- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
I said before and I will say it again. AI is product being built by its users, an unfinished program that it is used wrong just for companies to make money. AI hasn’t made any progress and we won’t see any progress, because it is used by companies to profit.
They don’t care about the economy and the downsides, they care to make us use AI.i overheard today on the bus, that someone(assume in grad school) as a TA was planning to use AI to grade all the classes homework without care if it was inconsistently correct or not, it isnt going to end well.
Here’s an idea: a catalogue of companies who pulled this shit during the bubble, so we know who not to buy from when it bursts.
In order to appeal to others’ emotions, it really helps to have emotions of your own and feel empathy.
It’s just the same old tactics advertising and marketing shitheads have been using for decades. Just ignore them.
Yet if prices somehow go back to sanity, people will flock back to nVidia like they always did
Nothing like a call for empathy from the morally bankrupt.
speaking of gaming i know people with recent degree in gaming related field, not surprise he couldnt find a job in that field.
Forget ram. Wait until there’s widespread power outages yet you’re somehow paying 10x for your electricity bill because of the new data center down the street.
and anyone near datacenters get polluted water or any unforseen pollution, contamination that has yet been studied.
this is actually happening
my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after
we have a power making dam in town
historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA
If the data center is causing all that power drain, they should be the ones footing the damned bill
they also, businesses get wholesale lower rates than residential consumers. which is one of the big issues about them not paying thier fair share.
i heard datacenter requires most of our electricity generation eventually.
Combined over 20% last November, great times!!
Combined means we have:
first 1k kwh rate Above 1k kwh rate
And the above 1k kwh changes seasonally.
they send us these cute charts and stuff about our usage
they show you a “you are using xyz% more then previous year” type stuff
but my wife keeps it and their little bullshit is because they keep changing the rate and then using the new rate against your old usage as comparison. Looks like OMG we used a lot more power then last year! We should consider cutting something out.
But the actual meter reading numbers are almost always the same year after year
I like the suggestions to save money and lower usage.
“Have you tried living in complete darkness this month? You could save $2 off your bill!”
“Perhaps try not using electricity this month. Or, consider getting a second source of income to turn on your fridge for a few hours a day!”
"try building your own dam, or wind farm, or having solar panels, why not have a nuclear reactor in your basement to powe houser house.
Inb4 we get astroturfed “Luddites” telling us to just abandon electricity and live like the Amish.
It’s winter here, and I wear two or three layers with a sweater on top, because I am saving electricity.
We’ll have ourselves our first trillionaire, and silly me hates all the people with 500mil+ net worth, and their bootlickers.
Mine does that too, and there’s $300 in fees that don’t relate to the actual power used. Using no utilities, I’d still have to pay that much.
Wenatchee?
The aura that the US irradiates is just preposterous. At this point the only sound you can hear is the sound of boots being licked, evil corpos are doing what they please while the general populace is disregarded.
mmmm Facsism, feels good right?
FUCK TRUMP and FUCK THE REPUBLICANS THAT ENABLED HIM
↙↙↙
With gas prices at multiyear lows and electricity being so expensive it’s really hard to justify electrifying appliances. I was considering doing so (gas dryer, stove, water heater, furnace), but I think if I did I’d be paying an extra $300/month for quite a long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
I went through this process in 2012-2016 - took out the gas dryer, gas stove and replaced them with electric. Mostly because my wife’s family has a history of asthma and the data for gas appliances and asthma is disconcerting to say the least. Especially for kids.
Good luck with your eventual transition!
But think of the (big tech) shareholders!
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
Master Of Orion 2 … TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) … Warcraft II …
X-Wing Alliance too, it’s a relatively modern game, but there’s something about the campaign. You really feel yourself a rebel.
They all have that atmosphere of going into the sea for real, I don’t know how to describe it.
Another old game with it is Ascendancy. I always get too emotional from its style and music, somehow it reminds me of how I dreamed of future in my childhood. But I didn’t play a lot of it for the same reason.
Master of Orion 2 is just very playable and comfortable.
TIE Fighter has that sense of humor similar to Dungeon Keeper in some sense.
X-Wing I like more, because of its atmosphere, again, you really feel yourself a rebel.
XvT is for a group of friends.
