[fzeroracer]

I don't think it's much of a wonder why people are turning to 'anti-tech extremism' as everything around them suddenly is no longer consumer priced. Seeing computing rise anywhere from 1.5x to 2x in pricing while the job market is fucked is enough to make me extremely bitter.

[pesus]

Exactly. Not only have the prices gone up, they've gone up for no real reason other than some CEOs are attempting to take over society. The average person isn't even seeing much of the upside of modern technology anymore, just the downsides. Gadgets no longer get cheaper over time, experiences no longer improve over time, and every new startup or innovation seems to be used to make their lives worse, whether directly or indirectly.

The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech - and the minuscule benefits they may possibly sometimes get are easily outweighed by the negative effects. Say what you will about the morality of bread and circuses, but making them increasingly out of reach seems like a very bad idea to me.

[ericd]

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

Really? Most people I know seem to have found the chatbots tremendously helpful. It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

[mrhottakes]

Most people I know don't use chatbots and don't find them helpful.

[kotaKat]

And can 'most people' even afford most of these services? Having seen some people's spend, even a $200/month plan has me questioning why I'd spend $200/month on Anthropic products when $200/month would be a substantial chunk of my housing as a blue-collar class IT worker just to survive.

[ericd]

You don't need a $200/mo plan, that's for people chewing through Opus tokens with multiple instances of Claude Code going in parallel. My impression is that most people just use the free ChatGPT tier, or $20/mo at most.

[brianwawok]

For coding or talking to it? $20 is ok to chat I guess. $100 is minimum if you do this for a job.

[LtWorf]

I own an apartment, my heating/electricity/water/internet/repairs costs ~400$/month.

[LtWorf]

My salary hasn't been increased to pay for this extra helpfullness.

[ericd]

Then use the cheap/free plans?

[LtWorf]

My time is too valuable to waste it trying to convince AI models to actually work.

[wao0uuno]

>It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

Ah yes that's certainly worth more than a steady job market, low inflation and affordable goods. Get real.

[ericd]

I think I'm already real? The main reasons for inflation, outside of computer components, are related to the fact that we're near the end of a long-term debt cycle. Look at demographics and monetary/fiscal policy. This is just the scapegoat du jour for long-term structural issues.

Stability in the job market seems to mean stagnation in the long term. That's fine in the short run, but eventually, you're Germany/France and major pillars of your economy are cornered and in trouble. Personally, I think the move is total at-will employment paired with UBI rather than the heavy-handed employer regs that those countries have for stability, and I think that's where we're going to have to go if job losses really start materializing.

[Corence]

Google search is worse because of recent AI tech flooding the internet with misinformation and low quality articles.

[ericd]

Low paid humans have been pumping out low quality SEO slop full of misinformation for at least the last 15-20 years, it’s not much different. If anything, the quality is probably somewhat higher.

[charcircuit]

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

ChatGPT and Gemini offer enormous consumer value for free.

[pesus]

What value do they get that both couldn't be done before and outweighs the costs?

[charcircuit]

Personalized learning. Some people on the US were paying over six figures to be educated and now they can do it at a much better quality for free.

[echoangle]

You don’t pay for the insight, you pay for the certificate. If the AI doesn’t give you a degree, it doesn’t really help you. Even before AI, you could have learned stuff from a degree for free.

[pesus]

I don't think the software that lies to you and makes things up on a regular basis is a very good teacher. Even if it was, that's not worth the cost to society vs just improving education.

[charcircuit]

Teachers make even more up than AI in my experience. I would always trust an AI over a human teacher.

[brianwawok]

College was never about learning it was about signaling. I get two resumes on my desk, one went to Harvard, one learned about stuff on ChatGPT. Which has a higher likelihood of being a success?

[charcircuit]

It defends how you want to define success, but I would lean towards ChatGPT.

[wiseowise]

You probably meant for "free".

[charcircuit]

I meant $0.

[wiseowise]

You meant they use user data to train their models.

