Give it 10 years and civilians won’t be able to own PCs… We will be forced to the cloud computers. And by that time AI surveillance and profiling will already have its infrastructure built.

We need to figure out how to do our daily things with very few computing resources. Gaming and heavy workloads excepted, most things we do ought to be possible on 15 year old CPU’s and 2GB. All we need is efficiency and low expectations. Fuck em.

Yeah. We went to the moon with, like, 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB RAM.

Not even. The Intel 8008 didn’t even break 1MHz and that was a few years later.

I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.

I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.

An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.

Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.

Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.

To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.

The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.

Aldrin deliliberately ran the approach radar which was not in the standard operating procedure

Very cool, thanks for the detail.

That’s maybe what was on the LEM. The total computing power including the mainframes “back home” was a wee bit more.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91

(Also besides the fact that it was 200000+ gallons of kerosene that did the “going”)

That’s still about 1000x less raw CPU performance than the cheapest smartphone on the market, though.

(E.g. a Blu View 5 Pro, which is the cheapest Tracfone is listing as in stock, for $30. Its Helio G36 uses 4 Cortex A53 cores at 2200MHz and 4 at 1800 MHz, and between 1-2 instructions per clock, giving between 16000-32000 million instructions per second. The IBM ran at 16.6 million instructions per second, per that Wikipedia link.)

(Looking at Walmart turned up a TCL K33 5G for only $20, but it uses a Dimensity 6300 cpu which is actually a little more powerful.)

Which just shows we waste tremendous computing resources on trash.

Agreed.

And even gaming is possible with those specs: retro gaming and emulation, thousands of excellent games

If you take gaming out of the equation though I don’t really need any sort of computing power.

How did you write this? Are you a wizard?

This is the time for Permacomputing to shine.

!permacomputing@slrpnk.net

It was already possible to do that. Then Electron came in and developers thought it was better to just release stupid apps that take 4 GB of RAM each.

“Believe it or not, straight to jail”.

Its already here. Most “regular” users already depend for most part of there digital life on subscription based cloud computing. Al lot of people don’t even own a PC anymore, only mobile devices.

I was there on the first wave of the cloud boom (2012-ish), it’s biggest pushers got really angry that we weren’t up to give up our computers for “sleek, slim, and elegant” devices that would make wires “obsolete” at least in the home, so we can finally live in a sci-fi movie. They literally wanted us to use “browser app” DAWs that would do it’s computing on the cloud, then they realized many of us would like to record music, run live effects, etc.

This is the type of dystopia that I cannot bear to live in.

And people who have an issue with this are called luddites

Absolute clown show

We’ve been told historical lies. People who have an issue with this are like Luddites, but that’s because the Luddites were justified too!

They weren’t against technology; they were against it being used to abuse and exploit them as workers.

I’ve only heard that term being used to insult, that’s actually a real thing?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites

The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who protested the usage of certain types of automated machinery owing to their concerns relating to worker pay, labour savings, child labour, working conditions, and output quality. They often destroyed said machines in organised raids. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of “Ned Ludd”, a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.

History is written by the victors, and the luddites lost. That’s why they’re maligned as backwards idiots who didn’t want tech to succeed.

They weren’t stupid. They knew precisely what was going to happen, and did their best to stop it. Generally they took care to target only machines as their goal wasn’t to harm people but to remain employed, and have money to survive with. Naturally there were exceptions, and sometimes people did get hurt.

But then, the bourgeoisie enacted law to prevent this where destroying mechanical looms became punishable by… oh let’s see…

The act, as passed, made the destruction of mechanised looms […] a capital felony (and hence a crime punishable by death).

Right! Death! Destruction of company property became punishable by death.

And people did die. Children died. Mind you, back then workers were anyone capable of working, and they had no rights. They didn’t vote for the people who passed this act; workers weren’t supposed to have a voice, and so the only recourse was rebellion.

This didn’t stop things immediately, there’s quite a lot of really cool worker history here, but eventually the government sent in the military and couple that with nothing really changing despite widespread rebellion, the luddite movement fizzled out.

This is why I am opposed to the death penalty and I want the police disarmed. It is also why I still believe in workers arming themselves.

I’ve never heard it used as an insult. How is it even supposed to be offensive? “Har har you’re a person who doesn’t like tech”?

