You are not alone. I feel like the world is quickly giving in to LLMs and I’m one of the very rare holdouts. My nephews, my coworkers, my bosses… all of them use a mix of ChatGPT, Gemini, and/or Claude regularly. Hell, even my therapist tells me his wife uses ChatGPT for everything. I remember being worried when kids would immediately answer questions with some obnoxious response akin to “just Google it”. I wondered if abandoning the need to remember anything would impact development. Now they instantly go to a chatbot.

I’ve tried it a few times with difficult problems and always found hallucinations. If I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist, the LLM has always made up a convincing answer. It’s frightening how so many people trust it blindly.

I work in US Public Education and the adoption of AI in this space scares the living fuck out of me. I understand the argument: “Kids are using it, or are going to use it. We need to get out in front of it.” That’s fine. Find a provider that “promises” not to use student data. Protect PII. Great.

But some district admins are enthusiastically using it. I literally mentioned in conversation that I needed to check when something was due for the state and they immediately asked Gemini and assumed the answer was correct. Another one 100% uses it for letters summarizing student performance and freaks out when ChapGPT is down. I can only imagine how horrific it must be in the private sector where the goal is efficiency and profit over everything.

This shit needs to pop, and fast.

Golden.

Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.

“This creates a concerning cycle,” Littrell said. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop. Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”

And yet, they did it, very quickly, and will do so again when the market shifts again.

These aren’t typical conditions. There is a world of difference between “Yo, here is a truckload of money. Give me all your RAM for the next two years!” (AI right now) and “We need to align our capacity to the current needs of the market in order to not flood the market with product we can’t sell.” (normal conditions).

Look at the memory market before this AI shitshow. It’s cyclical as the fabs try to match demand without flooding the market. It typically takes several quarters to ramp capacity up and down, causing shortages and then oversaturating the market because they can’t do it fast enough. Returning to that kind of production is also likely to be more difficult than it would otherwise be to adjust while already in it. There are so many unknowns in this wild situation. How much DRAM should they commit to making?

Anyway, I’m not even a business person so what the fuck do I know. I’m getting tired of this conversation. It would be great to be optimistic, but that’s not something I’m capable of right now. Best of luck. I hope it pops and prices plummet.

Please indicate the point at which we no longer agree.

• The price of consumer hardware, like RAM and SSDs, is high right now.

• Supply for consumer hardware is low right now.

• The reason that the price of consumer hardware is high right now is because supply is low.

• The reason this supply is low is because manufacturing capacity that used to be committed to consumer variants of this hardware has been converted to manufacturing datacenter variants of this hardware.

• The reason for the manufacturing shift is that, because of the AI bubble, demand for datacenter hardware is high.

• It takes time and money to convert manufacturing capacity between consumer hardware to datacenter hardware.

• This conversion also includes changing investment, R&D, and employment priorities. Companies like Micron (one of the three major/noteworthy memory suppliers in the world) have cut/gutted their B2C divisions to focus their resources entirely on the more profitable datacenter B2B efforts.

• Datacenter variants of this hardware are substantially different than consumer variants and are not interchangeable.

• Higher prices, slimmer margins, and lower sales have caused some consumer electronics businesses to cut back, focus on narrower market segments, pivot to other markets, or exit the market entirely.

If we agree on all of the above, I’m not sure why you are confused.

If the bubble pops today, it very well may cause demand for datacenter hardware to crater, assuming they don’t get creative and find a way to pivot hard toward other SaaS somehow. Since the parts are not at all compatible with consumer electronics, this would not provide an instant increase in consumer hardware supply nor would it crater consumer hardware demand.

If the crash is bad enough, some of the businesses that pivoted to B2B/datacenter hardware may fail or have to be bailed out by their governments. Even if they all survived, fewer consumer product businesses exist in the market to sell to consumers and they have fewer product lines in development. Companies like Micron, who abandoned their established brands and/or relationships with resellers or partners that would use their parts in consumer products, will need to rebuild those things. Manufacturing would need to be converted, updated to the latest consumer hardware needs, taking more time and money.

