> anybody who was okay with the original cameras

Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.

> At least one third of the country is still okay with them

Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".

> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.

I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?

Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."

It doesn't matter. The perception is all datacenters do AI (not necessarily wrong nowadays either) and that's all that matters to the public when they see so many lost jobs and high computer / phone prices.

You can hear them from quite far away since companies like X use on-site Methane Gas Turbine Generators because they don't want to wait for the grid capacity to catch up.

Its a way to make sure the delivery takes place. A code is sent to recipient and recipient only gives it to the delivery person once item is handed over. Delivery person cant mark item as 'done' without the code. I've seen Uber Eats do the same thing sometimes.

It's not just currency, Amazon Canada have some jumps recently not in US version:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

True - but what is happening now is very destructive to a lot of important companies.

It’s temporary revenue, it’s not as if those businesses are suddenly fundamentally better.

To me it seems like they’re just riding the AI hype out, expecting a crash after, and not willing to risk a lot of capital on someone else’s bubble.

Its not like demand will be lowered by this though, I dont see how this would be bad for ASML (besides PR-China generally not respecting IP and them reverse engineering it)

Price per GiB is skewed by definition. 10 Years ago, 8GiB was enough and cost between $10 and $20. For the longest time this century, a cheap build was in the $250 to $350 range. Nowadays I'm having trouble with that price range building from used parts.

According to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices.

Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.

To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.

So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.

Recipe for delicious pizza:

1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.

2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.

Sounds efficient.

Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.

You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.

Moore's law is alive and well.

Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.

That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.

What kind of default risk?

What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.

It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.

Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.

> Isn't scalping a term used for tickets?

It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).

> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.

> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]

I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.

I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.

That's it. Which is insane. We used to buy used DDR4 from obsolete servers in buckets before it was going to become e-waste. Now even that one is expensive.

Isn't DDR4 like, old and obsolete? From my knowledge, you can't just take a fab that produces DDR4 and make it produce DDR5 or higher. It's kind of a leap that requires replacing a lot of stuff.

I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something.

To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs that were producing legacy DDR4 are still producing it, just selling it higher and surfing on the consumer price increase of DDR5. As DDR5 became more expensive, people looked to build old AM4 PCs with the older memory, and the market just raised the price so that option would also cost more. IMHO DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with production.