Less of “you’re a person who doesn’t like tech” and more “you’re not with the times/are scared of the future”… which is pretty close to some messaging from clankers.

I see, thank you!

I am scared of the future, you know why? Because everything feels so unbearably bleak and I wish I had something to feel actually hopeful for.

But I guess we’ll own nothing and be forced to live with it.

Gotta warp the truth to misdirect from the real problems.

They confuse us with legitimate technophobes.

My stepmother was a technophobe. She read articles about school shootings in the US, and thought if I got addicted to video games like Quake, I’ll be buying a machine gun from the black market, then end up as a murderer. Yes, she also had a moral panic about drug use, all while she was a borderline alcoholic. The farce in it was that while I wasn’t allowed to play any Quake games, there was no harm in Unreal games, which arguably are better. The tragedy in it was that she tried her best to steer me away from computers, giving me some disadvantage in college, also she lied to the doctors about my first seizure to make it seem like it was due to the computer, which lead to the doctors not doing tests besides EEG and strobe lights. Once social media rolled out, she somewhat changed her mind on the subject, though she was still ignorant enough to think “software developer” and “CNC programmer” are the same, and almost got me a job at a local factory (she feared that if I lived on Budapest for a bit longer, I’d get some lung disease, because big city equals bad air).

Let me guess, she’s an avid social media user nowadays?

She’s dead, and I don’t know how to feel about it, especially as she abused my brother even harder than me.

They say you should only speak good about the dead.

She’s dead. Good.

Yeah apparently you’d think there be some closure or something but it seems that’s not how it works. Keep in there, and try to forget about the whole ordeal, that’s what I’m trying anyways, living with my demons. Works. Cheers.

Quake isn’t as good as Unreal? Blasphemy!

Kid me had a lot of fun in those games.

tulips

AI bubble will burst.

and if it doesn’t, let em have it. I’ll cancel my internet, and start overloading all other infrastructure with confusion from not knowing how to deal with humans and paper…

idgaf. I can’t and won’t be forced to comply to a subscription.

I mean, today I saw a chocolate company ad saying no AI was needed. For chocolate. Anti-AI in a chocolate ad.

If Sees Candy is getting in on AI hate to sell shit, obviously people are tired of this crap. The bubble will burst.

Does not mean prices will drop though.

They will have to when the artificial demand falls out.

No big. Guess I’ll have to wait another year before upgrading my laptop. Sorry for the loss of business.

They want you to get a cloud computer subscription. They want you to buy a Windows Portal, or whatever garbage small “terminal” device they will come up, and force regulators to make it be called a “fully fledged computer”.

I’ve called it. Laptops and PCs will be outlawed and hunted down like hiding a radio unit in WW2. Think Farenheit 451 levels of dogma

Chip companies are cutting off consumers on purpose. They lost your $100 business and gained $1000 sales on the same products

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent

And suddenly me “unjustifiably” buying 128gb of DDR5 was a good investment of money.

Yeah, I splurged on some hardware upgrades with great shame almost 2 years ago because I was preparing for the idiotic tariffs, expecting modest price increases.

I did not expect a 5x. So glad that I did it. It would no longer be an option.

I did not ever think PC prices would go as crazy as they are now.

but I thank my fucking asscheeks every day that I upgraded my CPU, GPU and RAM right before the shit hit the fan just by pure luck and coincidence.

I still wish I had a better GPU, I had to settle for the one I got cause finances… but I sure as fuck aint getting anything better for a reasonable price at this rate.

I still wish I had a better GPU

My 7900xtx was a rollercoaster of emotions all the way till now, so I decided to buy nvidia even tho I don’t support them as a company in the slightest (nor do I support amd at this point, considering they dipped in same AI bubble as soon as they had the chance).

So yeah, “I will just buy next top-tier gpu as soon as it arrives” was looking like this for past couple of years:

I’m rockin a 6700xt for my gpu :\

I really shouldnt complain, its a great card, it just doesnt have the horse power to chug through the bullshit lack of optimization in Unreal5 based games. especially ones that force some form of raytracing to be on with no toggle.

I built a new PC around that time for the same reason. I am kicking myself for not getting more ram.

Same! I got 64 GB but wish I got 96 or 128 GB (it’s a server).

I stupidly only got 32GB and figured I would get more later because I spent more to get a good GPU. 32GB is feeling pretty limiting at the moment, but I’ll just have to deal with it given the current prices.

