You see what's happening right?
They are preventing you from accessing the means of computing, making you reliant on their services in the future they're building.
At astronomical rents.
https://wccftech.com/western-digital-has-no-more-hdd-capacity-left-out/
@mttaggart Waiting to hear that Sam Altman has personally bought 50% of the hard drives...
@mttaggart When the "AI" bubble pops, they'll be using all those data centres for massive cloud computing services.
Hang on to your hardware and treat it well.
@mttaggart all these trillions of AI dollars have to amortize themselves.
Sunk cost fallacy par excelence, we have to foot the bill
@mttaggart Sooner or later the absolute and complete control over all electronic devices by those operating gigantically expensive chip fabrication centres would start to exploit that monopoly. Much as those extracting and controlling rare and vital minerals used in devices.
Modern life is a tad precarious.
And you can wait for the impact when China invades Taiwan and 70% of the worldwide Microchips production falls in disarray..
@mttaggart well there is always a majority of stupid people around to promote these and they are always the loudest, specially ones working in tech. But don't worry they will still tell you buy a insanely overpriced, criminally under speced mac book to access this billionaire bullshit.
We need a company to emerge that will manufacture it. It needs to be a FOSS type, European company.
@mttaggart sorry I'm in the wrong field of engineering. What's wrong with SSDs?
@Linza SSDs were already short for roughly the same reasons DRAM was.
@mttaggart
Toshiba still make decent drives.
To clarify: I am saying this is what they want. Not that it is inevitable. But it's difficult to ignore the clear pattern of strategic decisions by these companies since the dawn of "services" until this benighted age.
@mttaggart OpenAI apparently buying up 40% of RAM wafers and just hoarding them definitely points in this direction. It may be aimed at competitors, but a handy byproduct is yet more reliance on hyperscalers for the most basic of computing commodities.
Nah, don't be that dystopian. It'll suck for sure, however they will still want to get rid of all of the old used ones on a regular basis...
@agowa338 Do you know what happens to these disks after they're used the way they get used in a data center?
It depends what they were used for. Some get trashed. But a surprisingly high amount gets sold off in bulk to companies that then repackage the pallets of down into smaller bundles of e.g. 100 pcs. Then it gets sold to another that repackages in e.g. 10 pcs and then often lands on ebay...
@agowa338 The ones used for training workloads are not usable after 1-2 years max. Anything fronting hot storage will be in a similar situation. Sure, some may be resold, but if they already have a shorter lifespan, the supply issue remains.
well as I said it for sure will suck in the short term. However it's not "as dystopian" as you said with being cut of from the means of computation.
Also don't forget to also keep an eye on China. As prices rise there will be more and more opportunities for new companies to enter the market (ones that don't have their factory processes optimised to keep faulty units per production cycle in check).
Same for GPUs the first "all china" GPUs they should be purchasable in a few months
@mttaggart I wonder what would happen if the costs get too high to bear and people ended up... opting out entirely from computing
I mean it's not like you need computers to be able to grow a couple trees for food right 
@mttaggart @briankrebs If this is true then RIP Apple/Acer/Dell's business model
@mttaggart I very much wish I had purchased a 4TB NVME drive when they were 230 USD, now that the one I wanted is 700+.
I also wish I had ordered my laptop with 32GB, instead of 16GB DDR5, when it was an 80 USD upgrade, rather than now costing 300+.
@mttaggart whaddya suppose they're gonna do when all those drives get old in a few years? Dump them in the ocean? Nope, they will go in big crates and get wrapped in saran wrap and sold in lots of 1000, to guys in industrial suburbs who will uncrate and sell them for thirty bucks each.
"Not good enough for AI, but good enough for you!"
The moment Samsung or Hitachi start selling 10-petabyte drives,all those little terabyte SSDs will suddenly be worth fuckshit except to normal users.
@the_turtle @mttaggart It gets sent into the shredder in the name of privacy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQoKFovvigI though this is a video by Google from 2013 and I dunno if they're still doing it now
@koakuma @the_turtle Even if they wanted to resell, the cost of logistics for such an operation would outstrip profits.
Into the dump they'll go. We haven't even begun imagining the e-waste of this absurd misadventure.
@mttaggart I look forward to an upcoming glut of YouTube content discussing home tape library robots.
@mttaggart cf express and dram prices are already skyrocketing. Hitting the photographers hard.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
@lemgandi This is actually malice! It's rapacious greed, the purest evil!
@mttaggart Why not Both?
@lemgandi Then what's the point you're trying to make?
@mttaggart
Wooo compute gouging 😑
@mttaggart I still have my Commodore 64. They will never trap me. 10 PRINT “C64 RULEZ” ; 20 GOTO 10 ; RUN #c64
@mttaggart I am so sick of these fucks.
@mttaggart I hope this will help break the mental cycle that mandates the necessity of having to buy new stuff regularly instead of using what's already there up to its actual lifetime. That way, this would in the long term hurt companies who's business model relies on creating artificial demand instead of providing actually necessary products and services.
I regret having delayed upgrading my old 4x2TB NAS array, because I didn't want to spend that much money on HDDs. Seems like everywhere is limited to 2 drives per account where I am.
May need to get a hotswap enclosure and pick out all my old 0.5TB drives for less frequently used stuff.
@tschenkel @mttaggart I am suddenly very, very lucky to have 85TB of spinning rust
@freya @tschenkel I gently submit you were already lucky to have all that!
Indeed. I feel like we are the avantgarde with cobbled together IT. Feels like a Gibson novel, and unlike the tech-bros I did not read those scenarios as aspirational.
I just wanted to retire my beowulf cluster (12 old HP Z210 to 240 workstations and a few switches) because the gen7 i7s got a bit old in the tooth. But I may go and update that for a few more years and try to ride out the AI bubble.
@mttaggart @tschenkel I mean yes, I misworded that, I meant I suddenly feel very lucky, not discounting the fact that I already was, I just hadn't internalised it
Phase 1: force AI adoption by removing other options to not use it
Phase 2: make computing unaffordable for the masses by buying up all stock of components, driving up demand while building datacenters.
Phase 3: further increase demand for and adoption of your cloud computing/AI datacenter by making people reliant on crappy cloud PCs/PCaaS devices with little horsepower to do much else
Phase 4: use telemetry/spyware in said datacenters to surveil/harvest data from every user of said cloud PCs and use it to serve hyper-targeted ads (everyone knows people love hyper-targeted ads) and send drone fleets to respond to/harass dissenters domestic terrorists
Phase 5: profit
@mttaggart Suddenly all that retro "obsolete" hardware isn't so niche and worthless. I have a stack of old laptops to cannibalize - enough to last a Linux lifetime.
@mttaggart found 3 spindles of dvd-r's the other day, I'm gonna get archiving 😂
@tinmouth Finally my M-Disc writer makes sense
@mttaggart had to go look that up! It's true none of my cd-rw's from the late 90s read anymore.
