AI is an amazing tool for fascists.

Annihilate private access to computing, censor and rewrite all comms, destroy free software and the last remnants of education...

Every single decision made for evil.

And all these vendors who are locking themselves into one customer are about to learn why that's a bad idea.

How has this whole saga not been an obvious indictment of 'the free market?'

Big players shouldn't be allowed to gobble up all the resources needed by small ones. How is it not obvious that they need to wait until production increases to meet their needs before embarking on their little project?

Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years but I guess they couldn't hear them over the sound of the bags of dirty lobbyist money landing on their desks.

And then there are the financial "irregularities" funding the AI boom which are also not getting any attention.

Good! Motherboard prices have been wildly out of control for a while now. Asus selling 1k motherboards when that same tier of motherboard used to top out at 400 bucks max. Let these greedy fucks have their lunch.

The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting. They tried with Stadia to get people to play games hosted in the cloud, but that was never going to fly.

With the compute demands of AI (which is comparable to a AAA game except for the largest models), they dont want to make the same mistake and let you have the compute. They see this as an oppurtunity for subscription fees for the earth.

The fact that we cant get hardware for a reasonable price is an added bonus to this plan.

All of this only works of everyone subscribes to this shit. Businesses will, because its just easier to manage it. Consumers though should not give in. If you want to run an agent, use a small local model.

The best thing that can be done is to make local open source agents and models approachable for regular users. Right now, they arent.

Motherboards were already way too goddamn expensive, anyway.

About a year ago I was considering upgrading my AM4 PC to AM5. The rock-bottom cheapest motherboards were only slightly cheaper than the relatively high-end one I got 5-ish years ago. I decided to stick with my current PC.

Dammit. Everything is going up in fire GPU prices. . Ram prices. Storage. Then cpu. And now motherboards. So basically everything...!

If we can't make a time machine to go backwards, can we at least pause time? The future absolutely fucking sucks, let's just avoid it altogether lol

Me running old Asus B350 AM4 Board from 2017...

I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that's 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That's not terrible for pricing

Oh boy, if its not the consequences of their own actions.

Aww but I want more digital diarrhea, a whole mudslide of it!

I have a home server waiting around for an SSD for a year now. I have the money, but I don't like feeling like I'm getting scammed. So I'd rather wait for this market to collapse than give them my money.