While you are partly correct, the RAM used in AI datacenters is not the same shape as DDR5, they share a supply chain: The silicon that makes that RAM is being diverted from “consumer”, or even most “on-prem enterprise” RAM (DDR4/5/+) to datacenter RAM.

Memory manufacturers have been reallocating production capacity away from consumer products toward these more profitable enterprise components, and Micron has presold its entire HBM output through 2026. [emphasis added]

Because of that change in allocation, there’s a lower supply without a (much)lower demand, and the prices of consumer RAM will eventually rise to meet what the AI datacenters are willing to pay per unit of silicon. The shape doesn’t matter very much. This change in supply has already had very visible effects in the consumer DDRX markets, like 100%-increases-in-a-month-visible.

That smartphones and other devices with RAM haven’t felt this yet is reasonable. They locked their manufacturing prices in before the spike in price, so there is a lag. That price increase will be felt by the consumer, though. We’re going to be hard pressed to compete for memory against these companies willing to throw billions of dollars around. Next year’s flagship phone price will be a gunshot.

The really sad, annoying, rage-inspiring part is that modern consumer goods never drop in price. When DDR6 hits $1k/8GB, or something like that, “they” will know some of us are willing to pay that price. This line only goes up, and AI datacenters are doing irreparable harm to consumer electronics as an industry.

Think about this: What is NAND Flash made of? We’re already seeing SSD prices rise too, especially in the NVME flavor. SD cards for your camera, cartridges for your switch, your fucking fridge. They all have silicon in them and this AI supply chain is guzzling silicon the way it guzzles power and water.

// not AI slop. This is pure human slop! // I appreciate pull requests from people smarter than me.

Remember that the companies didn’t want any of this -

It’d be nice if those companies used their millions of lobbying dollars to tell lawmakers just how stupid this shit is.

They won’t, though, because knowing exactly who you are and then verifying it via government documents or biometrics is way more valuable than the users lost who won’t verify.

They “don’t want it”, but they actually do.

I tripped over this awesome analogy that I feel compelled to share. “[AI/LLMs are] a blurry JPEG of the web”.

This video pointed me to this article (paywalled)

The headline gets the major point across. LLMs are like taking the whole web as an analog image and lossily digitizing it: you can make out the general shape, but there might be missed details or compression artifacts. Asking an LLM is, in effect, googling your question using a more natural language… but instead of getting source material or memes back as a result, you get a lossy version of those sources and it’s random by design, so ‘how do I fix this bug?’ could result in ‘rm -rf’ one time, and something that looks like an actual fix the next.

Gamers’ Nexus just did a piece about how youtube’s ai summaries could be manipulative. While I think that is a possibility and the risk is real, go look at how many times elmo has said he’ll fix grok for real this time; but another big takeaway was how bad LLMs still are at numbers or tokens that have data encoded in them: There was a segment where Steve called out the inconsistent model names, and how the ai would mistake a 9070 for a 970, etc, or make up it’s own models.

Just like googling a question might give you a troll answer, querying an ai might give you a regurgitated, low-res troll answer. ew.

I’m happy you provided a few examples. This is good for anyone else reading along.

Equifax in 2017: Penalty was, let’s assume the worst case, 700$M. The company in 2017 made 3.3$B, and I’d assume that was after the penalty, but even if it wasn’t, that was a penalty of 27% of revenue. That actually seems like it would hurt.

TSB in 2022: Fined ~48.6£M by two separate agencies. TSB made 183.5£M in revenue in 2022, still unclear if that was pre- or post- penalty, but this probably actually hurt.

Uber in 2018: your link suggests Uber avoided any legal discovery that might have exposed their wrongdoing. There are no numbers in the linked article and a search suggest the numbers are not public. Fuck that. A woman was killed by an AI driven car and the family deserves respect and privacy, but uber DOES NOT. Because it’s not a public record, I can’t tell how much they paid out for the death of the victim, and since uber is one of those modern venture-capital-loss-leader companies, this is hard to respond to.

