AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws.
I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin, but if you want to use bitcoin to buy something it's about as easy/awkward as it ever was.
Food prices went up 15-20% more than they would have with 2% inflation. If PC prices do anything similar, it's not a big deal in the long run.
Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen? The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out. They wouldn't even want everything to be in the cloud, because a hundred rarely-idle cloud cores can replace a lot more than a hundred mostly-idle consumer cores, so they end up selling a lot less hardware.
> What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable?
That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
> By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
By what reckoning? And not just games, 3D workload, compilation. Hell. Even browsing + some productivity eats 32G of RAM as if it were nothing.
> I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin
The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
> Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen?
For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
Why not make anything for PCs? Because individuals can't compete with the coffers of large corporations and governments.
> The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out.
You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
Say all but one/two manufacturers leave the consumer market. The monopoly/duopoly hikes up prices again and again until you have a few stragglers on 40k USD workstations, and everyone else is on an iOS-like platform.
Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
> That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
Does it have to be DIY? Because a quick search says that if 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is enough then you can get a Zen 2 machine for $300 and a Zen 3 machine for $370.
But man, $400 in 2026 money is a really tight threshold for "affordable". It means PCs were almost never affordable. If I go back to 2017 when that was equivalent to $300, I don't think I can put together a viable build with even 8TB of RAM and 250GB of SSD. I think that standard is too demanding.
> The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
Oh, that was generally other cryptocurrencies but okay I understand.
nVidia has been overcharging, and they've basically increased the prices by one tier. A 70 card costs as much as an 80 used to.
But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050 beats a 1080 for half the price, before even factoring in inflation.
> For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
> You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
That works when there's enough demand to buy all the chips. AI will stabilize one way or another, and then the remaining datacenter market doesn't need that many chips compared to the consumer market. Manufacturers will have extra supply, and not selling it to consumers would be stupid.
And even if they charged datacenter-level prices to consumers, people would still be able to get PCs. Even if the cheapest new CPU was $500, that's still nowhere near the options being "no PC" and "$40k workstation".
Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
> Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
Yes. Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired at will. Go laptop or corporate and those get increasingly hard to fix. Not to mention if DIY market is healthy the non-DIY market is even cheaper.
> But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050
If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.
> Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
If governments want it, there is money to be made.
> Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
Sure, but no one will be able to afford all the other amenities. Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.
> If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.
It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.
But that's not the point. As long as you can keep getting better performance for less money, things are getting more affordable.
> Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.
Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all. Coolers are dirt cheap and a quality thermalright is less than $20. Housing for a server is about the same as a desktop and not changing. Half this list is nonsense.
Memory is going up a lot. But that's the one we started on. And you can get a reasonable amount for a couple hundred dollars, and acceptable storage for less than one hundred. Power isn't going crazy either.
And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict.
> Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired
Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair. It's a real downside, but if the CPU and motherboard are soldered together and take each other out then it's like I doubled the risk they break within seven years. And after seven years I'd replace both anyway. So that's like a $50 penalty, not a disqualifier. And the mini PCs I was citing have detachable memory and storage.
> It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.
I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.
> Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all.
For now.
And for the record I bought a bargain bin Xeon. Only to realize later the only motherboard that accepts it costs $1000. And I needed another Xeon chip. This was around 2020
> And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict
Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.
> Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair.
If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.
Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.
> I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.
It sucks, but it's nowhere near being the kind of barrier you're describing.
> Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.
What I mean is such a standard says that 1990-2018 was all unaffordable. 2019 was basically the only year that qualifies.
> If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.
In terms of e-waste, if you look at an unfixable mini computer with core parts that on average die 2 years sooner than a full-size computer, it causes less e-waste because it's so much smaller.
> Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.
They can sell bigger chips that cost more money to power users, why would they not care?
But even if it was just phone chips, that would only set back the exponential speed increases by a few years. It wouldn't destroy the market. My brand new phone is way more powerful than my aging desktop. If I could let the desktop borrow its CPU I would do so instantly.
> I think that the Pareto Principle is technically true in a lot of fields, but I also feel our society would be a lot better off if we didn’t know about it.
I doubt that. From what I understand Vilfredo Pareto introduced it to describe the existing allocation of wealth in Italy on the brink of fascism. He claimed that the crops in his garden followed this principle. I highly doubt that that can be replicated. Ever since people refer to the Pareto principle when they observe a 80/20 distribution. Like it is some kind of natural law. But it is not. At least I have yet to see a scientific explanation why a 80/20 distribution would have any kind of special meaning. Just because some distributions are 80/20 doesn't mean there is anything special about it, a lot of distributions are not 80/20.
So I think society would be better off if people would stop acting like it is a natural law and there is nothing to change about it.
Paereto distribution is dangerous since it is applied to justify hierarchies in society. And it is just not a good justification.
There's pretty much a mathematical rule that states that variables free to have any values tend to distribute themselves like that, just like the one that states that variables that are bounded tend to distribute themselves normally.
Or are you talking about the specific numbers? Because yes, the specific numbers are almost never correct.
This all is the most minor aspect of Trattato di Sociologia Generale. Treatise on General Sociology, the translation is the 4 volume The Mind and Society.
The whole point is that we have these arbitrary subject divisions of knowledge for convenience. Physics, economics, biology, chemistry, etc. Then he spends 4 volumes trying to describe what he sees as the mechanics of society without worrying about these divisions of knowledge.
I have been stuck on volume 2 for years. It is brutal read.
A Pareto distribution is a type of power law distribution.
80/20 is Joseph Juran's pathetic simplification. It is something MBAs can easily remember. It is like the most minor and trivial of Pareto's thought.
The main idea of his thought is that society is largely based on types of "non-logical conduct". Pseudo-logical conduct. The best I have been able to understand it is that Pareto believed society operates on unthinking, almost quasi religious beliefs, then after the fact we invent logical and scientific sounding reasons for the action/behavior and fool ourselves into believing the action/behavior was logically arrived at from the start.
His work is trying to catalog these non-logical conducts like a butterfly collector collecting types of butterflys.
Basically, nothing much at all to do with 80/20 or fascism.
Pretty sure all the big Italian political philosophers from that time believed in the Iron Law Of Oligarchy politically.
Democracy being basically a type of performance art while it doesn't matter the system, you always get oligarchy in reality.
Yeah, they installed mediawiki or something similar IIRC in the first years, but did they ever enabled public contributions through it? I recall the Assange committee have always tried to get the leaks through other means, the anonymous/encrypted version du jour of "send a letter to the newsroom".
I own a Xiaomi Vacuum Robot and that is by default very much not local only. However there is a project [1][2] to hack some of those devices and make them local-only.
With limited functionality they work of cause without app and cloud connection.
Thanks for this, I had a pending action item to look for something like this for my robot.
On a spin-off topic from this project: it says on his website
> The Apache-2.0 license is a very permissive license and a lot of work is being shared for free here, so I trust people to not take advantage of that and sell Valetudo; especially not as their own work.
Please don’t disappoint me. Thank you.
I really don't understand why people pick licenses that specifically allow for things that they don't want to happen. It's specially baffling when the author is clearly aware of the limitation!
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