There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.
Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI.
Regardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years.
No it’s not an easy fix. Manufacturers don’t have a good pulse on long term demand. The he capex to spin up a new manufacturing plant is significant. Especially with the recency of Covid where some folks did get caught with their pants down and over invested during the huge demand boom.
I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on and lots of startups getting massive amounts of capital but I here is a strong signal that a good part of this demand is here to stay.
This will be one of those scenarios where some companies will look brilliant and others foolish.
> Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay.
This sounds like economic dogma based on pointing at some future equilibrium.
I like the saying that goes something like "life is what is happens when you are waiting for the future". In the same way, it seems to me that equilibrium is increasingly less common for many of us.
Markets are dynamic systems, and there are sub-fields of economics that recognize this. The message doesn't always get out unfortunately.
> But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.
This feels like more dogma: find a convenient scape-goat: governments.
Time to wake up to what history has shown us! Markets naturally reflect boom and bust cycles, irrationality of people, and various other market failures. None of these are news to competent economists, by the way. Be careful from whence you get your economic "analysis".
It's hard to increase long-run production capacity for what seems to be clearly a short-term spike in datacenter buildout. Even if AI itself is not much of a bubble, at some point spending on new AI facilities has to subside.
Seeing the first mover succeed, every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to emulate. It distorts the price because people would pay premium for everything. Then there is surplus supply and no takers. People are caught with their pants down and things go for cheap.
This repeats ad nauseum. Whether it was building ISPs during early 2000s or the abundance of streaming service where every media company wanted one. Just because the corporate overlord doesn't want to look foolish for not following a trend.
AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.
There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here.
No, I think it is real demand.
AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand. The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages.
AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions 5 years ago for $5.[0] Everyone is going to need more disk space to store all those video files. Someone in their basement can make a full length movie limited only by imagination. The output quality keeps getting better quicker.
AI agents also drastically increase storage demands. Imagine financial companies using AI agents to search, scrape, organize data on stocks that they wouldn't have been able to do prior. Suddenly, disk storage and CPUs are in high demand for tasks like these.
I think the demand for computer hardware and networking gear is real and is only the beginning.
As someone who is into AI, hardware, and investing, I've been investing in physical businesses based on the above hypothesis. The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data.
Higher price encourages more supply. Typically when you see a acute shortage, its quickly followed by a glut as supply starts coming online in an over correction.
Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long.
What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer for us to use, in exchange of all of your data.
Bingo. A number of corporate interests don't want to let you own your personal computers for different reasons. Google/Apple wants you to get locked down devices, and cloud/AI providers want you to use their services from a weak client.
Time for folks to familiarize themselves with Linux distros designed to run on older hardware. My 2009 laptop runs great, with the exception of the browser. Oh and the fact that 32-bit software is harder and harder to find.
I think about this too. There are several headwinds. Rent-seeking and collapse of economies of scale in the consumer sector for sure, but also I feel like we've basically peaked in hardware's ability to meet routine needs.
Once the phone makers realize that they can sell phones and docking stations to businesses because 90% of knowledge work seems to happen in a web browser through one SaaS or other I think personal computers will be cooked.
I have heard that you can get used laptops. But they do not come with memory or SSD anymore... As even used components are now valuable enough to be removed and sold.
I no longer feel obligated to apologize for holding on to older devices for a long time. I have several desktops and laptops that are all still usable.
It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.
I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.
> rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island
Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?
Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.
And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.
(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)
It's only this way because the American ruling class would rather ship jobs overseas to increase their wealth than competently establish an industrial sector that would pay good wages to average people.
Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.
> It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company
Stop getting your news from news.
> that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion.
Threat of invasion? Who would dare invade taiwan when it's protected by china?
> I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production
Then why bother commenting here?
> but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.
If AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels.
If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.
This is getting ridiculous. Never before has an unwanted product been thrust so forcefully and artificially into the market that it disrupts the supply line for real products with actual demand.
What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?
Hearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering.
And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.
All the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.
