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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Nobody put "your computer isn't idle sometimes" as a problem, or shamed users for it.

What they did was to say "hey, we can leverage your idle computer to help process this".

Different perspective.

Nobody has shamed users for having unused compute, only stating that it is not economically optimal when there are global restrictions on a resource.

It can still be optimal because some activity A might provide more utility at 10% utilization rate than activity B at 100% utilization rate . Otherwise shared cars would be vastly superior to individual owned cars and same for houses in which 2 or 3 families live in different shifts ... we actually had that before in some areas in early stages of the industrialisation.

Users apparently don't need to be thought about at all if a few companies can secure loans large enough to purchase all dram capacity, and in the process close that market for consumers.

It seems to me it's economically optimal for inference providers to intentionally close markets that would allow local inference at all, even if that's bad for users as a whole.

If those companies can pay for those loans from the DRAM facilitated revenue then it will have been an efficient use of resources.

And if they're wrong, you'll be able to purchase second hand cheap data centre grade hardware in a couple of years and DRAM prices will return to normal.

If you, or I, or a company want hardware we can choose to pay market prices, but 4+ years of students will be robbed of the opportunity to tinker with a class of hardware that would have been beneficial unless they have extraordinary resources or an extraordinary support network.

There is opportunity theft here.

>If those companies can pay for those loans from the DRAM facilitated revenue then it will have been an efficient use of resources.

"Efficient use of resources" is not some absolute based on mere energy or economics calculations, it depends on the goal.

If the goal is "reduce reliance on big tech", "privacy", "autonomy", and so on, then the most efficient use of resources if to say fuck you to Big AI and not let them hoard ram and gpus.

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