I kick myself every day for putting off replacing this 2017 build of mine… My 1080 weeps.

sell 64gb of it today and pay for your entire PC build, plus a new (used) car.

I paid $350 for a similar kit back in October. Same kit selling at the same place is 4k…

Only if you actually use that much. You almost certainly don’t.

I do.

I wish I had 192GB, to be honest.

Same. But more than that - I noticed that my 7700x is a huge bottleneck: desktop CPUs limited to just 2 channels, plus controller in 7700 is kinda meh, so I can’t force anything above 5600mt\s with my 4 sticks. Switching to new CPU should allow to increase speed, but will still lock me to 2 channels. So I should’ve bought cheapest threadripper instead, which allows 4 or 8 channels instead.

Depends what you are going for. 7000/9000 series have way more per-thread performance than threadripper.

Another quirk with single CCD 7000 chips (which I have as well) is that the infinity fabric limits effective bandwidth to the CPU cores. Even with two channels, you hit diminishing returns with higher speeds, especially if you aren’t using the IGP.

You can get around it overclocking the IF, but it gets complicated and its much easier to do with 9000 series CPUs.

What is the need of 192GB?

I often execute calculations on a cluster where I’ll need some 500-1000 GB of ram. But I have 32 GB in my workstation and I never felt I needed more.

Everything I need to do I can do: I can be having many browser tabs open, several IDEs, compiling and have a game engine open at the same time.

Only times I fill the ram is when I stress test my software for ram usage, but that is to be expected.

Machine learning/data science stuff.

Local LLMs is half of it.

But that aside, I found myself working with huge files that swapped like crazy on my 32GB of RAM, or were completely infeasible to work with. Janky local experiments I wouldn’t want to run on a cloud instance billed by the minute.

128GB has been a godsend, but I could completely fill 192GB and still swap some if I had it.

But I found there are happy side effects to having so much disk cache, too. For instance, game modding/tinkering has sped up immensely over 32GB. So has hashing for transfers, or other scenarios where it’s useful to already have a file cached in RAM.

Fair, I guess I’d also want some ram if I did not have access to a compute cluster.

But to be fair, for what I do I don’t really think you can fit that much ram on a consumer motherboard.

In machine learning I don’t generally find memory to be the bottleneck, as long as the GPU can handle it.

But sure, opening huge files can be big trouble.

I can rent cloud stuff, but it’s just not worth it for casual/experimental use.

Like keeping Deepseek V4 loaded and hitting it rarely, but I want it to be in my control… it’s just easier to do it locally.

Or experiments I launch like 30 times before it works. I’d waste hours moving all my stuff to a cloud instance, configuring it, tinkering with the experiment to get it to launch; the thing would be idle the vast majority of the time. And yeah, I know I can containerize stuff, but some projects I can’t even test without a sizable memory pool.

introducing: zram

toss 32 or 64gb at that and call it a day

YMMV.

Big ZRAM absolutely tanks performance for me because it “steals” space that could be used for normal memory.

But if its for squirrling away a bunch of idle processes when multitasking like crazy, yeah, it can be wonderful. Just depends.

ah fair enough, worst case scenario if they dont know what to do with that much ram (I would build a homelab) they could also have a ramdisk

If you’re able to have swap, Zswap is supposed to be better.

Zram is intended for devices with no swap

…This appears to be amazing advice.

linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

I have 64gb of DDR5 and all my family said I was being wasteful.

Do I want more memory or do I wait for two years…

I wait for two years. As long as the existing memory modules doesn’t break, Linux will continue to be happy with existing amount.

I built a PC for work (I’m going to take it with me when I leave) and I bought used adata ram (2x32gb) with a lifetime warranty on it. I immediately needed to send one of the sticks for warranty. I bought the initial set of ram in May, and yesterday I paid roughly the same for a used set of 2x16gb. The price of the 32gb sticks is prohibitively expensive now. I’m betting the price only goes up, just wish I would be at 128gb rather than 96gb.

We could have been so rich if we could have seen the future. Just buy tons of memory modules at low prices five years ago and sell them now. What a profit.

Its not like memory tech has changed so much either.

I would just feel like such a piece of shit scalping though.

If you could see the future, buying nvda a few years ago would have done the trick.