Speaking from personal experience.. we treat cloud storage like an infinitely deep bucket. At rest data efficiency is not really a consideration because compute costs are so absurd. Why worry about a $2M year storage bill when your compute bill is $500M? It’s not worth the engineering time to optimize
I think the somewhat hallucinatory canned response is that they distribute data across drives for a massive throughput. Though idk if that even technically makes sense...
And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you?
As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism.
Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.
The ones who spend billions on integrating public cloud LLM services are not the ones writing that function. They are managers who based on data pulled out of thin air say "your goal for this year is to increase productivity by X%. With AI, while staffing is going slightly down".
I have to watch AI generated avatars on the most boring topics imaginable, because the only "documentation" and link to actual answer is in a form of fake person talking. And this is encouraged!
Then the only measure of success is either AI services adoption (team count), or sales data.
That is the real tragedy and the real scale - big companies pushing (external!) AI services without even proof that it justifies the cost alone. Smooth talking around any other metric (or the lack of it).
In my experience LLMs mimic human thought, so they don't "copy" but they do write from "experience" -- and they know more than any single developer can.
So I'm getting tired of the argument that LLMs are "plagiarism machines" -- yes, they can be coaxed into repeating training material verbatim, but no, they don't do that unless you try.
Opus 4.6's C compiler? I've not looked at it, but I would bet it does not resemble GCC -- maybe some corners, but overall it must be new, and if the prompting was specific enough as to architecture and design then it might not resemble GCC or any other C compiler much at all.
Not only do LLMs mimic human thinking, but also they mimic human faults. Obviously one way in which they mimic human faults is that there are mistakes in the LLMs' training materials, so they will evince some imperfections, and even contradictions (since there will be contradictions in their training materials). Another way is that their context windows are limited, just like ours. I liken their hallucinations to crappy code written by a tired human at 3AM after a 20 hour day.
If they are so human-like, we really cannot ascribe their output to plagiarism except when prompted so as to plagiarize.
6-7 years ago when GPU prices went up, I hoped nothing would break. Last year when RAM prices went up I did the same. Now with drive prices going up, it's the same thing.
It's interesting because I've always built mid-tier machines over the years and it was in the neighborhood of ~$700 at the time. Now the same thing is almost double that but the performance is no where near twice as good for general computer usage.
I built a new server this time last year. My board does 6 channel RAM so I bought 6x32GB ECC DDR5. $160 a stick at the time. Just for grins I looked up the same product number at the same supplier I originally bought from. $1300 apiece. One of the VMs running on that server is TrueNAS, with 4 20TB WD Red Pros. God help me if I have to replace a drive.
I was recently involved in a large server purchase for work, where we wanted 72 hard drives of 24TB each for a server. They were available last year, but last month the largest we could get were 20TB drives.
I bought 6x refurbished ultrastars for ~$100/ea Black Friday 2024. They were over $200/ea 2025. Samsung T7 (and shield) SSD’s have 2x-3x. Can’t get 1TB for less than like $180 right now. It’s ridiculous
This is all basically a textbook example of irrational market decisions. There’s clearly a bubble and not enough money coming in to pay for the AI bonanza.
It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the moment is gigantic, and the markets are getting increasingly impatient waiting for the revenue to materialize.
Mark this post… in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market after folks pick up the pieces of imploded AI companies.
(For the record, I’m a huge fan of AI, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also think a giant business and financial bubble is about to implode).
> in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market
COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.
> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.
That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.
I console myself with knowledge of the economics maxim that every supply shortage is usually, eventually, followed by a supply glut.
One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...
If storage and memory manufacturer don't respond with increasing supply. There might not be glut. Just postponed demand that will slowly get fulfilled over longer period. That is if we were in steady state.
On other hand if there is bigger economic turmoil that might mean that the postponed demand does not realise as there is no purchasing power...
People with a control theory background are welcome in economics; the field is more diverse than some would recognize. Certain professions and subfields are more open than others. There are plenty of economists who care about things like resilience and dampening shocks.
