Comment by roadside_picnic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roadside_picnic | Hacker News Reader

roadside_picnic

I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing.

I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for most people.

Micron has already decided to just eliminate the Crucial brand (as mentioned in the post). It feels like if this continues, once our nice home PCs start to break, we won't be able to repair them.

The extreme version of this is that even dumb terminals (which still require some ram) will be as expensive as laptops today. In this world, our entire computing experience is connecting a dumb terminal to a ChatGPT interface where the only way we can interact with anything is through "agents" and prompts.

In this world, OpenAI is not overvalued, and there is no bubble because the large LLM companies become computing.

But again, I think this is mostly a dystopian sci-fi fiction... but it does sit a bit too close to the realm of possible for my tastes.

I share your paranoia.

My kids use personal computing devices for school, but their primary platform (just like their friends) is locked-down phones. Combining that usage pattern with business incentives to lock users into walled gardens, I kind of worry we are backing into the destruction of personal computing.

Wouldn't the easy answer to this be increased efficiency of RAM usage?

RAM being plentiful and cheap led to a lot of software development being very RAM-unaware, allowing the inefficiencies of programs to be mostly obfuscated from the user. If RAM prices continue rising, the semi-apocalytic consumer fiction you've spun here would require that developers not change their behaviors when it comes to software they write. There will be an equillibrium in the market that still allows the entry of consumer PC's it will just mean devices people buy will have less available RAM than is typical. The demand will eventually match up to the change in supply as is typical of supply/demand issues and not continuously rise into an infinite horizon.

I believe that while centralized computing excels at specific tasks like consumer storage, it cannot compete with the unmatched diversity and unique intrinsic benefits of personal computing. Kindle cannot replace all e-readers. Even Apple’s closed ecosystem cannot permit it to replace macOS with iPadOS. These are not preferences but constraints of reality.

The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate one side or the other, but to bridge the gap separating them. Let vscode.dev handle the most common cases, but preserve vscode.exe for the uncommon yet critical ones.

That "dumb terminals" still need to run a modern web browser (likely Chrome) on a modern OS (likely Windows), these aren't exactly efficient with the available computing sources, so you could give up a lot of resources before you would actually trade it of for computing ability. Also resources have been risen exponentially for the last decades.

This is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to happen and to feel in an insane unsustainable bubble.

I am much more worried looking at these ridiculous prices on newegg that memory will be dirt cheap 3 years from now because the economy has imploded from this mass stupidity.

I was blown away by Gemini 3 at first but now from using it I have ran into all the dumb things it does because it is a large language model.

What I notice getting shorter is the time between the frontier model making me feel I will have no job prospects in the future to the model reminding me that LLMs are fundamentally flawed.

It is because I want to believe in AGI. I love the holy shit moment of a new model, it is so exciting. I don't want to face the reality that we have made an enormous mistake. I want to believe OpenAI will take over computing because the alternative of some kind of Great AI winter bubble burst would be such a horrible experience to go through.

The first "proper" "modern" computer I had, initially came with 8 megabytes of RAM.

It's not a lot, but it's enough for a dumb terminal.

That's not disproving OP's comment; OpenAI is, in my opinion, making it untenable for a regular Joe to build a PC capable of running local LLM model. It's an attack on all our wallets.

Why do you need a LLM running locally so much that's the inflated RAM prices are an attack on your wallet? One can always opt not to play this losing game.

I remember when the crypto miners rented a plane to deliver their precious GPUs.

Some models are useful; using whisper.cpp comes to mind to create subtitles for, for example, family videos or a lecture you attended without sending your data to an untrusted or unreliable company.

A dumb terminal doesn't even need a tenth of that.

Where do you put the framebuffer?

Only if you don't mind the screen being limited to 640x480 and/or low bit depth.

My first one- a Gateway 486/66- started with 4MB RAM (in 1993). It could run linux, X windows, emacs, and G++ in a terminal all at the same time, but paged so badly the machine was unusable during a compile. I spent $200 to double it to 8, then another $200 to double it to 16, then another $200 to double it to 32MB (over a couple years), at which point, the machine absolutely flew (no paging during compiles). It seemed like an obscene amount of money for a college student to spend, but the lesson taught me a lot about computer performance and what to upgrade.

I don’t think you need a conspiracy theory to explain this. This is simply capitalism, a system that seems less and less like the way forward. I’m not against markets, but I believe most countries need more regulations targeted at the biggest companies and richest people. We need stronger welfare states, smaller income gaps and more democracy. But most countries seems to vote in the absolute opposite direction.

The end goal of capitalism is the same as the end goal of monopoly.

1 person has all the money and all the power and everyone else is bankrupt forever and sad.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just typical dumb short term business decisions amplified and enabled by a cartel supply market.

If Crucial screws up by closing their consumer business they won’t feel any pain from it because the idea of new competitors entering the space is basically impossible.

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