YHK - yet another hacker news clone

For daily office use there is much more benefit in having more memory than having faster memory. Because apps all started using more memory. Especially anything Google Chrome related.

If you have some unused extra memory it will be used as disk cache, which also helps in the responsiveness of a desktop. Waiting for the disk is orders of magnitude slower than reading from memory cache.

Sorta, kinda. For a long time, a new PC tended to be built with new parts. New motherboard, new storage, new CPU, new graphics card. New.

During every mining crunch that made GPUs very expensive, we sometimes went backwards on parts of new builds. A used GPU from years ago was often a more-viable choice than a new model in any kind of condition.

edit to add: A lot of folks in 3D printing like to have a small computer driving the machine, especially with tinkerer-friendly hobbyist printers of yore. That often meant some manner of Raspberry Pi because it was inexpensive-enough, small, and a known quantity that was simple to deal with in an appliance-like way.

During the covid-era chip shortages, Pi hardware was expensive, hard to find, or often both. So folks started driving their printers with things like old cell phones or cheap Android TV boxes instead.

Yes, the previous fad (crypto) killed consumer GPU prices for good. I don't believe anything has compared on price-performance to a 1080 in the 10 years since.

Also the enshittification of software might count? You used to own Photoshop for life, now you're expected to pay a subscription for life. And legal onslaught, too. Encryption and consumer VPNs are on the chopping block in much of the world at the rate things are going. The end goal of governments and corporations alike is to remove the ability of consumers to own hardware they control. We are rapidly moving towards a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a "trusted device", which will be a thin client with a TPM, biometric verification, telemetry of everything you do on it, and which will require paying an ongoing subscription to use.

I don’t see that at all obvious.

Businesses are competing like crazy to make algorithms that are in high demand. AI could theoretically let people and create new things that they would never be able to otherwise.

It is entitled to thing that people wanting GPUs and new PCs for gaming and hobbies is a more valid use. And if someone values it, all they have to do is pay the market price.

Currently 128GB of normal non-ECC DDR5 as a 2x64 set is around 2000 euro and increasing...

2x16GB costs around $190 right now, or closer to $375 if you want ECC.

Not much cheaper than DDR5.

I built my current home pc on the cusp of the transition of ddr4 to ddr5 and ddr5 was at the time out of my budget so I went with ddr4 and I can still play modern games fine with 32gb even at 2k. I might not max out everything but that was never a priority for me. Usually besides resolution I seldom touch the graphical settings if the game is running ok. In fact the only thing I upgraded one it until now was my GPU since that was a holdover from my previous one.

Home server also runs ddr4 and does ok, but that has been hitting more cpu bottlenecks now rather than memory.

That said its kinda sad personal users are getting tossed back a generation due to current generation ram being almost all gobbled up for AI.

I mean arguably, this is good.

The amount of waste produced due to phones not receiving new batteries and software updates was utterly insane, given what goes into making them.

The wages of the West's deliberate deindustrialization and deliberate dependence on Asian manufacturing.

30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.

We can get refurbished phones with 8 GB LPDDR5 for less than regular DDR5 modules.

LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?

So LLMs are simultaneously making new hardware unaffordable, while also making old hardware usable again.

That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered. For the planet, anyway. And with the big caveat of that cloud tether, though just for scaffolding.

Thanks for sharing, maybe it's time to buy some more old Kindles... I use bunch as smart paintings (with changing pictures generated locally with stable diffusion), and of course Home Assistant dashboard. They are awesome little machines.

The article doesn't go into detail about it, but if you go to eBay and find a really old Dell rack server that that does use DDR3 ECC Registered (such as an R910 or R920 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Or like an R720 with 256 or 512GB in it. Also major price jump in resale value. That's what we have come to now.

Please consider being more civil when you post, you’ll probably find it more enjoyable in the long run.

The archive link was posted [1] long before you posted. Also from the HN FAQ [2]:

> Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50040452

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html