I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regulation, rate-adjustment, etc.
I'm not against subsidies but the concentration is a problem. This money could have spurned grass roots participation in these emerging industries, but instead they chose to go with the most heinous of monocultures, leaving billions of people out of the loop.
The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages.
Market says the more you buy the better pricing you get. Once you start capturing large market share of the product, the price should go up and not down; exponentially.
Example, a person that owns 10 houses means that they are restricting the ability of others to own a single home. By increasing the cost of excessive product ownership ... it will reduce the amount of product that people will hoard and allow others to gain access to it.
If you try to use government to force reality to conform to your idea of how things should work you're just going to get 1,000 companies buying 10,000 hard disks each rather than 10 companies buying 1,000,000 each. And if you try to outlaw that somehow then the market will just route around your new scheme in another way, creating even more unintended consequences in the process.
If you must meddle, you're much better off working with market forces rather than trying to fight against them.
>The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages.
I buy one hard disk, AI company busy 40% of global supply. Me not buying that one hard disk is not going to change anything.
>According to Western Digital, thanks to a surge in demand from its enterprise customers, the consumer market now accounts for just 5 percent of the company's revenue.
I pray someone steps into the market and takes all their consumer/SME business from them. I know thats not that simple or at all probable, but it would be great time to take market share and great for us little guys.
It's interesting to see here that spending is irrational, but actually even if AI improvements slow down it's more rational for companies to spend more and underutilize the machines than to underspend and get disrtupted.
On the otherhand lots of people here are even more uncomfortable of the other option, which is quite possible: AI software algorithms may scale better than the capacity of companies that make the hardware. Personally I think hardware is the harder to scale from the two and this is just the beginning.
Great. I’ve just returned a WD drive to Amazon after it arrived crushed in a torn-open paper bag.
The replacement arrived also in a paper bag and went straight back, this time for a refund.
I guess I should have kept that one and hoped for the best.
Good alternatives? I’ve only recently been enlightened on how profoundly sh__ty SSD is for long-term storage and I have a whole lot of images my parents took traveling the last few years of their lives.
I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?
Spinning HDDs will eventually be at risk of failing for purely mechanical reasons, so beyond handling them with care you can't really do all that much. Keeping them always-on may be a viable strategy for drives that are already mostly on, otherwise, just spin them up once in a while, but don't expect this to lower risk significantly. An old drive should simply have its contents transferred to new media, and then be treated as something ephemeral that may fail at any time without warning.
These really are some of the toughest years for people trying to buy a computer. We only recently emerged from the cryptocurrency-driven crunch, and now AI has arrived—and this wave is far more severe than crypto.
In that light, Apple’s Macs are actually quite good value for money.
Any point in setting my laptop to minimal power usage by default and drives to aggressively sleep, in order to try to extend life? Or is sleep and extra power cycle and better to not sleep my M2 drives so they aren't being powered up/down?
The main thing that shortens the lifetime of solid state drives is sustained writes over time. You should disable all system logging options and all "spotlight databases for fast search", avoid swap use and not let the drives "sleep" too aggressively since this will force the system to persist some volume of writes from RAM to disk that might have turned out to be unnecessary down the road.
HDDs, RAM, and chips have so many health metrics and methods that you really shouldn't be afraid to buy them used. The only special requirement is a RasPi test rig. That and a 30 day return window.
I feel like the goal is to avoid buying something broken in the first place, not just to be able to tell if you've bought something that turns out to be broken
I listed some hard drives on Friday on eBay.. most of them refurbished... within 5 minutes got a message from a person who wanted them all... shipped them an hour later
The reason this is a problem is because whatever value AI may have (personally I’m as long as one can get), companies believe that right now it’s a government sponsored financial bubble.
So they’re unwilling to spend on increasing capacity because they don’t expect this demand to last.
I'm wondering - if AI companies are looking at 'build your own saas' as their biggest moat that will make investors happy and drive profits to prevent bubble from bursting, surely hoarding up all the inventory that saas companies depend on directly isn't that great of an idea?
