I assure you, if you are a brokie like the rest of us, you will not have the money to spare in the ensuing recession. Honestly I expect personal computing is dead, likely for a decade or more, if it ever comes back.

With the amount of integration it achieved to facilitate services and transactions? I am very skeptical of that. I expect to happen a serious market feagmentation and a great number of bankrupties but the void will be filled by new presences.

It wont be like dead dead, but just stagnant. Companies like nvidia will just sell the barely passable hardware with even less reason to upgrade because the prices will rise and the performance jumps will decrease. The good thing is that even the entry level hardware was already good enough for 95% of use cases and what justified upgrades anyway was mostly AAA gaming graphics slop or heavy 3d renders for professionals.

The bad news is that entry level hardware will cost more than high end hardware did last year

and they already bought years worth of chips, so no computing for a long time.

afaik they havent, they committed to buying them, so they will be built, and when they dont buy them because they are insolvent, we should be able to get them at good prices

thedeepdive.ca/openai-locked-up-40-of-global-ram-…

From one brokie to another, drowning in debt is indistinguishable from drowning in debt with a GPU and SSD.

Last night, my friends and I were talking about how we’re trying to spend more time at home to save money. Instead of going out to a bar, we’re starting to plan more hangouts at home. Why spend $2k/month on rent if we aren’t going to be there? It feels like anytime I leave the house, I’m spending $100 or more. We all were at a bar last weekend watching college football, and after spending $10/drink, we dipped out, bought $50 in beer and pizza, and played Mario Kart at a friend’s house. Much cheaper to just play games at home and hangout.

Well, the downside of that is that it’s insular, you lose the opportunity of meeting new people

And sure, not everyone cares about doing that a lot of the time, but for me personally that’s a great loss at least. I love meeting new people, and everyone being priced out of existing in social meeting places… sucks. A lot

If I already had a solid group of friends, I wouldn’t really care for meeting new people. If someone cool comes along, awesome. Welcome to the group.

But why would I actively go out and try to sift through the 95%+ of people at bars who are either A) shitty, B) don’t give a fuck about me, or C) both; just to try to find one or two new people that I might exchange a couple texts with over the next two weeks before we proceed to forget about each other entirely?

If I already have friends at home who just wanna hang out and play Mario Kart or Magic: The Gathering or Catan or something? Why would I need to talk to strangers, most of whom would just tell me to get bent anyway…

That’s awesome. You guys should stockpile a few good boardgames while you’re at it, for when you want to switch things up

Yeah, there is also speculation that part of this build out is intended to force a shortage to get everyone to shift to thin client “cloud PCs” where everyone can be monitored and ad blockers can be avoided.

That shift has already happened.

People on this forum trend to use personal computers but most people now only use phones. They might have a laptop provided by work but many don’t own one at all.

The push to “the cloud” happened ten years ago. The people around here are the exception.

A phone is not “the cloud”

For most people it is. If you removed Internet access from the device what do you think people would say?

9 out of 10 apps are just web apps with a launcher and stop working the moment you disable data.

And how is that any different than a desktop tower?

I can run LLMs locally on my desktop tower. I can run CAD Software and create things. There is a large number of tasks my desktop can do that a phone can’t for a number of reasons not the least that using a phone without their app stores is becoming increasing difficult.

Just because you might just use yours as a thin client for Chrome doesn’t make me wrong.

There is nothing preventing you from running local apps on a phone, including local Ai or CAD, it’s just not necessarily practical or cost efficient to do so, nor is the software there the same way as say AutoCAD.

Nice try with the ad hominem attack, but I use my phone for a lot of different local apps, including gaming, photo editing, office suite, local music that I have purchased and collect instead of streaming primarily. Android even supports desktop mode so the workflow is very similar, and a phone is a good solution if you can afford but one device. I still have a desktop, but hating on phones for being cloud hosted makes no sense… because they’re not.

You may personally dislike app stores, and I don’t really disagree, but it is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

You ARE wrong, not because the population at large does or does not use a lot of web hosted apps. That’s irrelevant. Obviously, the internet is popular for a reason, and you are not inherently superior because you run more local apps then the ever-elusive “them”.

You are wrong because phones are fundamentally not cloud based. They are not thin clients, they do not remote in to a virtual desktop on someone else’s computer to do every task. Phone OSs run on bare metal. End of story.

