I can only hope that the A.I. bubble bursts in time when I need to buy a new computer.
What I’m becoming worried about now is all these corporations now realizing that they can simply supply price the average consumer out of owning electronics or any kind of compute. And locking them into renting or leasing access to data center compute and keeping the power of information further consolidated in corporate interests.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
That out of context quote takes a lot of shit for something that was supposed to represent a futuristic socialist utopia.
The idea was that 14 years after that article was published, mankind would have such immediate access to services and those services would be free, that people would just sorta stop caring about owning things. For example, since food and necessities would be free, you could go home and print your dinner. If you wanted someone else to cook, you’d get something delivered. But, if you wanted to try something truly novel that most people don’t do anymore in this society, you could rent kitchen equipment and it’d be ready as soon as you need it, and you’d use socialized appliances and utensils. Why? Because your home doesn’t need that clutter. If you wanna cook all the time, you can own whatever you want. But most people will want to use that space for something else, so they’ll just print their meals.
You would have quick and easy access to transport, so why waste the money and space to own a car? You wanna drive? Push a button in your app and a car arrives for free. Or take the free train or bus.
The essay isn’t about “you won’t be able to own anything,” it’s about “you won’t want to own anything, but you’ll have everything you could ever want or need.”
And we’re really headed in the right direction for this amazing future. Except, you know… Corporations are bleeding us dry instead of supporting us…
That does sound lovely, but like every other utopia it’s a fantasy. It’s got the same fatal issue as every other utopia - people. A person can be good and decent, but people suck. I’d say the modern use of that quote is more accurate to reality than the rose tinted view of its origin.
“To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”
The link doesn’t work for me.
Even if the initial intention is positive, I think this degree of dependency on external services is not realistic even if mega corps were not as bad as they are currently.
Holy cow that’s a very real danger I hadn’t thought of! The industry needs a new trend to reuse all this capacity they built, because AI will likely scale back as many startups fail to reach profit.
Renting your home computer might be the next trend, and it could be gratis at first so people get used to it. Why spy on users when you can actually own their computers?
Aren’t we already seeing that though?
The vast majority of people who surf the web don’t use a computer to do it. People who do belong to niches. People over a certain age grew up with and still buy computers. People who game still buy computers or consoles. People who stream/create content still use computers and other electronics for that purpose, same with like. Engineers and hobbyists using CAD and other software in creative spaces.
But the smart phone has overtaken the computer as a personal computing device by quite a large margin now. And at every turn companies are trying to make cell phones a den of ad service, slop, and addictive content while stealing any user data that’s not nailed down to increase their revenue and continue the circle.
with being a walled garden i have a feeling we will eventually see phones become genuinely free because you will not have an option to keep your data away from advertisers. AOSP is barely holding on to maintain a safe place for users. when all hardware is locked down we will be stuck.
I’m assuming you mean that phone software will be free, because phones (while they can be heavily subsidized) aren’t free and are getting up to ridiculous prices. I own a phone that retails for $1000. That’s a ridiculous price for a phone. Except that phones now are just very tiny personal computers.
the crazy prices will eventually lose users. so the price will drop but the phone manufactureres won’t just accept the loss. instead they will sell you as a commodity even harder.
I hope it means the return of old, old hardware and the software that comes along with it. This is why projects like collapseOs are important.
Anybody hold onto all their old electronics just in case in spite of the financial/resource “waste”?
No but I do hold onto old electronics because I grew up with my grandparents and they had WW2 wartime rationing mentality about saving everything. Also my grandfather also an incredibly cheap bastards at times too
I hope they do, it will just break stuff more and people will be more likely to go with Linux and open source software. My 10 year old computer still is super fast if it’s not bloated.
How’s your 10 year old computer going to look when it’s 30 years old?
Software needs hardware Linux dose nothing but make it easier for them.
Good luck…
Even when the bubble bursts, they’re going to have an insane amount of computing power just sitting there, it will get sold off in bankruptcy proceedings, and some company will gobble it up and operate at a loss while continuing to secure future supply contracts.
There’s a very real chance that we’re witnessing the slow death of home computing.
The way things shake out it might end up being prohibitively expensive compared to cloud computing, and once that’s the norm they price gouge like Walmart did to destroy small businesses.
