Finally or unfortunately? We (customers, hackers) get further and further from owning hardware and running software on our terms.

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RajT88 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

In a few years when all these rack servers are outdated for AI workloads, there will be a glut in the market of cheap only-slightly-dated servers.

My JellyFin setup in 5 years is going to be fucking awesome.

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ivanjermakov 6 days ago | parent [-]

Same, after getting into homelabbing, "post-lease" became my favorite word.

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rbanffy 6 days ago | parent [-]

When this bubble bursts, we'll have a lot of number crunching capability being sold for peanuts.

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bee_rider 6 days ago | parent [-]

Using these tiny floats for classic engineering workloads—if I were starting gradschool right now, that’s definitely what I’d look at. Mixed precision numerical algorithms are already a topic, but with the hardware glut there’ll definitely be room to push things.

So it’s in a nice spot where there’s some scaffolding, but it isn’t totally done, and the hardware is probably going to make things possible.

	▲	rbanffy 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Using these tiny floats for classic engineering workloads I think that's the idea. Back in the stone age, I did that with Apple II floats (40-bits) because I was hitting quantization problems in a Mandelbrot explorer program I wrote. Wrapping my head around it in BASIC was hard. You can only go so far when your abstraction level is that low.

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rbanffy 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are still selling desktops, laptops, and ordinary servers (and some quite extraordinary ones). It's just that their AI systems are selling like hot cakes.

Which is more or less everyone's AI systems. The appetite for AI training and inference seems to be exploding. My best guess is that it'll be like the dot-com bubble, but this time we'll get cheap Nvidia DGX rack machines being sold by asset recovery services.

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citizenpaul 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Looks like Jaron Lanier's predictions about servers being the new form of power are coming true. Companies are predictably moving to remove the power from the hands of their chattel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F