You could say “electron/web apps sucks” or “we need to use more than 5 websites that are all owned by billionaires” and everyone here will agree with you. There is no need to make up problems that don’t exist just you you can say “you thought THAT was bad?”

Yeah, you’re right. Tones of people set up their phones without an apple or Google account and then only use the baked in browser and calculator.

yes that’s exactly the plan and the reason these companies are paying profound premiums back to nVidia. If they don’t pay up nVidia will just announce another spark roll out and scare the crap out of them. They know as soon as newer computer hits the consumer market they are dead in the water.

The main thing will be the value of the dollar becoming next to null.

Putting some of your savings in foreign currencies can help dampen the blow a bit. That is, if you have savings to spare…

Unfortunately the bubble popping will not provide you with better or cheaper access to those. At this point it is artificially created scarcity because they don’t want consumers to own hardware anymore. Even with the AI bubble popping, the tech oligarchs (with NVIDA at the helm) will still be pursuing their wet dreams of consumers having to subscribe to their cloudbased computers for everything.

Other manufactures will arise then. Won’t be quick, won’t be painless, but the US is not the whole world.

You seem pretty sure about that. But where was the competition when they forced the switch to CD’s? The manufacturers are engaged in a shit-trust, and other anti-competitive behavior.

No one will step up.

Thats not… I feel like you weren’t alive yet when that transition happened.

Because CDs are objectively better in basically every way than VHS and cassette, especially for consumers. No more tapes stuck in the player, no more rewinding, no more randomly unspooled tapes, no more twisted ribbons, no more seeking static, no more heat warping, etc. plus cds take up less space overall, and you can easily use many-disc cd changers.

The market absolutely drove that transition, not manufacturers. VHS and cassette were still supported and produced for a LONG time after cds came about, because not everyone was willing to drop a ton of money to get their collection in a new format.

CD’s are not better. They scratch easily, and the players break. Like right away. I have vhs that still work, no cd player still works outside of a laptop or game consul, and the disks scratch and get ruined.

That you think they are better, ruins your credibility with me personally on this. You clearly don’t fucking get it.

Wow. Ok have fun with that personality… eesh.

Oh, the personality of not believing the oligarchs in the face of some credulous half wit? I will, thanks.

😂🤣

K

Wow, only assholes use those emojis in that context. In my experience. Good to know, now piss off. We can spar elsewhere perhaps, not now.

I’m going to have to agree with the other guy. I have working VHS tapes and working CDs/DVDs that are both over 30 years old. That just means that you didn’t abuse them and kept them away from bad temperature and humidity ranges. CDs were so much better than cassettes that it wasn’t even funny. If you were abusing your CDs so much that they were getting scratched to hell, I can’t imagine you weren’t running into similar issues with your tapes. DVD were vastly better than VHS in much the same way. And the “better” wasn’t even about durability which was probably a wash as they failed in different ways. CDs had better audio quality and better quality of life for the user. You had no need to rewind/fast-forward. The audio didn’t get continually more staticy as time went on. They took up less storage space, especially if you used a CD wallet/book. You didn’t need to clean the heads on a CD player. All these same issues applied to DVD vs VHS other than skipping around a DVD is less common than a CD as movies and shows tend to be viewed sequentially.

Also just to add that the transition from tapes to CDs and DVDs took decades, by the time tapes finally were fazed out blueray was a thing. I have a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban on VHS that’s what 04 I also have a copy of Sabatons Great War album on cassette because fuck it why not. Even now cassette still kinda alive.

I will quit the internet before I become a renter of everything I used to just use free.

Free or with one time purchase and possible payments for once in a while big updates.

I am not paying google shit. Or any of them. I will join a privateering crew first.

You sort of can with solutions like MeshLLM

I love computers but never enough to participate in their plans.

I know how to read. Write. Draw. Go on walks. Play sports. Basically sit and watch paint dry than give a shit about not using a computer again

You might, I think I would (at least personally, professionally I may not have a choice) but the vast majority of people will gladly go with this plan I suspect.

Look at car purchasing, most people don’t look at the sticker price or the total cost of ownership, they stop paying attention as long as their income can (and in a lot of cases it technically can but really shouldn’t) support the monthly payment.

Similar thing with new phones, most people buy a service plan that includes a lease or loan on a device. Very few people buy their sevice outright, because that’s a bug purchase vs a smaller monthly payment.

If there was a market for this for laptops, regular folks would eat it up.

That’s all opinion, so take it for what it’s worth. I hope I’m wrong. I’m fearful I’m not.