[jdprgm]

I just checked amazon and I paid $350 in Nov 24' for 96GB (2x48GB) 6800MT DDR5 which at the time felt quite expensive and a bit of a splurge but I figured I had my DDR4 kit for almost a decade so probably similar lifespan for DDR5. That same listing is currently $1300!!!

When RAM prices are increasing like a crypto currency we have a real societal problem.

[geodel]

I don't want to live in a society where RAM inflation is higher and food inflation. Future generations will ask me where were you when Computer prices were rising, internet bandwidth was rationed and people had to wait overnight to continue vibe coding because vendors blocked further API calls for many hours at a time.

[xtracto]

> people had to wait overnight to continue vibe coding because vendors blocked further API calls for many hours at a time

Tangential but this is funny. Back in the early 90s, I did a lot of BASIC programming in the family computer, this was before we had Internet. I could spend hours.and hours in front of the computer doing stuff.

Fast forward to around 2010 I remember a distinct feeling one time the internet went off at home. Sitting in front of the computer and feeling that it was "useless" because it wasn't connected to the net.

We are getting to that point in coding apparently: 5-10 years ago, everyone programmed just by typing commands, looking at S.O. and thinking. Now, if we open our "IDE" and it doesn't have access to The Brain, we are left just standing there looking in awe at the machine.

Sign of the times...

[bpavuk]

dunno, I have electricity problems (especially on winters when Russia strikes the hardest on infra) but I usually have this time as a downtime for lightweight C coding in Termux and retro gaming, all on Galaxy Note 8 (Android 9!!) + power bank.

I guess it feels less like a problem when you have that problem regularly and are forced to adapt. and I guess I'll just HAVE to switch to Pixel 10 when Pixel 11 comes out - the integrated Linux terminal right there is awesome. or maybe just get a MacBook like most around me did

[krabizzwainch]

I keep going back to Sublime Text when everything in VS Code becomes too much. Last time I looked at Sublime, I was like “Damn, the last update was from 2024? Must be dead.” Until I realized the lack of updates was because it was fully functional for what they wanted as is without connecting to the internet at all.

[tpoacher]

It isn't just a psychological feeling though. We've (unnecessarily) offloaded everything to the net, so there's a very real element of uselessness that kicks in when there's no connection.

E.g. back when you were coding BASIC, you probably had magazines and either ended up copying a lot of code by hand, or if you were lucky the mag came with a floppy disk. Now no such magazines exist. Manpages were all local, now it's readthedocs online. Fat local-friendly standard libraries in almost all languages have been modularised and package managers for the most part expect to install stuff by fetching it from the net.

So unless you have heavily prepared for the cyberapocalypse or sth, there really is not much you can do on your machine when the internet goes down.

On the other hand, however, when you can prepare in advance, it's great to shut off the net for a while. I do my most productive coding during flights, for example.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, I also feel that this negative aspect of "AI" adoption is not much discussed overall - massive centralization and dependency on a remote service woth something as important as computer programming.

[bjtitus]

To be fair, there are plenty of local models you can run. Seems surprising that in 5-10 years those models wouldn't match state of the art today.

[jareklupinski]

gotta wait for your turn to use The Brain

[sph]

From the point of view of AI companies, the benefit of very high hardware prices is that there will no competition from local models any time soon.

There might be an overdue era of computing where being a little mindful of resource consumption might go a long way, now that Moore's law has been killed by economics, but I wonder how that'll play out with vibe coding that vomits out thousands of lines of inefficient code.

I honestly wouldn't mind living in a society where growth and excess is no longer viable.

[Ardren]

Wow, I bought a 128GB Strix Halo machine for $2000 USD in September. Same model is currently on special for $4,399. Insane.

[bakies]

Yep my $2k framework is $3k now. And my amd stock I bought at the same time paid for it.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I will admit that I am also counting my blessings.

[jeffwask]

I think I've lived through three separate RAM boom cycles at this point. Two for sure...

[utternerd]

They were a fairly common occurrence in the late 90s. I worked at an OEM at the time and we would stockpile it during gluts for that reason, then make a killing ~6-9 months later.

[clove]

What should we be doing now if we want to profit?

[sambapa]

Ez, buy low sell high and don't buy high and sell low

[clove]

Buy what, exactly? GPUs? Are they "low" right now?

[wao0uuno]

My guess is that motherboards, cases and PSUs will be low soon.

[jauntywundrkind]

I got 96GB of sodimm 5600MHz for $195 last April.

The destruction of computing is absolutely miserable to witness.

[kevinqi]

don't think it's a societal problem; it's just a direct result of capitalism. and while capitalism causes all sorts of huge problems, it might also be the best of the options we've got

[thesuitonym]

> don't think it's a societal problem; it's just the direct result of our society's economic model.

[tuesdaynight]

Recently I had the realization that a lot of people see economy as something completely decoupled from society. Capitalism is both completely unrelated with people and the result of people's innate desires. The UBS discussions are a funny one for me. Capitalism is supposedly the best way to manage limited resources, but we would still need it in a supposed utopia where recourses are in abundance. I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.

[spwa4]

> I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.

You want the technical, mathematical, reason for that? The short version is that for society as a whole, prices are information. How many fields should be filled with grain plants? How many with flowers? How many factories should make cars? Phones? Tv furniture? How much fuel goes to heating? How much to transporting old people to the hospital and back?

I hope that can explain, if "society" gets that information more than a tiny bit wrong ... very bad things will happen. VERY bad things. People will die, lots of them, and quickly, if you get it wrong.

I hope it also makes it clear that for society as a whole, money isn't a "real" limit. Rather it's a tool that makes the actual limits clear. If we make 50% more bread, how do we make that not affect how many heart surgeries can be done?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Capitalism has many advantages, the strongest of which, in my opinion, is that it simply imposes a cost on lying. You can lie about production, about prices, but it'll cost you. It is resilient against the bane of so many other systems: it is extremely resilient against people trying to sabotage it, because everyone has an incentive to undo or bypass sabotage. In other systems like communism or slavery the people doing work have an extreme incentive to lie, and the only break on that is violence against workers. But the state fundamentally has no idea if you're lying or not, so that violence will be mostly random. It can't be directed against the people actually causing problems in society.

[tuesdaynight]

Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really appreciate that. About the pricing, isn't that the same as managing scarce resources? In a supposed AGI utopia, why would society still need it? To be clear, I get your point. I'm not against capitalism, I just don't get why it would be needed when resources are unconstrained