m wide combine

You can't put what they're having built under a desk, or in a laptop, or as 512g storage in a thumb drive

@johntimaeus @blogdiva

So what you're saying is that most of the world will be plunged into non-smart appliances, and people won't discard computers and phones like they're toilet paper, like some kind of frickin' paradise?

Nicovel0 🍉Feb 25

@johnzajac maybe it will kill disposable vapes too, truly a return to the dark ages

John Timaeus Feb 25

@johnzajac @blogdiva

I'm seeing a 5ish year long realignment toward consumer electronics -- after the bubble bursts and the initial economic havoc clears. The primary suppliers will have detooled all the 'user grade' supply chains by the end of 2026.

Getting back to making affordable RAM, performant cpu, and storage that you can buy and practically use as an end user is going to be hard.

If the bubble bursts today, I don't need 10-20 rack units of gpu and power sucking high performance storage.

I need a phone with an unbroken screen, and a laptop with double the cores, memory, and ssd of the one I bought four years ago.

Datacenter gear at discount prices doesn't fit in my backpack.

John Timaeus Feb 25

@johnzajac @blogdiva

Quite the opposite. Personally owned compute will become the exclusive territory of the rich.

@johntimaeus @blogdiva

Which will be useless because most content is created by the non rich

They'll have a whole lotta nothin because no one will make software because it won't make any money. I guess if you think Claude will code all software in the future that's not true, but you'd have to be a rube to believe that.

If personal compute goes away, literally 30% of modern GDP goes with it, probably more because of all the shit that relies on it for logistics and commerce

@johntimaeus @blogdiva

Also long before people stop having computers they will start recycling and reusing tech rather than throwing it away.

@johntimaeus @blogdiva

There are already groups in every major city that refurbish computers for free and run component libraries. They will simply become ubiquitous

Phones and PCs no longer lose value. People will no longer demand 100x the computing power they actually need. Brick phones will proliferate

The panopticon will...have nothing to look at

FAANG will cease to exist, but so will Palantir and all the other data scrapers. LLMs will fail for lack of published human-made material

Toni Aittoniemi Feb 25

@johnzajac @johntimaeus @blogdiva It’s still an interesting gamble:

They are trying to convert a consumer economy into an elite economy. (Back to feudalism essentially)

They are betting that they don’t need demand from us any more, but can just keep selling ultra-expensive things to the ultra-rich.

That’s what’s going on IMO.

@gimulnautti @johntimaeus @blogdiva

Yeah, they aren't terrible wise, are they?

Violet Madder Feb 25

@johnzajac @johntimaeus @blogdiva

But see for persons to get compute and produce things, they're going to try to force everybody to go through bare bones terminals to access the cloud.

That way everything we make, everything we say and calculate and draw etc passes through their gates. Total surveillance and control, with them able to cut us off at any time.

Of course this only works when you have a good enough data connection to get a snappy feed from the CPUs, anyplace without fast fiber will just be left floundering. Which is fine by them.

@violetmadder @johntimaeus @blogdiva

They're destroying the system that *already does that* to replace it with a system that...does that?

The plausible end result of what's happening is not particularly complicated: the rich will either back down or be destroyed. That's what history tells us. The relative timeline / scale of that consequence is the only thing in question.

Also, the impact of climate change on society's metabolism and hunger for the rich should not be minimized.