It would take quite a while to rebuild consumer hardware supply. Without that supply, demand will not be met and prices will be high.

My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved now that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.

Why would it be immediate? Where is the new supply coming from to alleviate the demand?

I feel like you didn’t read what I wrote. If the bubble pops today, how long do you think it will take for prices to drop?

…why would it need to be?

It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.

The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.

The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.

Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.

Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.

I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.

But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.

Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.

I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.

Allegedly an incorrect rumor.

Windows Central

Do you know of a reputable list of decent companies I can look for in the US as a leftist? I am kind of feeling like a doomer these days.

I’ve ranted about it before but I feel like every organization is awful or is on the precipice of either becoming awful or being acquired/obliterated by an awful competitor.

Most times I’ve recently needed something I’ve felt like literally every option of company was terrible and I don’t have the energy for it anymore.

As I recall, they were actually naked and didn’t feel the need to cover themselves until after eating from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”.

Thanks to that stupid fucking story and all the others, many cultures heavily influenced by Christian mythology feel the need to add those leaves because they can’t handle nudity.

Fucking LOL. https://www.idmerit.com/blog/idmerits-data-breach-fail-safe-architecture-game-changer/

Depending on the lore, running water can also stop vampires… though I suspect a squirt gun would not count. Though it could be blessed/holy water in the squirt gun…

They’ve changed their tactics in that they are becoming even more hostile to observers, protestors, and organizers. They are pressuring social media companies to hand over information about anti-ICE organizing and posters. They’re confiscating phones and cameras when they encounter them. Clearly, they are making a show of arresting journalists like Don Lemon. It is continuing to ramp up, but it is more distributed so that it harder to find and record.

Performative opposition party. Still need that donor money. And issues and quotes for Mothership campaigns.

The Republicans are rewriting history. I’m tired of Trump being treated like a special case. He’s been aided and directed by the entire GOP and their Christo-Fascist circle (Heritage and the rest of their like). When the bastard finally succumbs to whatever degeneration he’s suffering from, the country can’t just pretend like the fight is over. He’s just the face of this monstrosity that is trying to destroy America and rebuild it as their perfect playground.

Communism, socialism, and the theoretically fairer alternatives I speak of have a number of possible implementations and, for the reasons I mentioned above, virtually no untainted historical examples for us to cleanly learn from. Every time someone takes a crack at it, the circumstances are unique and the powers looking to sabotage the system or seize it for themselves are different. It usually gets dismantled or becomes so corrupted as to be nothing more than another attempt.

I know nothing about what happened in Egypt and I’m commenting solely on my general knowledge and the words you have provided me.

The president back then decided to take a big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.

When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.

So the farmers had no assistance and no plan to implement this massive change? Land was just taken from a large owner and haphazardly distributed to poor farmers?

While I don’t doubt that the loss of productivity has had a detrimental effect and caused harm, how were conditions for the laborers and those in poverty before this happened, when “productivity” was great? I’m not sure what the greater “good” conditions would be since I’m not familiar with the situation, the region, or its struggles. It is just notable that your description focuses on productivity.

Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.

Nationalized tends to mean state ownership rather than distributed or worker ownership. Who were the factories “given to” and what does that mean? Again, was there a plan or were they just seized and handed off without serious consideration for how they should be managed and maintained?

Perhaps there is a reason I’ve never heard of the Egyptian communism you speak of. It sounds like it was not implemented with any kind of long term plan and, unsurprisingly, didn’t achieve very much. Or it might just be that it received little attention because it wasn’t a country of “white” people.

What shakes me to my core is that any attempt to establish a fair system is immediately bombarded by countless external and internal malicious actors looking to either exploit any loophole they can find for their own benefit or sabotage the system to prevent it from gaining any traction because it threatens their power.

I don’t think capitalism or any of the similarly exploitative systems that came before it are superior solutions to proposed fairer alternatives, but the wealth disparity they have created and the perverse incentive structure they push on society leave us ill equipped to transition away from them. Right now, our economies are all so interconnected and interdependent that it’s impossible to exist outside of the influence of capitalism or it’s awful predecessors.