I’m out of time – and won’t likely be able to finish before the weekend, so trying to wrap up – and Boeing seems complicated and I’m more familiar with Crowdstrike and I know they fucked up. In both cases, I’m not sure how much of a penalty they paid out relative to income.

I’ll cede the point: There are some companies who have paid a price for making mistakes. When you’re talking companies, though, the only metric is money-paid/money-earned. I would really like there to be criminal penalties for leadership who chase profit over safety, so there’s a bit of ‘wishful thinking’ in my worldview. If you kill someone as a human being (or 300 persons, Boeing), you end up with years in prison, but company just pays 25% of it’s profit that year instead.

I still think Cassandra is right, and that more often than not, software companies are not held responsible for their mistakes. And I think your other premise, that ‘if software is better at something’ carries a lot: Software is good at explicit computation, such as math, but is historically incapable of empathy (a significant part of the original topic… I don’t want to be a number in a cost/benefit calculation). I don’t want software replacing a human in the loop.

Back to my example of a flock camera telling the police that a stolen car was identified… the software was just wrong. The police department didn’t admit any wrongdoing and maaaaybe at some point the victim will be compensated for their suffering, but I expect flock will not be on the hook for that. It will be the police department, which is funded by taxpayers.

Reading your comments outside this thread, I think we would agree on a great many things and have interesting conversations. I didn’t intend to come across as snide, condescending or arrogant. You made the initial point, cassandra challenged you and I agreed with them, so I joined where they seemed not to.

The “bizarre emotion reaction” is probably that I despise AI and want it nowhere near any decision-making capability. I think that as we embed “AI” in software, we will find that real people are put at more risk and that software companies will be able to deflect blame when things go wrong.

The burden of proof is on you. Show me one example of a company being held liable (really liable, not a settlement/fine for a fraction of the money they made) for a software mistake that hurt people.

The reality is that a company can make X dollars with software that makes mistakes, and then pay X/100 dollars when that hurts people and goes to court. That’s not a punishment, that’s a cost of business. And the company pays that fine and the humans who mode those decisions are shielded from further repercussions.

When you said:

the idea that the software vendor could not be held liable is farcical

We need YOU to back that up. The rest of us have seen it never be accurate.

And it gets worse when the software vendor is a step removed: See flock cameras making big mistakes. Software decided that this car was stolen, but it was wrong. The police intimidated an innocent civilian because the software was wrong. Not only were the police not held accountable, Flock was never even in the picture.

I think this is a potential windfall for gaming… Sure, it could be terrible, as other commenters have stated, but EA was already terrible. A national investment fund may very well have a better understanding of long-term investment and pull away from lootboxes and microtransactions. I’m certainly not holding my breath… but if I were in a position to buy an entire catalog of IP that people loved in their youth, I think this could be a sound strategy.

If Saudi Arabia took EA and all it’s properties and made it what 90’s gaming was… this would be monumental and I think it’d pay off; as well as a slap in the face of the modern game publishers’ business model.

We just saw this with Silksong: Make a good game, treat your customers with respect, and we will break records for you, even if it takes a decade. If the Saudis don’t act like vulture capital and instead play a longer game, they have the money to fund actual quality development.

This was an interesting article. I’m not a service provider, nor in the EU, so I have little personal exposure to this change. I like the customer freedom it will probably provide me as splash damage, though.

The thing I really want to call out is the tone of the article: “This thing we relied on is going away. Instead of gnashing your teeth and being mad, here’s how to leverage it to make your offering more attractive than your competition.”

not a locksmith, but…

One of those candidates for ‘worst memorable phrase in history’ is the old “duct-tape for things that move and shouldn’t and wd-40 for things that should move and don’t”.

WD-40 isn’t a lubricant. It often works to get something un-stuck, but then you need to still clean and lubricate the parts to keep it working.

