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Comment by b3lvedere | Hacker News Reader

The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.

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You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry?

Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.

The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.

In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use.

I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.

People will find a way to not need as much RAM, and thus the devices that require it.

Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.

I come from a time when people had to use 1 to a maximum of 48 kilobytes for their entire computer. Later on i once went to Helsinki to watch with my own eyes what people can program in a restriction of 4 to 64 kilobytes. Computers have amazed me, but people who used them, have amazed me a lot of more times.

I wasn't saying it'll be good and that the good guys win, but a lot of insane creativity to circumvent restrictions will pop up.

> Later on i once went to Helsinki to watch with my own eyes what people can program in a restriction of 4 to 64 kilobytes.

The Demoscene will save us all

One way of putting it, is the winners are ‘the good guys’.

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