Do they really think they will get some money from the AI ponzi scheme ?
Well, at least they might still have a product to sell once the AI bubble pops, unlike with NVIDIA which does seem to kinda forgot to design new consumer GPUs after getting high on AI money.
They haven't forgotten, they've expressly decided to soft-pivot away from consumer GPUs. RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018… (oops, 2028. No time travel involved. Probably). If the bubble has burst by then.
I might have been more concerned if it was a different drive manufacturer.. some users won't forgive them for the WD Red debacle where they lied about what was in the drive.
It includes all forms of storage except for USB devices, GPUs and high end CPUs. The latter you can still get but you're going to have some severe sticker shock.
I read it as both, but UK suppliers have stock of various SATA HDDs available in large and small sizes. It's hard to say if prices will rocket or availability decline, or both. I don't normally advocate panic-buying, but if it's needed now is the time. I have one NAS spare on hand, I don't want or need a drawer full of them, but it'll be a royal pain if I do and can't get parts.
the current spikes tempt me to sell off my home lab. a mac mini to sell to the open claw bros, 5tb HDD, Intel NUC, some SSDs, and a 5 year old dell laptop. can always buy back after the crash.
glimshe|14 days ago
Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI.
appreciatorBus|14 days ago
infecto|14 days ago
I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on and lots of startups getting massive amounts of capital but I here is a strong signal that a good part of this demand is here to stay.
This will be one of those scenarios where some companies will look brilliant and others foolish.
xpe|14 days ago
This sounds like economic dogma based on pointing at some future equilibrium.
I like the saying that goes something like "life is what is happens when you are waiting for the future". In the same way, it seems to me that equilibrium is increasingly less common for many of us.
Markets are dynamic systems, and there are sub-fields of economics that recognize this. The message doesn't always get out unfortunately.
> But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.
This feels like more dogma: find a convenient scape-goat: governments.
Time to wake up to what history has shown us! Markets naturally reflect boom and bust cycles, irrationality of people, and various other market failures. None of these are news to competent economists, by the way. Be careful from whence you get your economic "analysis".
tasuki|13 days ago
Cheap hard drives and ram, yay! Perhaps GPUs too!
zozbot234|14 days ago
thisisit|14 days ago
Seeing the first mover succeed, every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to emulate. It distorts the price because people would pay premium for everything. Then there is surplus supply and no takers. People are caught with their pants down and things go for cheap.
This repeats ad nauseum. Whether it was building ISPs during early 2000s or the abundance of streaming service where every media company wanted one. Just because the corporate overlord doesn't want to look foolish for not following a trend.
unknown|14 days ago
[deleted]
mrweasel|14 days ago
aurareturn|14 days ago
AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand. The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages.
AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions 5 years ago for $5.[0] Everyone is going to need more disk space to store all those video files. Someone in their basement can make a full length movie limited only by imagination. The output quality keeps getting better quicker.
AI agents also drastically increase storage demands. Imagine financial companies using AI agents to search, scrape, organize data on stocks that they wouldn't have been able to do prior. Suddenly, disk storage and CPUs are in high demand for tasks like these.
I think the demand for computer hardware and networking gear is real and is only the beginning.
As someone who is into AI, hardware, and investing, I've been investing in physical businesses based on the above hypothesis. The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data.
[0]https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedance2_0
xnx|13 days ago
Sounds right
> there's no price that is too high for these supplies.
Are you saying even higher prices won't increase supply? I don't understand.
ghywertelling|14 days ago
bko|14 days ago
BoredPositron|14 days ago
Xunjin|14 days ago
0. https://youtu.be/fij_ixfjiZE
pier25|14 days ago
markus_zhang|14 days ago
What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer for us to use, in exchange of all of your data.
"Don't you all have cellphones?"
digiown|14 days ago
bachmeier|14 days ago
randusername|14 days ago
Once the phone makers realize that they can sell phones and docking stations to businesses because 90% of knowledge work seems to happen in a web browser through one SaaS or other I think personal computers will be cooked.
