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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

I would happily give up on the entire AI industry in exchange for more affordable hardware. No hesitation. The worldwide inflation resulting from the AI rollout is shameful to say it politely

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I've thought a lot about that actually. I have a number of hardware purchases I'd like to make but I'm delaying due to the insane prices. That said, would I give up LLMs for the prior prices? No. Prices will come down eventually once more factories come online (it's just slow to bring up a new factory/fab, especially for RAM) and LLMs are such an awesome tool that I'll take the short-term pain of higher hardware.

That’s if you’re considering your personal situation. The increase in hardware is impacting every single institution that needs computers. Smaller hardware companies with low margins cannot operate in the current situation. That means less consumer choices, new projects delayed or cancelled. The impact on less developed countries is of course exacerbated. Hospitals, schools, government agencies are getting less for the same level of spending. And of course that results in worst services, worst infrastructure, more expensive services and goods

Luckily absolute performance still exists, it's just that we've normalized shipping less efficient software slopped out because there'll probably be new silicon in a few years so it doesn't matter.

Commodity hardware is plenty powerful and can be taken advantage of should prices signal efficiency is important again.

Maybe institutions and companies are gonna have to get smarter at making use of stuff that they have instead of just churning thru hardware. It's hard to see it being sustainable anyway to be constantly turning over hardware every few years if not yearly. In a way, this chilling of consumerism is kinda neat.

Yeah my 2006 core 2 duo running linux was more productive than any corporate Windows laptop I have ever used.

This is due to 20 versions of enterprise spyware running in the background + Windows being garbage.

But it is impacting everything. Even the new Sony RX camera has a slower sensor readout from the years old model simply because they can't get hold of the DRAM.

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