On the plus side, all the game companies are going to finally start optimizing games and quit pushing out more and more demanding shit. A big win for smaller devs and creative\fun game developers too. My steam deck and old PC gonna keep on winning.

Hahahahahahahaaaa.

What do you expect? Few will be able to afford to play their whizbang-5000 games. We already saw it play out with VR.

You might be right. But charging them $15 a month to stream their whizbang-5000 games is still an option. Especially for Microsoft and Sony. (And Amazon wants in on that too.)

Dingaling! They will rent it to you and it will have latency issues, but who cares money.

I will say technologically my trials of both Google Stadia and Xbox Live Play Anywhere were both impressive and ran well for single player and co-op games. But the idea of actually paying an ongoing fee to play my games? Fuck that.

People said this about movies too, don’t be too optimistic

Yeah, perhaps they’ll start bundling network play time with the game and we won’t have a choice aside from playing our existing games.

I wonder if the fed gov cares that entire sectors of the tech economy are being threatened by one (AI).

They might get interested if people start talking about Epstein again.

The only rational choice right now is to wait to buy new ram.

Either production capacity catches up and this amount of silicon is the new normal and prices come down or the ai bubble does crash and prices come down.

It can’t go on at this price point forever.

It can there are only 3 producers and they can decide to not let the price drop

Except in my lifetime I’ve seen the prices of computer components swing wildly based on supply and demand.

Tech improvements tend to drive prices down not up, it’s less about supplier collusion in this particular market.

Maybe this time is different but I’m not betting on this.

You’re acting like they are like they were less than 10 years ago. They aren’t. They think they won the game and are just consolidating.

This has been said before. Like I said maybe this time is different, but I’m not betting on it.

There has been consolidation among a few manufacturers for a long time. The silicon part isn’t the most expensive it’s the chip designs. If the prices say high we should see new startups emerge with new approaches and cheaper silicon. China is already making progress here, and nothing I’m seeing is telling me this time would be different from us chip designers. Also Europe is looking to get some us resilience and startups in chip design could happen there too.

It’s convenient to blame greed, and in some industries this is very relevant, but silicon is so much less defensible at least in the chip design industry that startups are likely to keep on coming as long as opportunity exists, which high prices are a pretty good indicator of high demand and limited supply.

I have worked in this industry for a long time, I’ve seen the cycles, and again I expect this time to cycle again.

I hope you are correct. I really do. But my fear is that they see how dependent we have become on this and what a tool of control it can be and simply make it illegal or otherwise very difficult for other start ups to get started.

Oh I don’t doubt that the current market leaders would love to price fix and play monopoly, that’s the desired end goal of all businesses.

The question is how hard is it for a startup or competitive country to get in and compete on price. I’m watching China’s chip fab especially for this reason, they have an economy that can take massive losses on something even at this scale to lock in new customers with cheap Chinese RAM. They’ve done this in many other industries I fully expect they will be competitive in this one too, and that’s just ONE credible threat to monopolies.

The us government going back to a rule of law government could also help enforce changes and break up monopoly, we will see if and how long that will take.

Every DRAM manufacturer has pled guilty to price fixing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

If we still have governments holding them accountable, then it will go down. If we don’t, it won’t

Well this is interesting. I guess it will at least take some time for governmental change then. Doesn’t mean it can’t change though. Not saying it’s easy.

If my workstation goes up in value in 4 years, something is seriously going.

Another 500% and I’ll be recording my ram along with my other retirement assets.

I fucking had to keep pushing back buying some more RAM. Yeah, that was a great move. Now I can only hope the bubble bursts and prices crash.

I mean, I get by fine with the RAM I have. I don’t need much. It’s the principle of the thing, you know? Sometimes being financially responsible and careful sucks.

I dont… I am absolutely stressing the DDR3 I have. But no way I am going to pay 500% for some memory!

The thing with the bubble bursting is it will still take time for it to come down, as they’ll need to start manufacturering consumer RAM again. The stuff they’re churning out now can’t be thrown into a PC or laptop.

And they’ll NEVER allow prices to drop back to reasonable levels. They’ve already learned people will pay a premium during a shortage, so they can still artificially control the supply to keep prices high.

If competitors ever emerge making RAM at reasonable prices, we need to boycott the current fuckwads even when they undercut the new players.

So I got this RAM in August 2025, for ~$400 according to the receipt:

www.newegg.com/…/N82E16820374767

…That is absolutely bonkers.

