Looking at what’s happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It’s not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that’s it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium? 
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you’re not storing that media anywhere
Our automated content scanning systems found a spicy pro-palestine meme in one of your chats. Your accounts have been terminated and the appropriate authorities have been contacted
Yeah, probably. Cory Doctorow’s been writing about the war on general purpose computing for over a decade now.
I hope we’re salvating as porky does shit like this. Gaming is just grilling for so many people and building a PC is an aspiration for so many who have already been burned by crypto.
I think the only way to get to alot of them is using it as the hook for a co-ordinated boycott. As much as possible cut Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, nvidia, Adobe and anything else AI adjacent out of your life. That includes deepseek who are also likely eating alot of hardware. If a brand or studio use AI then cut them out. This should have been easy with BDS but we need to work with what we conditions have not what we want. Some of it is inescapable, especially Microsoft but the tech industry is so overleveraged that any decline in the attention economy is going to be a disaster. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for economic warfare.
Are we communists seeking to replace this failed system or are we social democrats wincing at it’s next crisis?
Imagine building the empire on the support of treatlerites and then trying to take away their treats
I am convince that porkies really want a world where most people don’t work or consume. Just wait to die from some mysterious illness when just enough of the economy is automated.
I think they’re so obsessed with winner-takes-all dynamic and short term gain that they only care about whatever enriches and empowers them personally that they’ll cannibalize the rest of the economy and even their class to their own detriment.
Rent-seeking is always what capitalists want to do so my tinfoil hat theory is that big companies want to rent cloud computing capacity to the general public. I think about it more in gaming where there already existing cloud streaming services. As PCs and even consoles become increasingly unaffordable, that will seem like a more attractive option to people.
Also, muh free market signals in a heavily consolidated and specialized industry where 2/3 players said they’re going to do nothing to expand capacity and just roll big on high prices. Invisible hand
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Nah, enterprise PCs will always be a thing and corps pushing for PC refreshes means those enterprise PCs that have spend the past 3 years running Outlook, Powerpoint, and Teams will find its way to consumers once the 3 year warranty expires.
I’ve tried this option before. You get board, PSU failures and video card failures too often, especially with PCs being kept powered on 24x7. These aren’t the same standard boards and PSUs used in self-builds and get stupid expensive to replace.
That’s like the little guys they have attached to tv’s right? (Honest question lmao) I got a Lenovo one for cheap that’s been doing great for a few years now. Next project up is building a little ras pi and seeing if I can’t force myself into tech literacy
Ram will be cheaper when the next recession hits.
Stripping RAM out of AI data centers will be the new ripping out the copper wiring. There will be plenty of that too.
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium?
Yes, install Tiny Core Linux on it.
I’m being only half facetious, if you have an older PC it’ll still run a lightweight modern Linux distro. Kind of makes me feel all conspiratorial with all the perfectly fine office PCs getting turned into e-waste recently just because they can’t run Windows 11
There’s really nothing wrong with old tech. Half of the world still runs on tape drives. Until very recently my laptop was still 4:3. I haven’t upgraded my desktop PC in something like 6 years and it’s still fine. I don’t play cutting edge video games or do intensive video rendering, but I imagine most people aren’t either and they could live without AAA games.
A 6 year old PC could probably run most AAA games just fine depending on your GPU, a GTX 1080 from almost ten years ago still gets surprisingly good results. Some people seem to be stuck in the 90s/early 2000s mentality where PC tech evolved much faster and a five year old PC was already obsolete, when a decade old or even older PC is still cromulent for browsing the web and paying your bills.
The main problem with playing AAA games on an older PC would probably be disk space, since at some point it became totally reasonable for a game to be 100+ GB.
Not the case for everyone ofc, but the rising availability of high speed internet makes that less of a concern. If you can download 100gb in twenty minutes, you don’t have to worry too much about storage.
Yeah, I was thinking more of cases where you have a 256 GB drive or something and fitting even one modern game + OS is a challenge.
It would be a very strangely constructed pc to be able to play a modern 100gb game but have so little storage
There were definitely prebuilts being sold a few years ago with 256 GB drives, although those were probably all rocking the GTX 1650, so their ability to play modern games is debatable. At least nowadays it seems like even the shittiest prebuilt with only 8 gigs of RAM has a 512 GB drive.