I really like the description of AI coding as ‘custom stack overflow generator’ because it really sells the flaws as well, to an experienced dev. We go to stack overflow for help with some weird quirk of a language or find an obscure library that solves our specific need.

I think vibe coding is cobbling together a project from a bunch of stack overflow posts – and they only use the question part of the post.

I’m a straight male. My wife is bi. The most important part of her orientation, to me, is that it means everyone else was my competition for her love instead of just other men, but I still won.

Fully agreed. On the service-provider side, we have ‘safe harbor’ laws: A site isn’t liable for copyrighted user-generated content as long as they have mechanisms to take down items when notified.

Liability-wise: The payment processors should have no fucking insight into what is being sold, only that they handle the transactions. Therefore, they should have no liability, similar to “safe harbor”.

Reputation-wise: I can almost see a history where Visa, for example, used a statement like “we don’t handle transactions for X” as a marketing ploy… but that is way past where we are. There’s no chance of reputational damage to a payment processor for the items for which they handled a payment. Combined with the above, if I say I’m giving $20 to Tim, you give $20 to Tim and take it from me. Done. Not your problem.

As another commenter stated, the payment processor should be a dumb pipe, and anything illegal being sold should be a liability for the seller or buyer. The idea of a moral judgement of the processor is as stupid as a water pipe to your house cutting off the flow if your shower runs too long.

The real problem is the politicians, or lobbyists/influencers, who are sending bribes to each other to gain advantage… but visa doesn’t have a problem handling a venmo transaction for ‘tuition’.

Let me buy horny games until after you block world superpower corruption first. But honestly, don’t even do that. Just handle moving the money when someone send it. That’s your only job.

As with other responses, I recommend a local model, for a vast number of reasons, including privacy and cost.

Ollama is a front end that lets you run several kinds of models on Windows and Linux. Most will run without a GPU, but the performance will be bad. If your only compute device is a laptop without a GPU, you’re out of luck running things locally with any speed… that said, if you need to process a large file and have time to just let the laptop cook, you can probably still get what you need overnight or over a weekend…

If you really need something faster soon, you can probably buy any cheap($5-800) off-the-shelf gaming pc from your local electronics store like best buy, microcenter, walmart, and get more ‘bang for your buck’ over a longer term running a model locally, assuming this isn’t a one-off need. Aim for >=16GB RAM on the PC itself and >=10GB on the GPU for real-time responses. I have a 10GB RTX 3080 and have success running 8B models on my computer. I’m able to run a 70B model, but it’s a slideshow. The ‘B’ metric here is parameters and context(history). Depending on what your 4k-lines really means (book pages/printed text?, code?) a 7-10B model is probably able to keep it all ‘loaded in memory’ and be able to respond to questions about the file without forgetting parts of it.

From a privacy perspective, I also HIGHLY recommend not using the various online front ends. There’s no guarantee that any info you upload to them stays private and generally their privacy policies have a line like ‘we collect information about your interactions with us including but not limited to user generated content, such as text input and images…’ effectively meaning anything your send them is theirs to keep. If your 4k line file is in any way business related, you shouldn’t send it to a service you don’t operate.

Additionally, as much as I enjoy playing with these tools, I’m an AI skeptic. Ensure you review the response and can sanity check it – AI/LLMs are not actually intelligent and will make shit up.

While I would hate to lose actual trees, I’m medium on the idea of this on it’s own. People need lots of things and space, which causes the removal of trees. If we can replicate some of their functions, such as CO2 absorption with this tech, then that seems good. If upkeep is the same as a tree, I don’t see a downside to the overall concept.

My thought would be that this shows up on top of the buildings instead of at ground level, though… Plant real trees and put these on the roof. The real loss would be if we stop making green spaces because these things meet the need for O2. Green spaces in cities do way more than just clean the air, though, so I’m not sure we’re that dystopian yet.

