Definitely won't do anything to hurt the common person

Well, we’re not even anywhere close to AGI yet, and the underlying problem of “the people running everything these days are not programmed to value living things - only money” Is pretty fucking obvious at this point

Funnily enough, I was just introduced to this fascinating little game about being a paperclip making machine.

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

I spent a good 3 or 4 hours playing instead of sleeping.

OpenAI abruptly bought 40% of global supply, and announced it.

Other companies found out about it when OpenAI announced and thought holy shit, if we hadn't heard of this massive deal, what else haven't we heard of?!, and so they started panic buying.

On top of that, because of US tariffs and trade restrictions, the Chinese "B-tier" memory companies, who usually buy old machines from the big 3 (SK-Hynix, Samsung, Micron) and sell this lower spec RAM at lower margins, didn't buy up these machines as much as they usually do. They weren't sure they'd be able to make a profit given their lower margins, should tariffs suddenly change again or other restrictions get put in place.

Fucking slop factories.

Basically as I understand it sam altman made a deal to buy a majority of the semiconductor wafers needed to make ram from the two biggest manufacturers, and the third biggest saw that and went "oh ok time to make a killing selling tam to businesses" qnd pulled out of the consumer market so now there's just fucking none being made for consumers because of one giant fucking dickwad

I regret so much that I didn't, I was planning to build a new PC now or in the beginning of next year. But with the current RAM prices I will stick to my 5 years old AMD 5600x. I will have to start playing games in my backlog if the framerate in new games becomes too low.

I wasn't sure how bad it was until I just checked.

last December I bought a 2x32gb DDR5 kit for $160. right now, same kit, almost $600.

this is fucking insane man.

fuck AI.

I'm in the exact opposite position... hoarding bits on the cheap, all I need is ram and psu but ram now costs more than I paid for everything else put together and scavenging sources have dried up completely

Me too, the only regret that I stayed with 16Gb instead of going for 32Gb or more

No, some of them are running generators on site to get more power.

Nope. A couple of them have been built and they're just sitting there unpowered

Imagine you had infinite money and no consequences

I mean you could like— build entire city size data centers right?

But this infinite money goes away if you're not building them

So your choices are to build something that you don't need or to have no money

You see, humans were not very evolved or adapted to their planet, given their own social structures

There's many new jobs opening in the AI sector, pedalling on dynamo bikes.

Depends how dirty you accept the power.

Power availability is actually a primary consideration when choosing a location for a Data Center. Sometimes they'll site a DC even if there isn't enough power and then build out the power generation that they need.

An example are the two DCs that Microsoft is building in Cheyenne, Wyoming and the absolutely massive 1.2 Million panel solar farm being built to power them. https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/05/11/massive-1-2-billion-1-2-million-panel-solar-farm-planned-for-south-cheyenne/

This is at least the second time that Microsoft has done this in Cheyenne. In 2016 they contracted for 237 MW of Wind Energy, which led to the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farms being built / expanded. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/11/14/latest-energy-deal-microsofts-cheyenne-datacenter-will-now-powered-entirely-wind-energy-keeping-us-course-build-greener-responsible-cloud/

No matter what you think of AI the folks that engineer these DCs aren't stupid. They are well aware of their extreme power requirements.

We have such copious amounts of excess power but its all in off peak times. We need to build batteries or other storage methods so we can capture it in off peak hours for use during peak hours. It also helps stabilize and strengthen the grid.

We should force these data centers to help foot the bill for that instead of doing the stupid shit they're doing like portable generators, bring coal plants back online and what not.

El Chavo del Ocho Reference!!!!!! Elite ball knowledge 🤝🤝🤝

Just open a second tab in chrome and you'll be redlining that puppy.

The "when you're out of money and you pretend you have even more" tactic.

You chaebols sure are a contentious people.

The RAM that's being produced at scale for parallel computation is HBM, what the capacity is going towards. It's not in the form of DIMMs

you can't take it after it's been used and stick it into a PC's motherboard.

EDIT:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/inside-nvidia-blackwell-ultra-the-chip-powering-the-ai-factory-era/

Inside NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra: The Chip Powering the AI Factory Era

Blackwell Ultra doesn’t just scale compute—it scales memory capacity to meet the demands of the largest AI models. With 288 GB of HBM3e per GPU, it offers 3.6x more on-package memory than H100 and 50% more than Blackwell, as shown in Figure 5.

And we'll all be too poor to buy it, but then those who caused the issue and used their golden parachute to escape it can buy it up and use it to cause the next bubble.