I don’t think it’s going to work out once the over-inflated pricing bursts. Yeah there’s some people who want to have a digital serfdom, but I think it’s going to crumble. I don’t see how a “Own nothing be happy” society would be capable of re-producing itself.
Idk. I think what’s more likely to happen is that when the bubble bursts, a lot of these over-leveraged, capital-intensive, hardware tech companies, are to be acquired for pennies on the dollar by private equity or some other locus of fictitious capital, with money they get from a gvmnt bailout that prioritizes finance over any other industry.
After that, the buyers will get to work doing what they’ve done with other industries: rip the companies to shreds, sell them for scrap, and leave the barest possible operation. At that point, the company has to make a choice: do I spend a lot of money and resources servicing the consumer industry, with all its uncertainty and high overhead, and higher (importantly, only for the long term) margins, or do I go enterprise-only, where revenue is higher, more stable, less overhead, although with lower margins?
Given the quarter-to-quarter cycles these people operate in, enterprise is going to look like the play for most of these companies, at least while they recover from having been ripped apart by vultures which will take years. Some people will step up to serve the consumer market, but they’re not gonna have the economies of scale to offer the prices larger companies used to do, so stuff is going to remain expensive, or get more expensive.
Whatever choice they make though, private equity getting their cut is going to mean mass lay-offs, delayed or no maintenance of equipment, and inevitable loss of know-how and efficient production practices, as the people working there move on to other industries and can’t wait 3-5 years for the 1 in 50 chance of going back into consumer semiconductors again, so it’s going to be a while before affordable computer parts reappear, if they ever do.
I think our hubris lies in the fact that we can’t imagine being technologically behind others and severely underestimate how quickly other nations, such as China, can advance. It’s entirely possible US tech sector cannibalizes itself, but that doesn’t mean that will be the case everywhere. I can’t say it would be pretty tho’ we should try to minimize the collateral damage.
Unless of course the likes of Orwell get their wishes, the defeat of communism is finalized, remaining anarchist splinters continue to be hunted down for eternity and Liberal forces end up dominating the world.
I think our hubris lies in the fact that we can’t imagine being technologically behind others and severely underestimate how quickly other nations, such as China, can advance. It’s entirely possible US tech sector cannibalizes itself, but that doesn’t mean that will be the case everywhere. I can’t say it would be pretty tho’ we should try to minimize the collateral damage.
I wasn’t ignoring China, it just wasn’t relevant to the point I was trying to make, which is about western companies who sell to western consumers. When there’s a hardware market gap due to the AI bubble popping (and assuming Chinese tech isn’t too embroiled or affected by it, look at AI investment stats in China, and they’re not as crazy as in the west, but there’s still a big chunk of cash in AI), China and other countries will have an opportunity to fill it themselves, that’s true, and they will certainly try to go in.
However, infrastructure takes time to build, workers take time to train, and sales channels are hard to construct from scratch. Doesn’t matter if you have the immortal science of Xi Jinping thought on your side, it will take time and investment, which might not be easy to find in the aftermath of a stock bloodbath as the one we’re anticipating.
All in all, the western consumer market, largely impoverished by the aftershocks of the AI bubble bursting and accelerated de-dollarization, will be the last priority for hardware makers everywhere. And I don’t see this changing short of world revolution happening overnight.
Yes, I’m just saying we should try to reduce the damage that will come from when the empire goes fully into military-surveillance enterprise, that’s probably what will happen with all the jobless people and where they will go or be controlled by.
Washington could even win in the end, there are forces in every nation that are their allies. Including China. I’m probably never affording a computer again either way, so I’ll try to contribute to building a world where someone like me in the future can be making fun computer games to play with their friends. I can see that happening too.
America doesn’t have an education system and they don’t like making stuff themselves, you need time to learn how to do that also, they outsource that to the rest of the world, in order to make their own citizens feel wealthy and happy. I don’t want to take that away. I just wish everyone could have that.
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Currently existing society is already unable to reproduce itself in pretty much every aspect of its functioning: demography, education, infrastructure etc.
My thinkpad better last
we just need to give sam one quadrillion more dollars and he will invent a computer that can suck you off,
“Why would you want a computer that can be customised to your liking and can have an open source OS Distro that is fully under your control, when you can buy a new AI, spyware and marketing bloated phone that we will update to not work with any of our apps in 2 years. Greedy old fashioned poors! Fine, if you insist on being like that we’re just going force all the bad parts of Phones into all new computers.”