Instead of dropping a couple grand for a PC every couple years, we’ll have steady contracts paying for month at a time indefinitely.
Nah. Web devs will create even more bloated web pages to keep home computing in business.
For real though, most people don’t need that much computing power, and we reached the plateau 12 years ago. That’s why we’re seeing crypto and AI grifts happen. They recentralize decentralized systems. The elites are striking back.
You know the saying“information wants to be free; information wants to be expensive”? This is the expensive part where people try to horde knowledge by making it inaccessible to everyday people.
People thought they’d hang onto CDs and DVDs too…
How is this applicable to the comment? Companies never figured out how to charge rent for those.
Devs see home computers as a free resource, and the burden is on the consumer to buy a computer which runs their software.
I think it’s a lost cause. Essentially both crypto and AI were big because someone figured out how to offload shit to a GPU efficiently. There’s probably a ton of other appllications for GPUs we haven’t even tapped.
I’ve got this crazy idea where we can use GPUs to render 3D scenes efficiently.
First it was GPUs because crypto, then this. Wonder what useless thing the tech bros will cover up with in a few years!
Article in 2027:
Keyboard prices soared this month, as tech giants pivoted from failed AI projects to employing hordes of monkeys typing randomly. One CEO was quoted as saying, “Just a few trillion more dollars, and I think our random typing model could reproduce the lost contents of the Library of Alexandria.”
When in a gold rush, be the one selling shovels.
I’m off to buy stocks in bananas.
Water.
It’s already happening in parallel though, not next.
AI was never meant to benefit the working class in any capacity.
Its a great rule of thumb that if you see oligarchs hype up something and push for it to be everywhere, its a BAD fucking thing.
They believe they can put an end to having to pay for labor in any capacity ever again. If I knew less than I did about how this AI works I would be worried.
Or if I worked in entertainment.
Meanwhile the average CEOs decision making could be replaced by a goldfish in a tank with some arbitrary object detection code.
Resource drain of LLMs inescapably makes them tools availiable only to big players. They are ideal in the way they are naturally gated. Making them mandatory == giving these select companies and people power over everything. And not only oligarchs’ promotion, but the whole situation of them being given for free or cheap at a huge loss gives one an idea that there’s a lot to milk from it’s growing adoption.
But that’s completely not true! Like, not a single thing you said is even slightly correct!
LLMs are relatively cheap to run - at small scales. You can run an LLM on your own computer right now. It won’t be super fast, it won’t have super skills, but you can run it, and you can train it yourself.
Massive LLMs like ChatGPT require tremendous resources precisely because they are not just tools available only to big players. Everybody on the planet has access to them - for free. The only actual difference there is between running an LLM locally and through a provider is that you get better speed and (sometimes, depending on context) better training through a provider.
As for “there’s a lot to milk from its growing adoption” - maybe? Probably? Who knows? That’s the “magic” of the AI bubble we’re experiencing right now - the big players keep saying that it will “make work and money obsolete”, that “anyone will be able to do anything”, that “a time of post-scarcity approaches”, and a billion other bullshit marketing slogans like that. But the reality is that nobody has yet figured out how to make money on that thing.
Right now, the only reason it’s “growing”, is because of the weird and probably illegal circular financing that’s going on at the very top - Nvidia invests in OpenAI, which invests in Oracle, which invests in Nvidia - and so on. No money is actually being made or (often) even changing hands, but everyone can now show they’ve received a lot of investment which pumps up their stock prices. The only reason this hasn’t popped yet is probably because the main investing parties are using tonnes of cash they had stored.
Growing adoption means nothing. It’s a marketing tool for them to keep shareholders happy while they keep a literal investing circlejerk going, every now and again inviting another player into the fold.
I view AI to be like the internet: Most corporate players won’t survive the bubble, but the ones that do, will be incredibly influential. Ordinary people made great use of the internet - but failed to make it really decentralized. Thus the enshittification of Reddit, Youtube, social media, and so forth.
We can choose to embrace local LLM that is fully under our control, or cede ownership to the 1% forevermore.
Ordinary people made great use of the internet - but failed to make it really decentralized. Thus the enshittification of Reddit, Youtube, social media, and so forth
I don’t think one is related to the other.
