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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Golden.

    Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.

    “This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”


  • And yet, they did it, very quickly, and will do so again when the market shifts again.

    These aren’t typical conditions. There is a world of difference between “Yo, here is a truckload of money. Give me all your RAM for the next two years!” (AI right now) and “We need to align our capacity to the current needs of the market in order to not flood the market with product we can’t sell.” (normal conditions).

    Look at the memory market before this AI shitshow. It’s cyclical as the fabs try to match demand without flooding the market. It typically takes several quarters to ramp capacity up and down, causing shortages and then oversaturating the market because they can’t do it fast enough. Returning to that kind of production is also likely to be more difficult than it would otherwise be to adjust while already in it. There are so many unknowns in this wild situation. How much DRAM should they commit to making?

    Anyway, I’m not even a business person so what the fuck do I know. I’m getting tired of this conversation. It would be great to be optimistic, but that’s not something I’m capable of right now. Best of luck. I hope it pops and prices plummet.


  • Please indicate the point at which we no longer agree.

    • The price of consumer hardware, like RAM and SSDs, is high right now.

    • Supply for consumer hardware is low right now.

    • The reason that the price of consumer hardware is high right now is because supply is low.

    • The reason this supply is low is because manufacturing capacity that used to be committed to consumer variants of this hardware has been converted to manufacturing datacenter variants of this hardware.

    • The reason for the manufacturing shift is that, because of the AI bubble, demand for datacenter hardware is high.

    • It takes time and money to convert manufacturing capacity between consumer hardware to datacenter hardware.

    • This conversion also includes changing investment, R&D, and employment priorities. Companies like Micron (one of the three major/noteworthy memory suppliers in the world) have cut/gutted their B2C divisions to focus their resources entirely on the more profitable datacenter B2B efforts.

    • Datacenter variants of this hardware are substantially different than consumer variants and are not interchangeable.

    • Higher prices, slimmer margins, and lower sales have caused some consumer electronics businesses to cut back, focus on narrower market segments, pivot to other markets, or exit the market entirely.

    If we agree on all of the above, I’m not sure why you are confused.

    If the bubble pops today, it very well may cause demand for datacenter hardware to crater, assuming they don’t get creative and find a way to pivot hard toward other SaaS somehow. Since the parts are not at all compatible with consumer electronics, this would not provide an instant increase in consumer hardware supply nor would it crater consumer hardware demand.

    If the crash is bad enough, some of the businesses that pivoted to B2B/datacenter hardware may fail or have to be bailed out by their governments. Even if they all survived, fewer consumer product businesses exist in the market to sell to consumers and they have fewer product lines in development. Companies like Micron, who abandoned their established brands and/or relationships with resellers or partners that would use their parts in consumer products, will need to rebuild those things. Manufacturing would need to be converted, updated to the latest consumer hardware needs, taking more time and money.

    It would take quite a while to rebuild consumer hardware supply. Without that supply, demand will not be met and prices will be high.





  • …why would it need to be?

    It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.

    The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.

    The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.

    Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.


  • Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.

    I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.

    But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.







  • I’ve misread the tone, I agree. I apologize for that. However, I find that his complaints were not about things that are always “fundamental core principals of working in IT”. For some, sure, but where I work I’m by far the employee with the most familiarity with CLI/powershell and scripting. Almost everything is done via a GUI or web interface if it can be. I would tell any of my coworkers that maybe IT isn’t for them.

    I also, in a rush to finish, misremembered and incorrectly reread some of your words too quickly. You did not recommend the “clone a repo” solutions, you advised against them. Again, I apologize. I still am suspicious of this massive collection of self hosted services that work perfectly with each other after like 20 minutes of tweaking and little maintenance. That was what I was trying to imply with that section. I’ve lost close to a dozen 6-10 hour sessions on Saturdays pulling my hair out because I can’t seem to find out how to do some specific things that it seems like I need to do to make some “easy” new service to work with my setup. It’s like that Malcom in the Middle (?) clip of the dad 5 projects deep at the end of the day trying to fix some simple problem in the morning.

