I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever.

However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.

Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.

I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.

This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.

I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.

The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?

My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.

I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.

> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?

Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.

("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)