Decentralisation doesn’t affect enshittification that much. Look at Lemmy and Fediverse in general - it’s federated… so what? The .world instance is by far the largest in the Fediverse. If the mods there go insane, like they did on Reddit, or if the admins decide to add monetisation to it… it just happens. There being other servers changes nothing for the users stuck on the .world server. Sure, they can create new accounts elsewhere, but that’s - in principle - no different than switching from Reddit to Lemmy.
On the other hand, look at Steam. Valve, the creators of Steam, has no “decentralisation” of their product, they’re the god emperor of everything in terms of how Steam operates. At face value, it’s the same exact product as, I don’t know, the Epic Store, and yet Steam is loved by gamers, while Epic is hated.
No, you can have centralised and not enshittified services just fine - as long as the goal is to provide the service, instead of “creating value for the shareholders”. As soon as that element comes in, there’s no stopping enshittification.
We can choose to embrace local LLM that is fully under our control, or cede ownership to the 1% forevermore.
Agreed.
Your private LLM will have nothing to compete against the big guys though. A cute hobby project but nothing of economic value.
You’re not training it from scratch, though. There are people, enthusiasts, doing it for you. I can fire up LM Studio and browse through thousands of models to then have a conversation with, or have them write stories, etc., etc.
As for “nothing of economic value” - that’s, again, just plain misunderstanding what AI can be used for. Corridor Crew - a VFX team publishing on YouTube - used self-trained AI to boost their film making options. For example, to copy the “bullet time” effect from The Matrix, they were able to use around a dozen cameras instead of hundreds, and then used AI to create the “in between” frames.
How does that have “no economic value”, mate?
Right, spend all this time to self train a hobby model for one specific scenario which “Big LLM” would deliver by the time you’re back from lunch.
This illusion that plebs can easily use personal LLMs is the argument that AI companies will use to justify why they shouldn’t be reigned in or held accountable for their impact on society and economy.
I love how you completely ignored everything I said, and then reiterated your misguided point.
It’s good that you love that because you had no point. A bunch of people achieving one single specific outcome is not competing with anyone.
I knew there was something wrong when we started getting positive metrics based on how much we leveraged AI.
Holy shit, really? Crucial? They’ve been a major player for AGES. That’s wild.
I mean, Crucial is just the name that Micron puts on the memory they want to sell to consumers. So this story is basically just, “Micron no longer wants to sell to consumers”.
When the shit hits the fan and they come back to consumers, we should just buy from anyone but them, on principle alone.
So Samsung or SK Hynix. Because there are only 3 real players in the market :/
Anything but crucial.
Well it turns out that Samsung and SK Hynix also sold out to Altman. Literally whose RAM we gonna buy now? There were only 3 major manufacturers in the first place.
I’m pretty fucked then, because I was one of those that was waiting until 2026 to build a new rig.
I’m super lucky, I have 32 gigs and a graphics card. It’s just a 3060 ti, but it’ll do for now. CPU is a bit shit, BUT since it’s one of the lowest end CPUs of the second to last generation on AM4, I can go forward a generation AND get hella more cores with higher clock rates. Lately I use my PC more for work than gaming, so extra CPU cores will carry it till 2027 or 2028. 300 euros will take me from 6 cores/6 threads (ryzen 5 3500x) to 16 cores/32 threads (5950x) lol
Put it this way, I’m waiting for DDR6 and AM6 now to buy any more RAM. Just a full on platform upgrade and I’ll make it a company computer because I work on it. Will save like 60% because taxes (social tax, income tax, VAT)
I am really beginning to fucking hate AI. Like, before I just didn’t care for it, it just wasn’t really my interest. But now I’m really beginning to fucking despise that shit and I really can’t wait to see the “AI economy” completely fucking destroyed.
AI even ruined AI. Up until this insane hype train, ML models were specialized tools to achieve their tasks. Now the whole field is dominated by LLMs and slopgen bullshit.
Yeah that’s the annoying thing. Generative AI is actually really useful…in SPECIFIC situations. Discovering new battery tech, new medicines, etc. are all good use cases because it’s basically a parrot and blender combined and most of these things are rehashes if existing technologies in new and novel ways.
It is not a fucking good solution for a search engine replacement to ask “Why do farts smell?”. It uses way too much energy for that and it hallucinates bullshit.
Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.
But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.
I agree with the general sentiment here but just wanted to clarify that they definitely didn’t “solve protein folding” yet. Alpha fold is a significant improvement in structure prediction and it generated a lot of hype but some of the structures I’ve seen it put out are total nonsense.
exactly how i feel. literally said something very similar to my wife last night. I fucking hate AI. I think activist group are going to starting popping up hard against it. And if they aren’t already, they really should. This shit is destroying our world. The only people this is helping is billionaires.
Capitalism is destroying the world. We need to rise up against that. The AI bullshit is just one manifestation of the whole world being geared to serve capital and the handful of people that control it.
But we need capitalism to save us from capitalism!
Unbounded capitalism is for sure.
I would say “AI” makes a good poster child for what to fight against. It embodies a lot of what’s wrong.
Soon we’ll have nothing left to eat but the rich.
But they said we should eat cake if we have no bread anymore!!1!!!1!11!
So far, AI has cost me a few hobbies (as in, made them a lot less enjoyable) and one job.
If there’s an uprising against clankers, you’ll find me at the front lines.
Your enemy is, as usual, billionaires and their fanboys. Clankas don’t exist as a separate thing, they are tools of the wealthy to further oppress the common folk.
I bet we’ll start to see domestic terror attacks against server farms when more of the population loses their jobs to this bullshit.
I ain’t saying I’m going to do it. But a man burned down the governors home in Pennsylvania. People who lose their homes and lives are not going to take this shit well.
If it crashes the hardware will suddenly be dirt cheap though so. There’s that.
They’ll cheat us out of that too. Chip manufacturers will pay and coerce and liquidators and retailers to shovel all the surplus into the ocean to keep prices high.
You gotta be fucking kidding me, I swore by Crucial RAM and SSDs. Eat shit, Micron.
I built a god rig in 2022, i bought the best 64gb ddr5 4-stick ram kit i could, an nvidia 4090, the best processor i could, and attached it to the best mobo i could.
I spent about 4800.
My pc is now worth about 6500.
This is some crazy ass shit. Never should a pc appreciate in value.
What the hell is going on???
When you hear people say they hate AI, it’s for more reasons than AI slop, energy consumption, and beating the damn term into every product line you can imagine for little to no benefit.
My phone recently offered to summarize a text message for me. I’m talking about SMS, the messaging system that already has a character limit.
Also, when I last checked the weather in my area, there was an AI summary. It was an entire sentence or two, and offered zero additional details over what was already visually indicated by the raincloud icon and the number representing the temperature.
I’m looking forward to installing GrapheneOS when their support for my phone stabilizes.
AI companies are buying up all of the RAM in a futile bit to reach AGI.
And haven’t even achieved AI yet. What we call “AI” is still nothing more than an upjumped calculator.
In addition, we haven’t even come up with a definition of intelligence.
To quote a recent post “we taught computers to talk like middle managers and assumed that meant computers were sentient, rather than assuming that middle managers aren’t”
Their fucking calculator can’t even calculate. Big fucking whoop.
And people keep shovelling money in their bottomless maw. The world is mad.
Translation, Micron is shutting down Crucial for short term shareholder value at the cost of a sustainable and proven long term brand and channel.
They will return to the market with a new brand once the bubble bursts.
Probably just the same brand, honestly?
News two years from now: “Crucial back in business”
Depends on how proud they are and if they’d want to retract their statements of going after AI instead of consumers or not.
I don’t think there’s any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.
That’s exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it’s been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.
That is, if they haven’t sold the Crucial name to someone else first.
I can see both happening.
I’d say: We will see (thumbsup)China’s CXMT might go for it. Apparently they are rolling out DDR5 8000+ memory, two or three years from now. They can rebrand as Crucial for the western market, thus using familiarity to push their product.
“Crucial’s Xtreme Memory Technology will push your Steam Machine beyond the limits, dddduuuuude!” 🤘
A few months from now: Crucial unshutting down
If that happens, prior Crucial consumers (like myself) should boycott because they already showed what they actually care about and it isn’t their loyal customer base. They don’t want us to buy their products? We should happily give them what they want now should they change their mind later.
Anyway yeah, if they come back, they’re officially on my shit list.
