Comment by Ygg2
5 months ago
> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years
Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.
AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws.
I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin, but if you want to use bitcoin to buy something it's about as easy/awkward as it ever was.
Food prices went up 15-20% more than they would have with 2% inflation. If PC prices do anything similar, it's not a big deal in the long run.
Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen? The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out. They wouldn't even want everything to be in the cloud, because a hundred rarely-idle cloud cores can replace a lot more than a hundred mostly-idle consumer cores, so they end up selling a lot less hardware.
7 replies →
True, but as they say, the market can remain irrational longer than we can remain solvent
We simply don't know how long this bubble will last
You can use old hardware.
Yeah, but it won't be cheap or easily repairable. And they don't make them anymore.
> It's not called war on general computing for nothing.
Companies paying too much for hardware to chase a bubble is not "war on general computing".
> Even Raspberry Pi.
What's preventing supply from catching up with demand in this situation?
If high prices stick around long term, there will be so many chip fabs ready to pump out $100 pi-equivalents that still let them have a 200% markup.
Also I can go buy a quite good mini PC with 16GB of RAM for $300. In what world does that price go up another 40x?