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So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.
In 2030 you will own nothing.
And you will be happy.
By 2030 my game "Backups" will in playing time surpass my remaining life expectancy lol
I have a very long breath to dive this through.
No kidding, my 24tb hdd entirely full of GoG launchers has everything handled.
I wish I believed the happy part
I think the happy comes with the unsaid "or else"
You be happy or you be soylent.
That's about the size of things, yes.
As workers, we are majorly screwed no matter what happens. Either AI/Robotics takes off, and creates a permanent 50% unemployment class, which MAGA will solve by exchanging basic subsistence needs like shelter and water in work camps, where we will be leased out to corporations as slaves, under the 13th Amendment. Also a good place for any dissenters, journalists, attorneys and judges who won't go along, etc.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we'll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
No matter what happens, the citizens are going to take it in shorts.
Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs
PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don't
They do make hardware in most of those categories, actually, but they don't sell much of it direct to consumer in the West. And unfortunately, the way things are going, they're going to be able to get better prices for it from the AI-entranced idiots too.
I had an ExcelStor hard drive in the past and it was the most reliable drive I've ever had. I normally replace them when they die but that one never did, I just ended up retiring it when its capacity was no longer worth the electric cost to keep it running.
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home spying and backdoors.
E: what‘s this? All these folks either saying the US does it or skipping past all the phone-home spyware China includes in devices? Guess that means cheaper spying hardware is ok then?
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
For now, once China becomes the dominant power, they will certainly abuse it as much as the USA do.
It seems to be that you're mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren't Chinese, they're from the USA
Well if the choice is between cheap spying hardware and expensive spying hardware...
I'm getting distinct "fire sale" vibes from all of this.
Oh my god we're having a FIRE ^sale^
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and highly addictive apps and subscriptions and micro transactions. Freedom and real compute power will be locked away in their servers. And the top of the line phones are already expensive enough that pretty much everyone that has one is on a payment plan for it
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A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It's got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I'll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it's obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can't get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don't want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
Shit's gonna get stupid, fast.
Its the "service economy." Instead of making things, industry (in the US at least) is heavily skewed towards providing services (aka things you subscribe to or need to buy each time you use).
It does not benefit the individual.
They can service deez nutz
Bastards
It's awful.
I bought a second laptop for general use, because I wanted a Linux laptop and a gaming-dedicated laptop running Windows. (Seeing as how digital surveillance made privacy more important.)
I got a very nice, used Acer for about $600 that runs everything I need AND functions well with a dual-boot, so I was thinking of selling my gaming laptop. Now? I'm holding onto it so I don't have to get price gouged if my main computer fails.
Wild world we live in.
They BADLY want to be able to monitor our every communication, because an authoritarian government that sees North Korea as a prime example, needs to be able to clamp down hard on any notion of dissent.
And we will have huge work camps all over America to send seditious traitors to, to be leased out as slaves to corporations, under the 13th Amendment. You love your precious Constitution, don't you? You expect MAGA to abide by every word, don't you? Well then you better love the 13th Amendment, too.
Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.
Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.
Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
They'd only go bankrupt if they were spending the capital to increase capacity and were left holding the bag. And nobody's interested in doing that.
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
Issue is that the production is for server gear not consumer. So it’s U2 and other connectors rather than SATA.
Same goes for RAM it’s ECC and won’t work in normal consumer PCs (AMD has like unofficial support)
Eh, the market will adapt.
I've been looking at components on AliExpress. Even now, there's lots of X99-based motherboards with LGA2011-3 sockets that can take both regular DDR4 (with some limitations) and ECC DDR4.
But the descriptions are quite hard to understand, and they are apparently quite picky about which RAM will work with them.
I could get a combo of one of those motherboards with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 CPUs (2.4GHz, 3.3GHz turbo, 28 cores, 56 threads in total) (hey, a dual CPU motherboard) for €120. And it's got 8 RAM slots. So 32GB just with cheap 4GB sticks.
Unbuffered ECC DIMMs can be used as-is even on PCs not supporting ECC
Registered DIMMs can be unsoldered and the RAM chips reused in a pinch converting them to unbuffered DIMMs I suppose?
But reports of manufacturing capacity being moved to HBM will not benefit consumers if the bubble bursts.
I guess I’ll have to buy one of those racks when the bubble pops. Just add an LED strip on the outside and a gaming GPU on the inside. Surely they support PCIe?
Oddly enough ECC used to be quite common for consumer hardware…I had an old Mac desktop in the late 90s/early 00s with ECC memory. But at some point it was decided that consumers don’t want to pay the extra $ for error-free RAM and mobos largely dropped support.
Edit: reading up on it the G5 (which I had) required ECC memory
Haven't seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It's an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I'm missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it's running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
It may be a little tinfoil hat like, but you cannot convince me that these companies are shoving AI in literally everything, buying all the hardware in existence, and building data centets on land that no one wants them at, just to "make a better ai for the consumer." I believe this is an attempt at hardcore tracking and surveillence.
I think it's a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It's like they know it's now or never.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
Even if they didn't, they probably don't want to seem like they're falling behind, so once one person goes all in, so do the others.
Unfortunately the most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition
Its where all the money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
Gotcha, wasn't thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain't got shit on our authoritarian future.
They want to log ALL user data in the world. Every convo you ever had with the ai, in text or audio, images video, etc.
Spiralling
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this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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