WarCraft II has amazing music. Other than feeling yourself in a world where moral alignment is not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional, chivalrous honor being the one forgotten. You might not feel yourself the good guy necessarily, but that honor you’ll feel in its campaign. A bit like in Harry Potter such a character as Bellatrix Lestrange has that quality maxed out in the positive direction, which makes her an interesting character compared to most DEs who are both baddies and spineless cowards.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Please tell me more.
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
One of the classics
I really need to get a new display replacement for my old vaio f series laptop. The screen layers are doing the funny vinegar thing. That and some sort of ssd. Maybe a USB Dom or some msata thing with a converter board.
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
It is and it isn’t. There’s a ton of tech waste and lots of people get rid of systems that are still quite capable. Obviously there’s less power but even a 6 year old gaming rig can still run most games, just at lower framerates
I find it fascinating how the concept of coping with a situation has been made into a negative. “Get bent loser, how dare you try to make the best out of a bad situation”. Hold on, let me unfuck the tech sector real quick.
It goes wrong when you try to convince me that retrocomputing is somehow better than building a reasonably priced new machine.
Oh Steve, you’re so misguided
Not copium when the purpose is different.
IMHO there’s much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for “outdated” hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
What does a kitchen server do?
Serves kitchens
“Your kitchen, sir”
“Our special today, is silverfish and granite, served with a side of wood chips, garnished with table salt.”
Discworld?
?
🤔 ah, I suppose that makes sense
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn’t want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.
What’s funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
Software has also gone to shit performance wise, few things really get optimized anymore and there’s frameworks and containers behind everything.
For sure. Buying higher performance machines didn’t get us better performing games, it just got us lazy developers.
> has an AI slop summary
Yeah I noticed that lmao, definitely AI slop.
AI slop with the audacity to block anyone with Privacy Badger enabled, like, “we worked hard to produce this AI slop so we deserve to make money scraping your personal data”
(edit: oh wait, I just noticed you meant OP’s summary. Yeah, blatant slop, get to fuck OP)
These people keep saying “it’s the future” but it just seems like they’re chasing pink elephants and forcing us to partake in the delusion.
That delusion keeps pumping up stocks.
… Until it all goes to hell, and their delusion will finally meet its fait.
The C suite and management of these companies want two things - for the stock to go as high as possible, and for them to be able to sell at the top and leave a bunch of bag holders wondering what the fuck just happened.
What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Your TAM is about to go bam, so cut the shit and make us some RAM.
I can’t take anything that uses the word “tremendously” seriously any more.
Bigly agreed
Slammed!
They gotta get while the getting’s good or they’ll miss out on that margin
Yeah but your TAM (who you could possibly sell to) is the biggest concentric circle, inside that is the Servicable Addressable Market (who you could feasibly sell to) and your SOM (serviceable obtainable market, who you are actually selling to) and the consumer market is who you were actually selling to.
It could be that these data centers never become serviceable or obtainable, and this is all just predictions with no actual product making it into a machine.
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
currently its very useful for propaganda, thats why conservatives are all in on it.
Don’t forget obligatory data mining the crap out of you!
It almost seems like they want to make home computing unaffordable, so you have to rent PC time from a cloud provider. This way they nickel and dime you, and use your data to train their LLMs.
Micron and nvidia get their cut by being able to set whatever prices they can imagine.
That’s exactly what they’re aiming for.
there are plenty of home computers for sale for under $500. i’m on a $700 laptop right now that’s 4 years old.
they just can’t run modern games. i can run 2d games just fine or old games.
the gaming crowd seems to forget that most computers don’t use integrated graphics and a $1000 PC is a luxury purchase.
I hope that will prompt many more people to adopt Linux then
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
chuckles
Micron reported a revenue of $37.38 billion for fiscal year 2025. Nvidia reported a revenue of $57 billion for just its latest quarter. AI is hot. Meanwhile, inflation and interest rates continue to depress consumer spending power here in the U.S., which is reflected abroad as well. AI has also torched jobs—it’s fueled thousands of layoffs already.
Torched jobs, the environment, and climate.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the fevered pace of tech often has led to good outcomes in the end.
Only when it’s well-planned and well executed, with people and our habitat treated well.
But that doesn’t change the individual impact of incomes lost, plans destroyed, security evaporated. So when a company makes a play for my agreement through emotion, I always wonder: Who benefits from this vision?