The photo looks like it doubles as a bench too, so maybe that helps justify its footprint. Make them a mini-light show with varied colors and it can become a functional art installation. How long until it has spikes to prevent someone from taking a nap on it, though?

Evanescence in my Lemmy? Hell yeah!

At that point, I’d expect the cyclist to pull over and let traffic flow past.

The same way we expect slower traffic to keep right or use turnouts to let faster traffic pass them on mountain roads. Nothing wrong with being slower or less comfortable on the roads, but if you are causing traffic to back up, you can get out of the way.

The biker’s loss is <1min as they use a turnout, shoulder or sidewalk, and the cars all get where they are going without needing to perform riskier passing maneuvers.

Doesn’t generally apply if you have a single car but I’ve been in a situation behind a cyclist where I wasn’t knowledgeable about the road ahead and was unable to find a place to safely pass for a while. I clearly was making the cyclist nervous, and I was nervous. A 10 second delay for the cyclist would have resolved the issue. Instead, I spent more like a minute waiting for a moment with enough visibility to let me safely pass.

A company where the stated objective was to prioritize profit at the cost of human life. That’s a job to cause death.

The people working for that company are not likely to be in a position to quit over ethical issues, as they are trying to feed their families, but the CEO of that company made decisions that directly impacted other people lives and likely killed many. If he didn’t want to deny claims for care, he could have resigned. Instead, he profited.

His job was to cause death. As is the job of all for-profit health care companies.

Don’t lump us all together. Windows users are just linux users who aren’t there yet.

I moved early this year and haven’t had significiant problems, though I’m IT savvy and can code my way around my issues. Linux is great, and I’d been halfway there for a long time, but Windows had the edge on gaming and simplicity. They fucked up, though when they started pushing for AI and Win11, at least for me. Where the Rubicon lies will be different for everyone, but it does exist for many.

We win by couching linux as the place to go to escape corporate focus and greed, not by being elitist.

This is the part that hurts the most.

I canvassed, I rallied, I pushed people to vote. I did what I could to ensure the fascist didn’t win again, but he still did. Enough of my country either didn’t care, found some excuse to not vote for her, or wanted him to to be president.

I was denied a chance at a primary, but I was excited for Kamala. There is no person who can sit and represent 300 million people and make them all happy, but she was more on my side than not, and I’m willing to push for ‘better right now’ and then push for ‘better later’ too as distinct events.

As part of the now vocal minority, I don’t relish what is to come. I didn’t ask for it and I don’t want it; but lumped in with ‘Americans’, we sure seem to.

What does that mean?

This is the frantic typing of someone who is distraught; who has seen their country die and now has to live with the still-kicking remains.

That might be a bit hyperbolic, but to those of us with empathy for our fellow man, it’s not a major stretch.

They mean to say that so many people are about to die in so many places, both domestic and foreign.

When I woke up after election night, I wept for the uncountable number of people who would die because of that one night. Some will be killed soon by having critical care fully enshrined as illegal because they are women. Some will die later, because their healthcare benefits are cut and they can’t afford care. Some might die because they happen to have said the wrong things publicly. Many will die in a year, as we empower other fascists in other countries to do terrible things. Many more will die in a decade because of policies enacted by the incoming administration, which places vastly more importance on the increase in wealth of a few over the well-being of the many. And I can see a future where BILLIONS die because the people in charge prioritize power and money over the health of our planet.

The nation that I grew up believing in: the melting pot, the country that welcomed those in need has turned hostile and ugly. The first trump election was a fluke, a flaw in the system that allowed a “charismatic” “outsider” to gain power and abuse it. Biden’s election was a refutation, though only barely, and seemed to show we were better than that.

Trump’s re-election, however, is proof that we aren’t better. Enough people couldn’t be bothered to vote that we elected a criminal.

We, collectively, chose this and we will never be free of that legacy.