- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
I said before and I will say it again. AI is product being built by its users, an unfinished program that it is used wrong just for companies to make money. AI hasn’t made any progress and we won’t see any progress, because it is used by companies to profit.
They don’t care about the economy and the downsides, they care to make us use AI.It almost seems like they want to make home computing unaffordable, so you have to rent PC time from a cloud provider. This way they nickel and dime you, and use your data to train their LLMs.
Micron and nvidia get their cut by being able to set whatever prices they can imagine.
That’s exactly what they’re aiming for.
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it’s an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of “the customer is always right in matters of taste”
Which just means “if they want to buy ugly shit, let them”
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. “The customer is always right” just means don’t tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company’s bottom line.
I don’t think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money “they” can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
It’s vassal capitalism. Capitalists pay their technofeudal lords their 30% cut of revenue and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
I’m worried that at the end of the day, gamers will just give up and accept higher prices, kinda like with GPUs.
they have to give up their bragging rights if they don’t upgrade their PCs
They can fuck right off.
For the foreseeable future, DIYPC is dead.
most folks will pay. all my PC gamer friends are just paying $200 per 16GB stick now.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
https://wccftech.com/asus-declares-all-in-ai-strategy-as-server-revenue-soars-beyond-expectation/
Lol
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
Let me translate that for you:
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
But uh, yeah uh, I feel you, that sucks bro and I appreciate you. But, dude, seriously, look at all this money! So yeah, stay strong guys, tweet about us! And don’t forget, if you want to be informed about the best memory deals, definitely sign up for our newsletter! Just put your email right in this field…
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
To be fair I would not be mad if that was the response, It’s the pandering that get’s me fuming
Yeah, some honesty would be refreshing.
Though to be fair, when that actually happens you know what we call that? “X company just said the quiet part out loud”.
So yeah, there’s kinda no pleasing us either…
LOL If companies were honest we’d have a socialist revolution within 48 hours.
I still have one PC with a broken motherboard that I need to fix. I wonder when will I be able to do that.
motherboard prices haven’t inflated too much yet. gaming/consumer motherboards aren’t in demand from the AI industry. the want server hardware
> has an AI slop summary
Yeah I noticed that lmao, definitely AI slop.
What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Your TAM is about to go bam, so cut the shit and make us some RAM.
I can’t take anything that uses the word “tremendously” seriously any more.
Bigly agreed
They gotta get while the getting’s good or they’ll miss out on that margin
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.
Forget ram. Wait until there’s widespread power outages yet you’re somehow paying 10x for your electricity bill because of the new data center down the street.
this is actually happening
my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after
we have a power making dam in town
historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA
If the data center is causing all that power drain, they should be the ones footing the damned bill
The aura that the US irradiates is just preposterous. At this point the only sound you can hear is the sound of boots being licked, evil corpos are doing what they please while the general populace is disregarded.
mmmm Facsism, feels good right?
FUCK TRUMP and FUCK THE REPUBLICANS THAT ENABLED HIM
↙↙↙
Combined over 20% last November, great times!!
Combined means we have:
first 1k kwh rate Above 1k kwh rate
And the above 1k kwh changes seasonally.
they send us these cute charts and stuff about our usage
they show you a “you are using xyz% more then previous year” type stuff
but my wife keeps it and their little bullshit is because they keep changing the rate and then using the new rate against your old usage as comparison. Looks like OMG we used a lot more power then last year! We should consider cutting something out.
But the actual meter reading numbers are almost always the same year after year
Mine does that too, and there’s $300 in fees that don’t relate to the actual power used. Using no utilities, I’d still have to pay that much.
I like the suggestions to save money and low usage.
“Have you tried living in complete darkness this month? You could save $2 off your bill!”
“Perhaps try not using electricity this month. Or, consider getting a second source of income to turn on your fridge for a few hours a day!”
With gas prices at multiyear lows and electricity being so expensive it’s really hard to justify electrifying appliances. I was considering doing so (gas dryer, stove, water heater, furnace), but I think if I did I’d be paying an extra $300/month for quite a long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
I find it fascinating how the concept of coping with a situation has been made into a negative. “Get bent loser, how dare you try to make the best out of a bad situation”. Hold on, let me unfuck the tech sector real quick.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
Master Of Orion 2 … TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) … Warcraft II …
X-Wing Alliance too, it’s a relatively modern game, but there’s something about the campaign. You really feel yourself a rebel.
They all have that atmosphere of going into the sea for real, I don’t know how to describe it.
Another old game with it is Ascendancy. I always get too emotional from its style and music, somehow it reminds me of how I dreamed of future in my childhood. But I didn’t play a lot of it for the same reason.
Master of Orion 2 is just very playable and comfortable.
TIE Fighter has that sense of humor similar to Dungeon Keeper in some sense.
X-Wing I like more, because of its atmosphere, again, you really feel yourself a rebel.
XvT is for a group of friends.
WarCraft II has amazing music. Other than feeling yourself in a world where moral alignment is not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional, chivalrous honor being the one forgotten. You might not feel yourself the good guy necessarily, but that honor you’ll feel in its campaign. A bit like in Harry Potter such a character as Bellatrix Lestrange has that quality maxed out in the positive direction, which makes her an interesting character compared to most DEs who are both baddies and spineless cowards.
IMHO there’s much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for “outdated” hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
And all these memory are spent on the generation of pornographic content in the highest quality.
Are they really able to replicate pornography like that? I know that for normal stuff, the videos are only under ten seconds or so.
You can get up to 12 minutes locally even if you’re patient. Technically you can go way further if you do it in parts though, and use multiple generations. Might take a few weeks to “direct” it right though, depending what you want to make. If it’s vanilla stuff, maybe 3 days for a 45 minute video on a 3090? (Via 3-5 minute chained segments, with smaller second long segments for smooth camera angle changes)
Idk I’ve seen better in the amateur section
In the “amateur” section with professional cameras and pretty experienced (one could say glorified) “amateurs”.
highest quality.
Man’s got jokes!
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
Don’t forget obligatory data mining the crap out of you!