[charcircuit]

Which costs them money to do. Not the users.

[coffeeindex]

Doesn’t help that prices are skyrocketing because of circular investing and spending between companies trying to amass as many data centers as possible to cash in on AI hype. These same companies keep pushing this idea that everything you know and do is worthless in the face of prompt-fu and that you have to use these platforms they’re pushing or you’re NGMI.

[babelfish]

What does this have to do with the steam deck?

[doubled112]

PC hardware like the Steam Deck is more expensive due to demand from AI hype.

[aquova]

Where do you think all the supply that the Steam Deck was previously leveraging went?

[mrhottakes]

The insides of the Steam Deck have a lot of the same bits and bobbins and thingamajigs that go inside AI data centers.

[yieldcrv]

RAM is expensive and there is scarcity in getting a supply of it = all consumer electronics will cost more

[idle_zealot]

I'm glad at least this happened after consumer electronics plateaued. I don't know about you but in my estimation a 5 year old phone and mid-tier gaming PC are holding up fine. The limiting factor in features is more crappy software than hardware. Unless you're looking to run local AI stuff, I guess? But I don't figure the anti-tech crowd would want to do that.

Give us replaceable batteries and the right to update our own operating systems and I think we can survive unaffordable RAM for decades if it comes to it.

[Benanov]

My thirteen year old PC is holding up fine. I've replaced the disk (condition of me getting it; it was a disused Windows machine), installed Ubuntu, Debian, then Kubuntu, and upgraded the video card, but beyond that...basically as it shipped from Dell. The last BIOS update was 2013.

[LtWorf]

I have a similar machine. The only issue is that I haven't bought a video card and the integrated Intel is starting to show its age by not supporting Vulcan.

[bcrosby95]

I'm completely on board with your view, I'm still rocking a 1080ti. But I'd also like to buy my kids a gaming computer someday, and I don't know when that will be, especially with prices being what they are. It took a shockingly long amount of time for a graphics card to come out at 1080 performance that costed less than a 1080.

[bluescrn]

I’m much more concerned by the skyrocketing cost of housing, energy, food, and transport than the cost of tech luxuries.

If I never buy another GPU or console again, there’s more than enough quality gaming for several lifetimes available on older hardware and often very inexpensively.

[everdrive]

>I’m much more concerned by the skyrocketing cost of housing, energy, food, and transport than the cost of tech luxuries.

I'm with you, but given that I have no control over any of them I wouldn't have minded that my luxury fun was still cheap. About a decade or so ago, I remember saying something like "We're in an odd period historically: if you except housing, healthcare, and education, everything else is _stunningly_ cheap by historical norms." I wasn't trying to discount the importance of those things, but it felt like there was at least some relief among the rising costs there. Now, it seems like "everything else" has caught up and it's simply that everything is expensive.

[milkytron]

> I'm with you, but given that I have no control over any of them

We all have a little bit of control over at least housing and transport. Local politics determine land use, and municipalities in the US have consistently voted for more car dependency (leading to more expensive transport) and limited housing construction (leading to more expensive housing).

Local politics aren't really paid attention to, which results in any amount of participation and influence having a relatively large impact compared to state or federal politics.

[tavavex]

Those same components are contained in tech everything, not just "luxuries". If you want to stick with your current hardware, you just need to hope that your existing setup will outlast you and never have any part failures.

[jdprgm]

The difference is those have largely all been steadily increasing every year for decades. Tech and entertainment (streamers etc) have been one of the few bright spots you could point to as something that would usually improve yearly.

At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.

[wtetzner]

> older hardware and often very inexpensively

What makes you think demand won't drive those prices up as well? And this is more than just gaming, the Steam Deck prices are increased due to the increase cost of general components like RAM, which impacts machines used to do work as well.

[threetonesun]

Inflation adjusted gaming is about the same as its always been. Hurts to see prices go up but it happened during the SNES days too, and the job market was more fucked then.