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by johnvanommen 39 days ago
> The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China

I built my career on Solaris and it got rugpulled by Linux.

That wasn’t because of software, it was because of hardware. Linux’s cost advantage existed because Sun hardware had huge margins, because their software was basically free.

AI will probably be a repeat of this. Whoever can come up with the hardware solution that minimizes the cost per token will win.

I believe the 5090 still holds this crown, but someone certainly knows better than I do.

3 comments

While people fly to the US to buy Macs at a lower price and bring them back in their backpacks, I guess I'll be flying to HK to buy a Chinese GPU rather sooner than later...
Fortunately, Solaris skills map to Linux pretty cleanly.
but not all tokens are equal and vertical integration is the name of the game. Solaris did not lose to Linux, it lost to the LAMP stack on commodity x86 hardware. without the "AMP" part, Linux would've been dead in the water.
The L part of LAMP is kinda irrelevant at the application level, though. From the point of view of running the software, SAMP or LAMP doesn't make any difference. So yes, Solaris lost the competition with Linux to be the first letter of the acronym.