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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

Heh. Let me tell you about how I tried to buy a new Nvidia RTX 3090...

I really don't understand why Nvidia doesn't just give every buyer a test to see their knowledge of either ML or gaming skill before allowing purchase of a GPU.

Either

(a) submit a history of gaming high scores with dates

(b) a Github repo with Tensorflow or Pytorch code that has commits from at least a year or two ago

What is it that I do not get about this joke?

That wasn't intended to be a joke. It might sound comical but it would solve the problem and would probably the first solution an 8-year-old would think of.

Which points out the the real answer to the question: Nvidia doesn't want it solved. Not just that they don't care, but they're making more money now — so they don't want it solved.

Not really, they're selling out and making the same amount of money because the crypto-nuts buying and hoarding them are still buying them at list price. And they are not making use of 90% of the features available on the cards.

I don't think mentioning that an 8-year-old thinking of this idea actually helps your argument in this case

(c) could be cheated away, and (a) and (b)... I don't know, I guess if NVDA does this my best option is to sell my ML toy project repos to gamers :P

You mean like the Verified Actual Gamer program Linus Tech Tips is doing?

What about resale? Would you forbid that too? How would they enforce it?

Buying a 3090 is not a basic need.

Are gamer or ML engineer dollars worth more than those of the general public?

Or they could just you know, increase the price until quantity demanded = quantity supplied

That is just a horrible suggestion... Doesn't matter what rules or what level of enforcement you take to try to control prices/allocate resources... people will find a loophole to get around your authoritarian restrictions, and rightly so.

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