What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all the time. But don't call it a principle.
Unlikely that mining will disappear because NVIDIA limits a specific algoritm/client software/however the limit is implemented. It will, like most "limit for your self-protection" systems, eventually be broken. Miners are already not afraid of picking apart the components they are using, so neither software nor hardware is safe.
Huh? To me, refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism for one’s principles is one of the worst things I can imagine. Principles ought to be routinely subjected to criticism, no different than scientific theories.
I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that you had.
As a tangent: while the parallel to scientific theories is good on the surface, it does lump in this idea that there’s a universal set of correct principles. Isn’t that just philosophy, then? Logical arguments about which principles are sound & universal. Maybe the lesson is to pick principles from the battle-tested ones rather than trying to develop your own.
Also, if your principles are likely to change quickly, it's probable that they haven't been thought through very thoroughly to begin with. It's not like you have to wait for situations to actually arise to consider them.
But usually people use “principle” to refer to a relatively concise statement that can be applied to a large variety of situations.
Principle as I'm using it here is a moral belief or guide. It's less a description of what you do and more an explanation for why you do what you do.
The realities of life make most principles less finite than one would hope. If Nvidia doesn't want to rebrand as a crypto-hardware company, they're going to take action so their products and brand match _their principles_.
I think cryptocurrency is a scam and I'll be glad if/when it goes away and graphics cards become cheap again. However, I will never support hardware manufacturers infringing on the idea of general purpose computing for the sake of their business model.
If they want gamers to get more graphics cards then make so many graphics cards that everyone will be able to afford them. Don't try to artificially limit what the hardware can do.
What is the principle you are defending and at what point does it become less important than other principles?
In this case though the choice is between restricting hardware to give gamers more affordable GPUs. The benefit doesn't match the cost.
The principle is something like freedom or ownership. Arbitrary restrictions are bad because freedom is good. By definition arbitrary restrictions aren't needed (arbitrary) and reduce freedom (restriction).
Of course, it's not really the big value-producing activities getting hit here, it's gaming.
The argument in this subthread has been over whether we should be mad at Nvidia on principle. For example, as capableweb puts it:
> What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all the time. But don't call it a principle.
You seemingly agreed with a "principled" reading of the situation: "That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do."
istorical is arguing, by giving an extreme case, that we don't have a consistent principle against limiting the capabilities of a product when it will benefit a customer who matters more.
After all, if we've agreed that it's morally wrong to "cripple" a product, then what worth is that principle if we abandon it during a crisis? Let the people starve! You're rightly repulsed by that idea, and so you're retreating to the position that we're just going with a cost/benefit analysis. Preventing food from being burned has a cost and a benefit. Preventing GPUs from being used for crypto has a cost and a benefit.
The thing is, this gives up the supposed moral high ground that many in this thread have tried to promote as a reason to be mad at Nvidia. From the perspective you present, it's perfectly reasonable to look at the situation and say that preventing GPUs from being used for crypto will have more benefit than cost. (I certainly think so!) There's no inconsistency you can draw out of someone weighing the various benefits and costs differently than you do.
This is not abandoning a principle but rather picking a higher principle to follow when two or more principles conflict. The point I was making is that we are not currently in this situation. We aren't starving people by denying them access to the latest and greatest graphics cards for cheap.
Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the hands of crypto miners.
That is the end goal here. If you have a better solution, of how to do this without people getting around it via reselling, ect , please suggest it.
What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners, and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to support your long term customers?
There are lots of very good business reasons to provide preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and to raise prices on a different customer base.
It is called price discrimination, and is very useful.
Do you not support companies making obvious business decisions like this, with their own company, that have large benefits to their existing customer base, as well as being perfectly rational from a business perspective?
Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base, makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of people.
And it is all done, with people making voluntary decisions with the products that they choose to sell. Don't buy the product, if you don't like it.
I don't support companies making the choice to limit their compute. I think companies should sell general purpose computers.
No, this doesn't solve the problem.
Because what they want to do is ensure that the cards are not resold to miners, and instead stay in the hands of long term customers.
> You don't need to cripple the devices
First of all, they aren't crippled for the existing customers. They are only limited, for this other use case that the company doesn't care about.
And they do need to limit that functionality, if they want to prevent those cards from being resold to crypto miners.