Uh oh, looks like you’re not renewing your cloud storage subscription. The photos of your dead grandma have been deleted
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium?
Why, yes, how did you know?
It’d be way easier to make linux illegal. Capitalists want to sell you things, and computers and all the requisite components are things. If they made linux illegal then subscription services on the only allowed OS can still be a thing.
I think capitalists would rather wedge into Linux and enshittify it than outright make it illegal.
I get the feeling the moment Linux gets popular enough, some techbros are going to get their claws into it just like they do everything else. Valve making Linux popular through Steam Deck etc is good for now. But everything always goes the same way eventually once private companies get involved. Capitalists are experts at taking the hard work of passionate people and stripping the copper out of it for profit until it’s just a shell.
Corps trying to get in on Linux and make a version you pay them for has already happened twice (RedHat, Canonical) and it’s about to happen again with Valve. It’s been fine, the GPL is mostly working at keeping them from stealing it all. You’re even using stuff made by all three of those companies.
There’s also Android where they made a whole layer of Not Linux on top of a Linux and that’s kind of shitty, but it hasn’t hurt mainline Linux at all, and despite their best efforts, the part where it’s open source has let all sorts of projects use Android for things Google wouldn’t like (like those emulator handhelds).
GPL stays winning, permissive licenses coping and/or seething. Imagine a different timeline where Apple or Sony had to put all of that back into FreeBSD.
People are being mad about the AGPL again.
I could see the EU getting pissy about Linux if they ever introduce a version of Chat Control for PCs, threatening distros that don’t comply with whatever draconian horseshit they’re cooking with ridiculous fines. France already thinks you’re a drug-dealing terrorist pedophile if you use GrapheneOS on your phone
Oh absolutely. The age check crowd too are going to go after it right after VPNs because unlike MacOS, Android, iOS, and Windows it won’t have baked in unavoidable age attestation that complies with and replies to websites with whether you’re over 18/21 or not and thus is a hacker tool used to evade keeping the children from porn and other things (cough pro-Palestinian anti-empire narrative content cough). They may just make it so that you can use Linux but most of the web locks you out because you don’t pass a valid age attestation check because your OS can’t do that. So no more banking no more emails from Google, no more online shopping, no more social media, no more chat rooms, etc.
While that is a scary possibility, in practice it would be hard to pull off a blackout of that kind. Legislators can pass as many regulations as they want, and corporations will do the bare minimum because it’s not in their interest to shrink their customer base and ad views. There is a contradiction between the desires of the state and the desires of industry that I kinda doubt will end up in favor of the state very long, if ever. The economy always comes first even when it undermines geopolitical or propaganda goals.
The thing with the current shortage is that it’s way more profitable to sell the chips used for RAM and SSDs to giant corporations building AI data centers than to bother with the consumer market at all. It’s not a co-ordinated push to ban personal computing per se, just a side effect that happens to align with the push for cloud/subscription bullshit Microsoft and others have a huge hard-on for and will probably dovetail nicely also the West’s even bigger hard-on for doing every single fucking
authoritarianthing they have been accusing China of doing for the past 20 yearsWhy on Earth would they make Linux illegal? Linux is a kernel for servers, mobile devices, and embedded systems. A small number of lunatics thought it would be funny to run it on a personal computer, but those people create bug reports and PRs that help with the big corporate projects, so it all works out. 5% of people with a PC use Linux on it, and 13% of people don’t have a PC at all. Besides, operating systems don’t matter nearly as much as they used to (and will continue to matter less) as everything migrates to the web, where you can easily charge subscriptions to everyone for services.
get off the lathe
Not if they can avoid it. Selling stuff is usually necessary for a company that produces stuff. It’s just that right now there are more valuable markets than the consumer market. Because this is a ludicrous bubble ai companies are willing to pay unreasonable prices.
But when this bubble pops apart from all the other financial damage, no one will be willing to pay the ridiculous markup on gpus.
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium?
People do this already. the biggest reason not to is power consumption.
A less hyperbolic example is “Obsolete” Haswell-E X99 server CPUs being used for gaming setups in brazil and other near periphery countries.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
nah someone else will fill the void, and micron will be back when the ai bubble pops
This but it’ll take a while and be shitty in the meanwhile.