Ekaros|14 days ago
theragra|14 days ago
I probably will only need to return newest laptop if I leave the company.
tomasphan|14 days ago
manbash|14 days ago
nipperkinfeet|14 days ago
sincerely|14 days ago
robinwhg|14 days ago
I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.
mapt|14 days ago
tbrownaw|14 days ago
Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?
Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.
And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.
(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)
magarnicle|13 days ago
shimman|14 days ago
Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.
FireBeyond|13 days ago
And isn't it also in a seismically active region, also prone to eathquake and/or tsunami?
hearsathought|13 days ago
Stop getting your news from news.
> that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion.
Threat of invasion? Who would dare invade taiwan when it's protected by china?
> I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production
Then why bother commenting here?
> but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.
Ah, you have a political agenda.
BLKNSLVR|14 days ago
Is the profitability of these electronics manufacturers more likely than the companies that are buying up all their future inventory?
smashface|14 days ago
If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.
josefritzishere|14 days ago
55555|14 days ago
Ekaros|14 days ago
And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.
red75prime|14 days ago
jmclnx|14 days ago
I was toying with getting a 2T HDD for a BSD system I have, I guess not now :)
pixelesque|14 days ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...
danny_codes|13 days ago
numpad0|14 days ago
voidUpdate|14 days ago
GuB-42|14 days ago
As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism.
Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.
szszrk|14 days ago
The ones who spend billions on integrating public cloud LLM services are not the ones writing that function. They are managers who based on data pulled out of thin air say "your goal for this year is to increase productivity by X%. With AI, while staffing is going slightly down".
I have to watch AI generated avatars on the most boring topics imaginable, because the only "documentation" and link to actual answer is in a form of fake person talking. And this is encouraged!
Then the only measure of success is either AI services adoption (team count), or sales data.
That is the real tragedy and the real scale - big companies pushing (external!) AI services without even proof that it justifies the cost alone. Smooth talking around any other metric (or the lack of it).
cryptonector|13 days ago
So I'm getting tired of the argument that LLMs are "plagiarism machines" -- yes, they can be coaxed into repeating training material verbatim, but no, they don't do that unless you try.
Opus 4.6's C compiler? I've not looked at it, but I would bet it does not resemble GCC -- maybe some corners, but overall it must be new, and if the prompting was specific enough as to architecture and design then it might not resemble GCC or any other C compiler much at all.
Not only do LLMs mimic human thinking, but also they mimic human faults. Obviously one way in which they mimic human faults is that there are mistakes in the LLMs' training materials, so they will evince some imperfections, and even contradictions (since there will be contradictions in their training materials). Another way is that their context windows are limited, just like ours. I liken their hallucinations to crappy code written by a tired human at 3AM after a 20 hour day.
If they are so human-like, we really cannot ascribe their output to plagiarism except when prompted so as to plagiarize.
co_king_3|14 days ago
[deleted]
nickjj|14 days ago
6-7 years ago when GPU prices went up, I hoped nothing would break. Last year when RAM prices went up I did the same. Now with drive prices going up, it's the same thing.
It's interesting because I've always built mid-tier machines over the years and it was in the neighborhood of ~$700 at the time. Now the same thing is almost double that but the performance is no where near twice as good for general computer usage.
xienze|14 days ago
kotaKat|14 days ago
We're fucking doomed.
emsign|14 days ago
mnw21cam|14 days ago
Forgeties79|14 days ago
dgxyz|14 days ago
cmiles8|14 days ago
It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the moment is gigantic, and the markets are getting increasingly impatient waiting for the revenue to materialize.
Mark this post… in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market after folks pick up the pieces of imploded AI companies.
(For the record, I’m a huge fan of AI, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also think a giant business and financial bubble is about to implode).
doom2|14 days ago
COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.
infecto|14 days ago
> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.
That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.
1970-01-01|14 days ago
arbuge|14 days ago
One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...
