And that’s mostly the “bullshit IoT” category. It’s not like the demand for phones and laptops exploded in the last years, it’s IoT, AI and other useless crap - regardless of the process node.

We could start by not requiring new chips every few years.

For 90% of the users, there hasn’t been any actual gain within the last 5-10 years. Older computers work perfectly fine, but artificial slow downs and bad software cause laptops to feel sluggish for most users.

Phones haven’t really advanced either. But apps and OSes are too bloated, hardware impossible to repair, so a new phone it is.

Every device nowadays needs wifi and AI for some reason, so of course a new dishwasher has more computing power than an early Cray, even though nothing of that is ever used.

What exactly do you think these chips are used for?

Because it’s often enough AI, crypto and bullshit IoT.

Admittedly, I only ever entered an operating room under anesthesia, but could you just, you know, put the displays somewhere else?

This seems like one of those informercial “problems”.

I feel like there’s a sad background story here.

You’re oversimplifying things, drastically.

Corporations don’t have one projects, they have dozens, maybe hundreds. And those projects need staffing.

It’s not a chair factory where more people equals faster delivery

And that’s the core of your folly - latency versus throughput. Yes, putting 10 new devs in a project won’t increase speed magically. But 200 developers can get 20 projects done, where 10 devs only finish one.

Though, technically not anyone can access every piece, so I guess we could dismiss it as a thing of the past.

That’s how words work, yes.

The threat of public information for most people is not a data broker, but their neighbor. And unless you have a particularly psychopathic neighbor, they can’t realistically access data from a data broker.

It’s threat modeling like every cyber security. My phone’s password protects me from a random thief, but if a state actor really wants my data, they will get it, but the chances of them even trying are very low for me personally.

This is just the peak power. The average power is much less. And batteries can maybe work on a grid scale for smoothing, but not for an individual consumer like a data center.

Outsourcing is realistically often a tool to get mass, not for cost.

There’s a reason so many people went to coding boot camps, there was a huge demand for developers. Here in Germany for quite a while you literally couldn’t get developers, unless you paid outrageous salaries. There were none. So if you needed a lot of devs, you had the chance to either outsource or cancel the project.

I actually talked to a manager about our “near shoreing” and it wasn’t actually that much cheaper if you accounted for all the friction, but you could deliver volume.

BTW: there’s a big difference between hiring the cheapest contractors you can find and opening an office in a low income country. My colleagues from Poland, Estonia and Romania were paid maybe half what I got, but those guys are absolutely solid, no complaints.

I use Xanax, BTW.

I get your point, but have you looked into the power demands of data centers? They already have room filling batteries for power outages, but those are just enough to keep the lights on while the diesel generators start.

Covid hit just around the time where people around me (and myself, obviously) hit 30, got kids and settled down.

That means, covid turned into a “getting old” speed run for me. Before covid, there was something going on each weekend, a party here, a gathering of friends there, it was almost always at least something going on. When the lock down was unlocked up for real in 2022, most people had partners, didn’t want to go out anymore or do anything at all, some kids were on their way or just arrived.

It felt like a development of 5-10 years was compressed into one or two years.

That’s not “readily available”, and it’s certainly not given voluntarily by users, it’s often straight up illegal. That’s a very different case.

None. There is no model that can output anything even remotely usable on that tiny amount of RAM and certainly not using the few CPU cycles your vps has to offer.

Both have potential revenue streams used to justify the cost.

You sure about that? AI in any semi-professional environment uses proper AI accelerators with loads of ram and not overpriced consumer cards. And that ignores the fact that AI never produced any relevant revenue stream.

Miners, do they even exist anymore? Bitcoin is ASIC land and ethereum switched to proof of stake?

What is competitive about textures? Is eSports an arts contest now? You can’t seriously suggest that having better textures makes a gamer better at playing counter strike.

4K high FPS is exactly the kind of useless numbers game I’m talking about. There’s a point at which humans don’t see differences anyway. Especially in those super high competitive games you also have pretty fast paced movements, you can’t see texture quality.

Yes, if compared in a lab environment the newer card will probably create a better image, but we’re pretty close to “virgin blood infused speaker wires for audiophiles” territory.

Isn’t that pretty much a thing of the past? This meme is maybe true for Facebook, but most sub 40 people don’t use that anyway and the “public diary” days are also pretty over. Sure, you can stitch together a lot from geolocating Instagram posts and LinkedIn information, but it’s not like it’s the searchable database Facebook was in 2012.

I honestly don’t understand why people keep buying these. It’s not like games look that much better compared to cheaper models.

And what’s really surprising to me: who exactly pays those scalper prices? Who can justify shelling out 1-2000 currency units for a (part of a) toy?

The entire industry lost its direction. It’s only about some artificial numbers go up and no one even tries to come up with a reason for those numbers.

Businesses (at least the larger ones) replace their hardware every few years anyway. They don’t care whether their new Optiplexes run Windows 10 or 11 and most hardware bought since 2022 probably has Windows 11 installed already, probably all since 2020 supports it. So there’s hardly a problem here. (Btw I’m taking the management view here, I know that it’s a pain to actually deploy, but that doesn’t matter to management).

The new Intel chips already addressed that, at least for notebook class devices.

Realistically, there wasn’t really a reason for Intel and AMD to be super power efficient, simply because there wasn’t any competition for quite a while. It took Apple Silicon to show how powerful arm can be and how easy the transition could be.