- 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.
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
> 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)
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
Capitalists aren’t the masters of the economy - they’re vassals. They pay their technofeudal lords their tribute, their 30% cut of revenue, and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.
Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
You are right that capitalism tends towards monopolies. But I think there’s a significant difference in what, exactly, is being monopolized. Capital itself is not being monopolized. Access to the marketplace is being monopolized.
In a capitalist monopoly, you would have to buy, for example, shoes, from just one shoe factory, which is the only factory able or allowed to sell you shoes. It can charge whatever price it wants, and you have to pay it or go without shoes. That’s how a monopoly in a capitalist economy works.
In the current economy, you can go to Walmart or Amazon and buy hundreds of different shoes from hundreds of different factories, all competing against one another. You have an enormous amount of choice in shoes.
But those shoe factories all have to pay rent to Walmart and Amazon, and have to sell their shoes at the price Walmart and Amazon tells them to, and have to agree to sell their shoes at lower prices at Walmart or Amazon than on their own website. If they refuse, they’re not allowed to sell on Walmart and Amazon at all.
And because so many physical consumers only have access to a Walmart, and no other stores; and because so many online consumers default to Amazon for all their purchases; if the capitalists don’t submit to Walmart and Amazon they lose so much of the customer market they won’t be able to compete.
That’s the feudalism part. The capitalists aren’t in charge. The vectoralists are - the people who control the flow of information, the lines of communication between producers and consumers. And the vectoralists have split the economy into a handful of private fiefdoms, and make money not from producing anything, but from charging rent for access to their private fiefdom and the customers entrapped within it.
And since this phenomenon is most advanced online, where Amazon controls almost the entire online physical goods market and Google and Apple control almost the entire app market, we can call it technofeudalism.
Traditional monopolies certainly exist - for example, the American food supply is controlled by only a handful of companies - but those companies aren’t the ones controlling the price of food. Walmart and Amazon do.
Or to put it another way: in a socialist economy, like the USSR’s, the government controls the flow of goods and the allocation of resources.
In a capitalist economy, the owners of capital - the land and factories and natural resources that produce goods - control that flow.
And now, in a technocratic economy, the flow of goods and services is controlled, not by the government, and not by the owners of capital, but by the vectoralists.
I think it’s a vital distinction to make.
I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it’s an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of “the customer is always right in matters of taste”
Which just means “if they want to buy ugly shit, let them”
Huh, til
Well shit, that’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. “The customer is always right” just means don’t tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company’s bottom line.
I don’t think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money “they” can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
It’s exactly what monopolies and oligopolies end up doing, whatever is in their interest to do. If anti-trust laws were actually used to enforce competition, we wouldn’t be here. But since we can’t compete with the campaign donations of the companies those laws should be regulating, we get no regulation at all and end up here. Selfish people, being selfish, making everything worse for everyone else.
Lol
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] 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.”
Let me translate that for you:
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
But uh, yeah uh, I feel you, that sucks bro and I appreciate you. But, dude, seriously, look at all this money! So yeah, stay strong guys, tweet about us! And don’t forget, if you want to be informed about the best memory deals, definitely sign up for our newsletter! Just put your email right in this field…
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
To be fair I would not be mad if that was the response, It’s the pandering that get’s me fuming
Yeah, some honesty would be refreshing.
Though to be fair, when that actually happens you know what we call that? “X company just said the quiet part out loud”.
So yeah, there’s kinda no pleasing us either…
LOL If companies were honest we’d have a socialist revolution within 48 hours.
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.
And all these memory are spent on the generation of pornographic content in the highest quality.
highest quality.
Man’s got jokes!
Idk I’ve seen better in the amateur section
In the “amateur” section with professional cameras and pretty experienced (one could say glorified) “amateurs”.
All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it’s not physically possible to [xyz].
Are they really able to replicate pornography like that? I know that for normal stuff, the videos are only under ten seconds or so.
You can get up to 12 minutes locally even if you’re patient. Technically you can go way further if you do it in parts though, and use multiple generations. Might take a few weeks to “direct” it right though, depending what you want to make. If it’s vanilla stuff, maybe 3 days for a 45 minute video on a 3090? (Via 3-5 minute chained segments, with smaller second long segments for smooth camera angle changes)
This guy is an expert at jerking off to AI porn.
They can fuck right off.
For the foreseeable future, DIYPC is dead.
most folks will pay. all my PC gamer friends are just paying $200 per 16GB stick now.
I am in a position to see first hand people regularly dropping ~$4000USD on “mid-range” PCs. It hasn’t slowed down purchasing of PCs, if anything it is speeding up compared to this time last year.
at that pricepoint it’s just about showing off how much money you have.
typical rich way to backhand brag about how rich you are is to whine about how ‘expensive’ things are that are luxury items.
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.
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they have to give up their bragging rights if they don’t upgrade their PCs
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Apart from a bit of simracing, I game almost exclusively on my Steam Deck lately. I upgraded a bunch of hardware early last year, and have no plans to upgrade again any time soon. I’m kinda glad I got it when I did.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
https://wccftech.com/asus-declares-all-in-ai-strategy-as-server-revenue-soars-beyond-expectation/
Yet if prices somehow go back to sanity, people will flock back to nVidia like they always did
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.
They are going to kill an industry and damage peoples ability to access technology.
Im kind of wondering if that isnt the real end game- there was a Bezos quote i saw the other day, where he said he wants to see personal computing die out in favor of essentially cloud based, where users own minimal hardware and just rent compute time for everything.
It kind of feels like they dont actually need ai to succeed- its already achieving the goal of denying components to end users. If they maintain that scarcity long enough, they can kill the pc/ laptop status quo. (Especially if chip makers abandon those fabs for data center tailored units for a whole generation, until theres nothing viable left on the market)
The good thing is that we have a few giants with vested interests in resisting that. PC OEMs like Dell and HP, Clevo, Intel/AMD who still have huge consumer sales, and the big one:
Apple.
Apple is all-in on personal compute, and they have the muscle to resist the anticompetitive plays, hopefully.
Apple can make Chrome book equivalents, they want you to rent compute power not computers.
Natively you’d be able to run VLC on a good day if you’re lucky, but everything else will be online with a subscription attached.
Apple likes being able to distribute apps and have users pay subscriptions to run them locally. This is what they already do; even 3rd party apps get a cut to Apple.
And its why iPhones are so powerful, other than their meager RAM capacity.
Tangential, but ironically the only used laptops (e: for repair) you can buy right now that haven’t been gutted for RAM and NVME are macbooks and similar that have everything soldered onto the motherboard.
Such crazy logic from Bezos, personal computers are now more powerful and capable than ever, fulfilling the average users needs easily. Hey let’s just get rid of that and make them use our servers. He tries to frame it as the logical conclusion but the only conclusion I can see is he wants more money.
Nothing like a call for empathy from the morally bankrupt.