> I don't support companies
Then don't purchase their product, if you don't like it. That is kind of the point of all of this. They don't want you as a customer. And it is their company, that they can do what they want with.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why doesn't nVidia just make the best cards they can, and sell them for the highest price they can? What does nVidia care if their customers are using their cards for gaming or mining?
Because it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize the long time gamer customer base, as opposed to the crypto market, which could disappear very quickly.
Prioritizing certain customers, that will be around in the future, makes a lot of sense.
It also helps build a gaming ecosystem. If gamers don't have graphics cards, then the gaming ecosystem as a whole suffers, and could hurt their future business.
If you need to run millions of hashes per second then buy one of the non-LHR models. No one is forcing you to buy one of these chips and Nvidia is not taking anything away from you.
This is like saying that Intel limits what people can do with their hardware because they make both i3 and i9 chips. There is a spectrum of options to fit more people's needs.
How would you feel towards Intel if they didn’t allow you to run Microsoft Office on an i3 chip because it’s a “consumer grade processor” - you have to upgrade to an i5 or higher to run “business programs”.
If there are poor people why don't they print more money? But seriously, I addressed this in my reply: there is an ongoing chip shortage in the industry (besides the fact that it may not make sense to scale a production line for a demand surge).
I agree with you, you should for sure listen to criticism against your principles, and challenge them yourself too. But if they change because "if we didn’t have such a dire X", I wouldn't call it a "principle" anymore. A principle (for me) would mean that you don't compromise on it "in emergency" but rather that it's something fundamental you believe in, without much reason in many cases.
> because the intent displayed by Nvidia does matter
Yeah, agree again that it matters, but as a gamer myself, I'm afraid it doesn't solve the problem for me. I want to be able to buy graphic cards myself too, and these "fixes" from NVIDIA looks (to me) like posturing without actually try to address the core problem (low supply). I'd love for them to come up with a real solution, that doesn't try to decide how people use their computers, even though I don't want to mine anything myself.
As a compressed form of your moral judgment, it is also useful for you to quickly communicate your position on the moral space, and it is up to participants in social interactions to decide whether or not someone is good at this moral judgment compression.
For instance, I have a principle not to lie in general. Most social participants know that this does not constrain me from lying in specific situations. After repeated interactions they can tell whether this principle of mine is held in a manner that's useful to them.
The same principle also allows me to quickly judge situations that require me to lie. Is it okay for me to tell this person that their house is painted poorly? Well, I have this anti-lie principle so that pulls me toward "yes". I might have other principles that pull me in other directions.
Of course you can treat principles as immutable moral rods. This presumably has some value to you. In general, people do not act in this manner, however.
Of course even though you can have relaxed principles, e.g. “I usually don’t lie” vs. “I don’t lie,” I think the point here is that if you believe or preach a particular “principle,” but then adjust it for yourself when it’s convenient (for example a “just this once” scenario), it was never a principle to begin with.
I have not yet met someone who rigidly adheres to theirs. Perhaps if I had met the Dalai Lama but nearly everyone else will find that the moral space is so fraught that they cannot adequately compress it into immutable laws.
Usually, should one demand such adherence one would find one met with accusations of “looking at the world in black and white” and “lacking nuance”.
Of course I don’t really intend to change your mind, but I do intend to transmit what I have observed.
The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly.
When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run with the demanding synthetic workloads 24/7, which is going to create a high failure rate. This is going to sour a lot of people who buy those used mining cards and experience failures later.
In short: They're gaining goodwill with the long term customers at the expense of the short-term customers. This is fine, because the short-term customers will disappear soon and the long-term customers can consume all of their production anyway.
Source: I used to mine ETH years ago on used AMD GPUs when that was still profitable. From perusing mining forums this is still standard practice. I eventually sold all the GPUs and all of them worked flawlessly.
GPUs are relatively reliable, but fans less so. The failures are usually an early death of the fan, which can't be replaced without strapping something else to the shroud with zip ties or watercooling it.
Miners aren't usually impacted because the failures happen after several years. It's the downstream buyers who lose out and then associate the brand with premature failure.
Also, if they're able to produce both consumer GPUs and miner GPUs to meet both demands, what's stopping them from doing it now? Is it not worth their while at current prices, so bumping the miner GPU prince by a significant amount would change that? Why not just increases prices as it is? It seems to me that the actual price charged by amd and nvidia isn't that outrageous, it's just that the cards are bought well in advance and possibly scalped later.