To be fair to the 1980’s, a Hercules video card in 1982 adjusted for inflation would only be about $1700. We are way beyond that point.

An original Macintosh 128K would set you back $8100 in today’s money, so I guess in that regard Apple hasn’t changed. ;)

At least the Macbook Neo comes with a lot more flashy stuff.

It is starting to feel like it. Might not see price decline for a while yet, but the upswing on pricing is nearing breaking point.

I suspect if anyone is buying these is because of them needing to meet an existing strict spec. Not sure what that would be but it is a possibility.

I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on pricing but was blown away the other day. The Nvidia RTX 5090 launched at $4090 here in Australia, that was already obscene. Nowadays almost 2 years later, you are lucky if you find one under $12,000!

For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.

But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.

A situations like this makes me use a form of Malapropism one would expect of a Dickensian society to bring about almost Orwellian situation. Makes you wonder when someone will use Chekhov’s Gun before it all gets Bowdlerized. Alas this Machiavellian paragraph is reminiscent of a Lovecraftian creature.

But seriously, that paragraph above reads like the scene in Blackadder when they meet the writer of the Dictionary.

Only works if local models cannot do it.

Live your life as an inverse Altman. What ever he says, do the opposite.

Fair point. I will say this, the low quality of Chinese goods isn’t entirely their fault. They enable it but it also comes from higher up.

I knew someone that was building some device, I forget was it was, and they were in China sourcing parts. That is when you see the game and they know exactly what is going on. You are after a specific capacitor, they will bring out 10 of the same product ranked in terms of price and quality. The 5 cent part, that will last 5 years or 1,000 hours, the 50 cent part will last 30 years or 10,000 hours.

Most producers will just go for the cheapest parts available to get the prices at the end down or to increase profit margins. China can make brilliant high quality parts, just those that control the pricing will always go for the low end and then blame it on Chinese manufacturing.

But also, many Chinese manufactures offer these parts knowing this, so it goes both ways.

One of the reasonable things with “free” markets is that manufactures are just going to keep making RAM, year after year. So these AI data centers have to keep purchasing the bulk of new RAM in perpetuity til the end of time OR eventually the dam will break and they lose control. I put my bet on the second option.

Ok Sam, give your computers up first and then we will negotiate.

It doesn’t have to be the fastest, it doesn’t need to even be the most efficient it just needs to cheap enough to undermine the folks from Bastards Inc.

Heck, why not do like the giant MRDIMM’s and just slap loads of chips on to taller DIMM’s.

https://www.micron.com/products/memory/dram-modules/mrdimm

A few years back I was talking to an acquaintance that worked in the NSA for about a decade, he was far to casual when he said “Oh, yeah we have back doors in Linux and all over the open source world that haven’t been discovered.”.

I mean, yeah, that tracks but did he have to be so proud of his achievement. He was one of those, ‘see if it can be done don’t question if it should’ kind of people.

I suppose it is a part of their NOBUS “NObody But US” strategy but with the code being in the open, that is a dangerous game to play with it being discovered by others. Nowadays with LLM’s able to do mass analysis of code, I do wonder if there is some regrets in putting those things in there?

But also I suspect a lot of it probably needs physical access to the machine as just sending a few packets to a machine probably isn’t enough to get it into an executable state.

Either way, interesting guy, wouldn’t trust him with anything!

Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.

Turns out reducing peoples expose to their core advertisement business while burning millions of tokens to produce a summary, not the best business decision they have ever made. But what do you expect of MBA’s that praise Jack Welch like a God.

To be fair, Reddit has been Zombie Reddit for about 5 years now.

When they received $150 million from Tencent in 2018, the writing was on the wall. You cannot accept that kind of money and keep to the original aspiration. The IPO just accelerated it.

The amount of slop on there nowadays is wild! Even the smallest communities are being overrun with it and they don’t give a damn because it is good for business short term.

Praise be to whatever gets me exemption!

We are for the jobs the comet will bring.

I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.

It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.

But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.

A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.

The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.