sure, collapse is inevitable, alright

how does one prepare for the moment it actually happens? what would it look like?

what were the immediate consequences of dotcom for the normal folk?

$250 angle grinder

He didn't say it's a working kit.

My health insurance company recently rolled out a major revamp of their website, and it now uses GiB as if they were KiB.

At my knitting group last night one of the conversation topics was how everyone's computer feels really unstable these days. One person stopped volunteering at a local charity because, after a recent website rewrite, she has too much trouble with the page locking up when she's trying to sign up for hours.

Last weekend I got talking to another parent at my kid's gymnastics class about how her computer's really struggling since they rolled out some "modernization" rewrites of internal business applications, and it's making it hard to get her work done.

What I'm getting at is, if we do have to get used to memory being more expensive, that might be very disruptive. Programmers will have to do a major about-face on how they've been writing software in the post-AI era.

It's about 1TiB of HBM going into a GPU server eating about 3TiB of DDR that could have gone to consumer electronics.

Doesn’t seem like it was coming at a high speed if it took decades to manifest.

How so? Memory bandwidth and capacity has been steadily increasing. On desktop for example, 10 years ago an i7-5960X was the absolute top of the line and it had a limit of 64GB, with most motherboards in practice being limited to 32-48GB, and this was an unthinkable amount of RAM at the time for desktop. Now the top end desktop chips support 192-256GB, and a year ago (before the RAM price spike) you could realistically buy that much if you wanted for a reasonable price.

Not sure I buy that? There's a hardware/process argument that DRAM scaling is hitting a wall (for largely the same reason that logic scaling is, even though the fabs are different).

But DRAM has always been almost completely dominated by consumer device needs, and consumer requirements leveled off hard maybe a decade ago. Once you had a 4G system, things were mostly OK. Pervasive VM use and general bloat pushed that up by maybe a factor of two or three since, but that's it.

AI is different. It wants that capacity for different reasons and puts it in different places. And almost none of us really saw that coming more than ~18 months ago or so. Certainly not to the extend that you'd conclude "we've been ignoring it".

Or possibly more likely get the Chinese manufacturers labeled as some kind of national security threat and forbid importing their products.

This is not a very useful comment

> I have this wild theory that this has not just todo with AI but with weapons production overall.

Why? Weapons are low-volume compared to commercial products, and they probably use trailing edge or weird bespoke components.

I was digging around the other day, and at least the initial versions of the Tomahawk cruise missile had the computing power of an original IBM PC. That just shows how little computing power is needed for a lot of advanced weapons capabilities.