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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity?

I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.

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> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result

Tbh, I hope it does. Prices are outrageous, and I'm a firm believer in personal computing/having access to powerful hardware, privately and locally, is hugely important.

On a more selfish note, I miss the days of being able to build an outrageously powerful desktop for myself for relatively cheap. For now I'm still holding onto my AM4 motherboard w/ 64GB DDR4 and an aging GPU, praying my 7 y/o GPU holds up long enough for prices to drop again.

64 GB! you are lucky :) sitting there with 16GB, a GPU that already shows the signs of strain, and AM4 Ryzen 5 5600G. (MacBook Air M1 equivalent in single-threaded tasks.) apparently the CPU requirements slowly crept up across the line. and then there is looming AVX512. why "looming"? because at some point enough people will move to it that software will require AVX512.

Maybe a year from now we'll all be using MI300As and EPYC 9600s to read e-mails. Or Nvidia Veras, maybe AWS will sell some of their Graviton stuff in an effort to offset their capex.

Unfortunately, I don't think IBM Cloud will suffer enough for me to play Tux Racer on my very own Z17.

actually I'm looking forward to that :3 but that requires Claude et al. going bust and HN is gonna kill me if I wish that publicly

I would also be very sad to lose one of my best coworkers. Everybody in the office treats Claude as their own assistant. Just today Claude reminded me I forgot to add a database zone migration to my fault-injection experiment. Not only he reminded me, he also implemented it with perfect consistency with project guidelines.

not worth 32GB RAM becoming unobtainium imo. what's use of Claude if Claude can't build the project on my machine?

and before you say "cloud IDE" or "Ona" or "GitPod", know that I'm going to draw the metaphorical revolver with a calm gaze. [1][2]

[1]: using Amazon listing for reference, the original author of this edit is unknown. https://www.amazon.co.uk/WENSHUI-Portrait-Painting-Posters-P...

[2]: I reposted it on bsky because I share it too often. https://bsky.app/profile/bpavuk.neocities.org/post/3mffdd5ud...

> play Tux Racer on my very own Z17

Interesting. It looks like Debian has a Tux Racer package for Extreme Tux Racer on s390x. I guess it'd be remote graphics, and not accelerated.

I don’t think Linux on Z supports GPUs on the PCIe IO drawers, but that’s a relatively minor software enablement issue. All I need is a z17 for myself to play with it ;-)

> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result

I really hope it doesn't but I could see this resulting in just a couple "PC" manufacturers remaining when this is all over. Things will never be the same after that, and likely much worse with a couple companies telling us what we can and can't do on our devices.

> including agriculture

in fact, agri sees its share of impact now! all of this investment has to come from somewhere, which means that money is getting sucked up into AI from the entire economy. job cuts in tech are part that, part general "de-bloating" of post-COVID tech. retail investors are a lot more likely to invest into AI than any other industry, although there are signs that big players already consider risks of overexposure to AI.

not to mention, agri saw a "bubble" of its own, surrounding Agtech, which peaked at 2021 and has been cooling ever since. scare quotes here because it was nothing like AI bubble

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