Ekaros|14 days ago
On other hand if there is bigger economic turmoil that might mean that the postponed demand does not realise as there is no purchasing power...
bluGill|14 days ago
xpe|14 days ago
I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regulation, rate-adjustment, etc.
blurbleblurble|14 days ago
yndoendo|14 days ago
Market says the more you buy the better pricing you get. Once you start capturing large market share of the product, the price should go up and not down; exponentially.
Example, a person that owns 10 houses means that they are restricting the ability of others to own a single home. By increasing the cost of excessive product ownership ... it will reduce the amount of product that people will hoard and allow others to gain access to it.
Ajedi32|14 days ago
If you try to use government to force reality to conform to your idea of how things should work you're just going to get 1,000 companies buying 10,000 hard disks each rather than 10 companies buying 1,000,000 each. And if you try to outlaw that somehow then the market will just route around your new scheme in another way, creating even more unintended consequences in the process.
If you must meddle, you're much better off working with market forces rather than trying to fight against them.
estimator7292|14 days ago
Unfortunately, there are several such outlier entities which collectively control enough resources to price literally everyone else out.
e145bc455f1|14 days ago
I buy one hard disk, AI company busy 40% of global supply. Me not buying that one hard disk is not going to change anything.
>According to Western Digital, thanks to a surge in demand from its enterprise customers, the consumer market now accounts for just 5 percent of the company's revenue.
sieabahlpark|13 days ago
[deleted]
nutjob2|14 days ago
xiphias2|14 days ago
On the otherhand lots of people here are even more uncomfortable of the other option, which is quite possible: AI software algorithms may scale better than the capacity of companies that make the hardware. Personally I think hardware is the harder to scale from the two and this is just the beginning.
opengrass|13 days ago
jccc|14 days ago
The replacement arrived also in a paper bag and went straight back, this time for a refund.
I guess I should have kept that one and hoped for the best.
Good alternatives? I’ve only recently been enlightened on how profoundly sh__ty SSD is for long-term storage and I have a whole lot of images my parents took traveling the last few years of their lives.
literalAardvark|14 days ago
notpublic|14 days ago
aceelric|14 days ago
geye1234|13 days ago
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?
zozbot234|13 days ago
dennysora|13 days ago
_DeadFred_|13 days ago
zozbot234|13 days ago
cs02rm0|14 days ago
I'd have thought HDDs aren't at the top of the list for AI requirements, are other component manufacturers struggling even more to meet demand?
thephyber|14 days ago
If we weren’t talking about AI, was there another high demand sector / customer for spinning platters?
And their margins get fat now that supply is relatively constant but AI demand has saturated their current production numbers.
1970-01-01|14 days ago
saghm|14 days ago
minkeymaniac|14 days ago
ddtaylor|14 days ago
Forgeties79|14 days ago
layer8|14 days ago
ErneX|14 days ago
egypturnash|14 days ago
thanks, AI-boosting motherfuckers, thanks a lot
vaylian|14 days ago
nialv7|14 days ago
huijzer|14 days ago
zozbot234|14 days ago
hshdhdhj4444|14 days ago
So they’re unwilling to spend on increasing capacity because they don’t expect this demand to last.
shmerl|14 days ago
unknown|14 days ago
[deleted]
gck1|12 days ago
dClauzel|14 days ago
Yes, AI is nice, but I also like to be able to buy some RAM and drives…
Sharlin|14 days ago
m4rtink|14 days ago
Well, at least they might still have a product to sell once the AI bubble pops, unlike with NVIDIA which does seem to kinda forgot to design new consumer GPUs after getting high on AI money.
Sharlin|14 days ago
j45|14 days ago
unknown|14 days ago
[deleted]
Jyaif|14 days ago
jacquesm|14 days ago
antonyh|14 days ago
unknown|14 days ago
[deleted]
unknown|14 days ago
[deleted]
acheong08|13 days ago
tgrowazay|13 days ago
SkyeCA|13 days ago
I love modern world so much /s