Comment by tptacek
9 days ago
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
9 days ago
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions?
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.
Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
9 replies →
If we’re going to define what’s good for the general public based on a single arbitrary product from a company of our choosing, the Steam Deck just got a $300 price increase for the same hardware.
It literally has 8gb of RAM. It's a great laptop, but its value is specifically in how much it can do with cheaper parts using their infrastructure.
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
its anecdotal, but the non software engineers in my social circles wont even consider trying games with rumors of breaking hardware like Jumpspace with GPU bricking[1] because they feel they can no longer afford to replace the hardware in their gaming rigs. I have had several people independently complain to me that they are locked out of the hobby whenever their GPU or ram dies.
[1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...