[Dylan16807]

> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing.

By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.

In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.

> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.

I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.

For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.

For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.

[bayindirh]

> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.

I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.

...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".

Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.

> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.

I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.

Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.

[mrngld]

> I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.

Seems accurate though, I've already noticed no-name Chinese manufacturers stepping it up, throwing caution and capital to the wind and leaning in as hard they can. Following the typical Chinese model of how they get involved in markets, we're just a couple years away from memory being a market with skyrocketing prices and limited availability to a market where various nations are considering bailouts and tariffs to protect their local manufacturers from dirt-cheap Chinese exports to keep their memory producers from going through what domestic solar panel producers went through (a near extinction level event).

I specifically didn't say disk mfg as well only because I haven't yet noticed a new big spinning HDD Chinese brand. But they're definitely active in the lower end of the DDR5 market.

[pbronez]

In that scenario, maybe SSD prices drop enough that spinning disk loses relevance.

[bayindirh]

I don't see that possibility from a data retention duration perspective. SSDs are glorified and addressable capacitors at the end of the day, and they leak.

[Dylan16807]

For a backup drive that's plugged in at least every 2-3 months, an SSD is great if the price is right.

For proper long term cold storage, you want tape.

There's a niche in between where hard drives are good on their technical merits, but it's not a huge niche.

[dosinga]

> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".

Keynes said that when somebody complained that his theories didn't work in the long run. And the true rebuke is, we're now in the long run and Keynes is dead

[AnthonyMouse]

> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".

The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.

> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.

When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.

It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.

> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.

The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.

[stymaar]

> The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around

You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.

[AnthonyMouse]

No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote.

And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people ignore that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.

[throw0101a]

> No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous.

If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes:

> The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quantity if other variables return to their former values, but the short-term dynamics of this process have practical importance.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tract_on_Monetary_Reform#Leg...

The economic pain that Britain was experiencing in the 1920s due to its ill-conceived idea of sticking with the Gold Standard, especially at the wrong level, could have been solved through policy tools that the Bank of England had at the time rather than waiting for this to stabilize 'in the long-run'. I.e., he did not want to wait for eventual stabilization, he wanted to alleviate people's suffering now: it's no use to you if things stabilize when you're dead.

A longer extract:

> In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

[AnthonyMouse]

It is his fault, because he favored statements that go too far. "In the long run we are all dead" is so widely abused exactly because it's phrased in a way that allows it to be set against anything that takes time, even the things worth doing. It thereby sounds more authoritative than it has any right to be because it's so often the wrong conclusion.

This is the same guy who said it's better to give people jobs digging holes and filling them back in than to have them be unemployed, thereby giving every fool with a bad plan cover to ignore the false dichotomy and thereby the opportunity costs of doing something wasteful instead of something more efficient or productive.

[Dylan16807]

Looking out ten years is an easy answer but that doesn't make it a wrong answer. I didn't choose the time period, the person calling this the slow death of personal computing did. And these computer prices are life and death for extremely few people.

[stymaar]

I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either).

And I tend to agree with /u/bayindirh that the original optimism of /u/Dylan16807 is baseless. We don't know have things will turn out, but it's absolutely not guaranteed that we'll ever return to “normal” (“normal” being what happened in a very narrow time period where computing power was so cheap it was available for the masses to own).

[AnthonyMouse]

> I don't think the quote is particularly on point in this discussion, but that doesn't make your understanding of Keynes correct (and your misunderstanding doesn't make much sense in the context of this particular discussion either).

It isn't a misunderstanding. Even in the original context, the proposal is to be impatient with something that takes time even if it eventually works. (It's also not even the best critique of the gold standard, which has plenty of problems not solved no matter how long you wait.) Worse, the quip has memetic fitness (people think it sounds edgy) even though it expresses no limiting principle and can thereby be used in service of every incitement to do something stupid immediately because the smarter thing takes a minute.

It's sometimes true that acting quickly is the better option, but by giving no indication as to which times that is, it's an ambiguous statement masquerading as a conclusive determination and an invitation to do the wrong thing in the common case.

[Dylan16807]

Very narrow? The masses could get a computer for almost all the time integrated circuits have been produced.

And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years. Including RAM going up multiple times. We would have to buck that entire trend on top of having a failure of supply and demand to end up with the current prices being permanent.

(And don't be dramatic. Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.)

[originalvichy]

Late reply. This is all assuming that the corps producing the hardware will live in the same world as before this squeeze. The reality is that the combination of a highly concetrated manufacturing landscape + the global political environment means that the same games that were played with ASML, Nvidia and TSMC will likely be repeated with the relatively lightly affected generic manufacturers of components. Given the close connections the hyperscaler CEOs have with the USGov, and the leverage the US has over South Korea and Japan, one executive order is enough to tip over the entire manufacturing sector and supply chain to the hyperscaler’s advantage.

As others noted, only the Chinese sector has a chance to fill the space for consumers in this nightmare scenario.

[QuadmasterXLII]

So far its just metastasized not smoothed out. GPUs then RAM then electricity then disk… long way to go till land then sunlight, hope we don’t get there!

[Gasp0de]

Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years.

[Dylan16807]

When the market's so hot I don't see why anyone would give them a particularly big discount. And they would have been getting a discount before, so they probably end up seeing a larger percentage spike in what they have to pay.

Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.