Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead

“You will own nothing and be happy”

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.

"Please insert more corpo-coin for compute access"

Wouldn't the chinese or whoever doesn't chose to do that gain market share?

theyd have to all collorbate to make that happen though, which is really unfeasable on their end. a BUNCH of companies will go under if they cannot sell product. they arent going to willingly take losses for the sake of a different company.

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.

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”?

Only if you use their products and allow them to profit from it.

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.”

Water.

It’s already happening in parallel though, not next.

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.

Those GPUs fry themselves in a year or two, and utility prices will put pressure on governments to concept datacenters

I've got this crazy idea where we can use GPUs to render 3D scenes efficiently.

Serial compute isn't doing the double-every-18-months-in-speed since something like the early 2000s.

Unlike with serial compute, not all problems can be solved, run faster, with parallel compute. But at some point, unless we figure out some sort of new way to play with physics, we pretty much have to move to parallel compute where we can if we want much more performance.

It's already there for most of us. It only a few rich companies getting richer that's making the line go up.

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 always thought the butlarian jihad was silly but now i get it

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.

There was already a lot of ML bullshit from the big data bubble ~ 2010 and before ChatGPT, together with all of the fuss about data scientists. But now it's a 100 times worse.

A lot of top researchers have already moved on from transformers.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s longtime chief AI scientist, quit and said LLMs are a “dead end” because scaling text-only models can’t produce real intelligence, and he's not the only one who thinks so. Lots of engineers understand the limitations of LLMs.

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.

And it'll happen again and again and again

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.

When the shit hits the fan and they come back to consumers, we should just buy from anyone but them, on principle alone.

That really whips the llama's ass.

Functional RGB isn't bad when tastefully done like that. Nice little effect.

That said I have all of mine turned off and prefer my tower under my desk and out of sight.

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.

That's interesting. I've always wanted a bunch of blinkenlights but they also needed to be functional and serve some purpose. Kind of like the old Thinkpad I have that has a whole row of status LEDs under the screen. A bunch of meaningless lights just for the sake of having lights always seemed pointless.

Anyway, with the last PC I built, the RGB stuff was pretty much unavoidable. I still went out of my way to get a case without a window though. I do have the RGB on, but it's a solid blue-greenish color so there's a bit of glow coming out the back of the case.

I like the rainbow vomit, but I get it.

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.

A classic heads they win, tails you lose scenario.

Ah you say that, but I lived through the internet bubble. Jeez it was gruesome and then 9/11 hit the next year. Savage times.

Unless it's considered a national security issue, which it might be, they're getting fucked without the lube.

They don't even need that. current AI will tell them that. They've actually ran these questions and they ignore the answer every time

Yeah but we can't possibly hold people accountable for the actions of their company, think of the shareholders!

Indeed.

I have a model running locally on my NAS that does image recognition for photos in my Immich app (think Google Photos, but private). It does a decent job and runs well on AMD integrated graphics on a Ryzen 5 3400G. I just search for [daughter's name], and there she is.

I use Firefox's translation feature (that also runs locally and can run on low end hardware).

My sister is blind and uses an AI assisted screen reader that works way better than what she was using before.

The issue isn't AI/machine learning in itself, it's this tech bro arms race. It's them manipulating models to push agendas. It's them shoehorning an LLM into every fucking Google query. It's them telling companies they can fire all their staff and rely on LLMs.

It's capitalism, it'll never end. Working as intended.

No one is asking for ads on their fridge. You are really underestimating the cartel like behavior of business in general now.

Customers aren't asking for this shit. The issue is that companies don't seem to try to deliver products customers want anymore. Instead they hop on some bullshit trend to try to appeal to investors to buy their stocks to pump it up because they want to show they are the next big thing in innovation.

I swear bro, just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear, we're gonna get to AGI. Just add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear. I swear. I swear. I swear, we're gonna get to AGI. Just one more gigabyte and just make it bigger. Just make it bigger. We're gonna get to AGI. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. Just make the model bigger. I swear.

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.

Probably just the same brand, honestly?

News two years from now: "Crucial back in business"

Ask Intel how well compromising long term product development for short term gain is working now. How is their bank balance looking now?

You also cant just pick it up from scratch again. The people are gone, the relationships are gone and people who trusted your brand to build their businesses have gone elsewhere.

I swear businesses are run like political parties these days, they simply dont care about anything beyond the next cycle.

Kinda no? Its not had a great last few years.

It's fine for things like office PCs where you just need it to work, don't want to spend a lot of money, and performance doesn't really matter too much.

But you repeat yourself.

I have a couple open slots in my rack waiting for the day.

The way the elders of the internet intended; by crudely pasting their heads on top of someone else body.

No. The survivors of the bubble will have plenty to eat.

I have memory thar predates DIMMs and have no plan to throw them away. That guy is crazy

Imagine the ship of Theseus, but they don’t replace the parts. They just take them off. It will be very cost efficient, until the ship sinks.

Who needs ram in a phone anyway?

Not sure that leopards will be having a glorious meal is the appropriate symbolism but feel free to give me a better one

It's a calculated risk. But I think they will be just fine when they turn back to their base consumers. And the consumers will welcome them back. Happens all the time. nVidia and crypto Hoe's are the latest example.