Damn, that was the only brand of RAM without LEDs and racing stripes on it
I used to hate on RGB in PCs, until I realized that they can do more than just rainbow vomit; with enough LEDs you can actually get a visible image… If you squint…
One of my favorite things to do with RGB is use the RAM sticks as VU meters and the CPU radiator fans as visualizers when playing music; gives off oldschool HiFi vibes and reminds me of my Winamp days.
I like the rainbow vomit, but I get it.
My pc lights start flashing all red when its overheating. Pretty useful cause I won’t notice the sound till its crashed. I’m weird like that.
All the lights go out on mine when it overheats, and then there’s a puff of white smoke.
AI is really ruining fucking everything. The enviorment, entertainement, music, art, jobs, reality, freedom / privacy / rights.
The fact people are blaming the tech rather than the tech bros is a big part of why this keeps happening.
Its the decision of real people that make this situation suck.
Yeah but we can’t possibly hold people accountable for the actions of their company, think of the shareholders!
Capitalism is the biggest religion of today, and it’s su successful it can coexist with a lot of other religions.
It’s not AI destroying the environment and making us miserable, it’s th pursuit of profit. It’s not “corporate greed” sucking us dry. Corporations are greedy by design under Capitalism, that’s the whole point. It’s not bad CEOs making evil decisions. It’s the system that allows such wealth and power to exist.
All of those problems are systemic, not bad people making bad decisions. Treating capitalism like law of nature won’t fix anything.
No, corporate greed is ruining everything with AI.
Because you know if they built a super-AI that give them perfect instructions on how to build Earth into a paradise, but it would require they give up 1/4 of their wealth, they’d be reaching for the reset button before it finished printing them out…
And it will burst and mostly disappear, taking with it half the economy, thousands of jobs, and become a military industrial complex blackbox tax sponge, the worst of all possible outcomes.
A fun reminder that during the pandemic, before AI, there was a backlog in new cars because all the crucial chips were unavailable due to an increase in bullshit like wifi enabled toasters.
It has nothing to do with AI. Consumers are asking for this shit and companies are delivering.
No one is asking for ads on their fridge. You are really underestimating the cartel like behavior of business in general now.
I read an article yesterday that Samsung’s memory division wasn’t even willing to let Samsung’s own cell phone division lock in any long-term memory buying agreement with them, which the cell ohone division hsd been trying to do. Too much money in selling HBM memory for parallel compute to datacenters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/ai-frenzy-is-driving-new-global-supply-chain-crisis-2025-12-03/
Some 6,000 miles away in California, Paul Coronado said monthly sales at his company, Caramon, which sells recycled low-end memory chips pulled from decommissioned data-center servers, have surged since September. Almost all its products are now bought by Hong Kong-based intermediaries who resell them to Chinese clients, he said.
“We were doing about $500,000 a month,” he said. “Now it’s $800,000 to $900,000.”
I threw away a bunch of large-capacity DDR4 DIMMs last year, figured that theyld be useless in the future. Kind of wish I hadn’t, now. Reusing old DIMMs is probably the only source of supply that can be ramped up in the near term.
In October, SK Hynix said all its chips are sold out for 2026, while Samsung said it had secured customers for its HBM chips to be produced next year. Both firms are expanding capacity to meet AI demand, but new factories for conventional chips won’t come online until 2027 or 2028.
Two or three years until manufacturing will be ramped up, and there’s nobindication of how much of that will go to HBM as well.
Dude I have DIMMS that I bought in fucking 1999. Who the fuck throws away RAM???
Right after Windows 10 stopped being supported, rendering a lot of computers “obsolete”.
/yes I know about Linux
These CEOs seem really slow on the uptake. Gonna put all your chips into the AI business just as the bubble is about to burst.
The market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent.
That’s the thing about bubbles, the last moments are very profitable, it’s more like rich people are playing chicken with the market until it busts.
They’re trying to squeeze the last water out of the rock while hoping to dip out before everyone realizes everything has been squeezed out.
Are you fucking kidding me? Holy fucking hell.
Fuck AI, may the people pushing it die by its hands.
Well, we will likely die with them in that case.
No. The survivors of the bubble will have plenty to eat.
I am not talking about the bubble. I am talking about AI being a threat to humanity up there with nuclear wipe out.