I ebay’ed my DDR5 RDIMM 5600 RAM sticks. 32gb was $606 some months ago, the remaining six sticks was about $3,600 bucks. I was originally planning on waiting for bubbles to burst and DDR6 to be released before switching to a DDR5 platform, but the whole war with Iran threw everything into doubt.

The US’s strategic oil reserve will likely run out within half a year, which means everything costing more. I wanted to be smart with my money and wait for a good time to buy, but this situation has ruined my planning. I bit the bullet and used a flex-pay to let me buy now.

Is it that my discipline sucks, or is the world certain to go into a hellish handbasket? I cannot tell anymore…

I honestly don’t know. Even setting Iran aside, it’s impossible to tell when the bubble will deflate, and even then, when memory supply will somewhat normalize.

But if you can afford it, it seems like a reasonable decision to me. Iran and the US could become allies tommorow, but DDR5 still isn’t coming down soon, and you get to use your server now instead of having to wait forever.

I got 64GB of ram for my laptop back in April, was close to 700, of is 829 today. I guess only desktop sizes are over 1k?

Like April this year?

Could be that it was DDR4 or something.

Ddr5, but the laptop size on amazon. I just checked and its still under 900

Well, 900 for 64GB is still outrageous, unfortunately.

Yes, yes it is 😓

I feel so justified for doubling down on Zen 3, and replacing my dead R9 5900X with an R9 5900XT lol

I’m getting worried, 'cause I’ve got the same. What killed yours?

Bad luck. I started getting random reboots, the reboots started happening more and more frequently. I tried a few kits of spare RAM I had laying around, reboots kept happening. I replaced the PSU with a brand new one because mine was a decade old, reboots persisted. I replaced the CPU on a whim (with an upgrade if it was fine), problem went away entirely, not a single reboot since.

That’s strange - I had some of the same symptoms and it ended up being a completely different thing - a dying (and then eventually completely dead) SSD (the Phison controller fiasco).

Other than that the CPU itself seems fine and it’s only shown very minor degradation over the 4-5 years I’ve had it - i.e. it used to boost up to 4975 or 4950 single core, now it only goes up to about 4900 (no PBO, no CO); and I’ve also had to fix the SoC voltage because of the memory - but I haven’t touched that in like 3 years, so not sure it’s even degradation.

Yeah I tried increasing voltage, decreasing voltage, resetting BIOS to default settings, etc. I tried everything you could think of but nothing helped.

I did see a post on reddit from someone else with the same MCE hardware errors in Linux that I was getting, with the same random rebooting, and their 5900X ended up dying too.

I got some 16gb of DDR4 i found in a closet. You guys can start bidding.

i’m using an optiplex sff with 32gb ddr4 as a monitor stand right now. i just don’t know what the hell to do with it… so it sits, probably until the dietpi running on a jaguar soc keels over.

What I’d do is a little media center / HTPC so my TVs stay dumb.

already have a media ‘server’ and several things to watch ‘tv’ on or from.

this is what we were doing with it… trying out winpodx, but it’s not quite ‘usable’ like this (updated after this, does same). so it (and it’s hp cousin with similar specs) sit waiting for their next call-to-arms.

It seems the more this shit happens the less I need tech in my life (pulls notebook out of back pocket and writes this down for posterity).

I am infinitely grateful to my past self that I purchased an on-sale 64GB RAM upgrade for my Framework 13 in 2024 before prices skyrocketed. It was $119, and checking back right now… Holy crap the same thing is $1,079 now. 🫪

Yeah, I put 96GB of DDR4 in a PC just before prices went wild and my only regret is that I didn’t also do my server. Garage sales have been interesting this summer. Always hoping to find old PCs or TiVo devices so I can grab the hard drives and/or ram.

I could have bought a 16 GB DDR4 stick at 30, now they go for 150, I’m going to be stuck at 24 GB forever now.

Bought my first prebuilt 2 years ago and it’s now worth over twice what I spent on it. First time in my life I remember anything like that happening.

Ah you crazy kids, we used to have to lock our computers in steel cases in the early 2000s.

yea its getting pretty bad. i bought 32gb 3200mhz ddr4 ram like 3 years ago for like 50 dollars brand new on amazon, and i recently had to purchase that same amount for a server pc im building and it costed like $130 USED