    I’ll try to document some of my issues this weekend. I would honestly appreciate any help or recommendations.


  • That being said, I think there’s a bigger issue at play here. If you “work in IT” and are burnt out from “15 containers and a lack of a gui” I’m afraid to say you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

    Honestly, this is the kind of response that actually makes me want to stop self hosting. Community members that have little empathy.

    I work in IT and like most we’re also a Windows shop. I have zero professional experience with Linux but I’m learning through my home lab while simultaneously trying extract myself from the privacy cluster fuck that is the current consumer tech industry. It’s a transition and the documentation I find more or less matches the OPs experience.

    I research, pick what seems to be the best for my situation (often most popular), get it working with sustainable, minimal complexity, and in short time find that some small, vital aspect of its setup (like reverse proxy) has literally zero documentation for getting it to work with some other vital part of my setup. I guess I should have made a better choice 18 months ago when I didn’t expect to find this new service accessible. I find some two year old Github issue comment that allegedly solves my exact problem that I can’t translate to the version I’m running because it’s two revisions newer. Most other responses are incomplete, RTFM, or “git gud n00b”, like your response here

    Wherever you work, whatever industry, you can get burnt out. It’s got nothing to do with if you’ve “got what it takes” or whatever bullshit you think “you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole” equates to.

    I run close to 100 services all using docker compose and it’s an incredibly simple, repeatable, self documenting process. Spinning up some new things is effortless and takes minutes to have it set up, accessible from the internet, and connected to my SSO.

    If it’s that easy, then point me to where you’ve written about it. I’d love to learn what 100 services you’ve cloned the repos for, tweaked a few files in a few minutes, and run with minimal maintenance all working together harmoniously.



  • Bots that scrape for training do not usually respect typical methods of asking them kindly to not look at their data.

    If we could start from scratch and force these bots to check for some kind of opt in data before scraping, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable with Gen AI scraping.

    At this point, most models are trained on content taken without consent. In most cases, much of that content would, if a human were to consume it, be considered stolen/pirated. The courts just decided that these AI companies are above those laws for reasons. That reason is money.


  • Not an expert but… typical computers do what they do by transmitting (primarily) electrical signals between components. Is there electricity or isn’t there. It’s the “bit” with two states - on or off, 1 or 0. Electricity is the flow of electrons between atoms. Basically, we take atoms that aren’t very attached to some of their electrons and manipulate them so that they pass the electrons along when we want them to. I don’t know if there is a way to conduct and process electrical signals without using an atom’s relationship with its electrons.

    Quantum computing is the suspected new way to get to “better” computing. I don’t know much about the technical side of that, beyond that they use quantum physics to expand the bit to something like a qubit, which exploits superposition (quantum particles existing in multiple states simultaneously until measured, like the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor) and entanglement (if two quantum particles’ states are related to or dependent on each other, determining the state of one particle also determines the state of the other) to transmit/process more than just a simple 1 or 0 per qubit. A lot more information can be transmitted and processed simultaneously with a more complex bit. As I understand it, quantum computing has been very slow going.

    That’s my shitty explanation. I’m sure someone will come along and correct my inaccurate simplification of how it all works and list all that I missed, like fiberoptic transmission of signals.


  • They are anticompetitive, just not in an obvious way that is antagonistic toward consumers.

    But the Steam platform does not maintain its dominance through better pricing than by rival platforms. Instead, Valve abuses the Steam platform’s market power by requiring game developers to enter into a ‘Most Favored Nations’ provision contained in the Steam Distribution Agreement whereby the game developers agree that the price of a PC game on the Steam platform will be the same price the game developers sell their PC games on other platforms.

    While I’m willing to forgive requiring price parity when it’s a steam key, which will ultimately be redeemed on Steam and utilize all of the services provided by Valve, this should not apply to other platforms that distribute the game themselves.