> Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music?

If X composes something, X is an artist. The person playing a composed work is a performer. Some people have both the roles of artist and performer for a given work.

To say an AI composes something is anthropomorphizing a computer. If you enter a prompt to make a machine generate work based on existing artists' art, you're not composing (in the artistic sense) and neither is the computer. Math isn't art even if it's pretty or if mathematical concepts are used in art.

The term "director" instead of composer or artist conveys what's happening a lot better with telling machines to generate art via prompts.

I'm not against AI art per se, but at least so far, most “AI artists” I see online seem to care very little about the artistry of what they’re doing, and much much more about selling their stuff.

Among the traditional artists I follow, maybe 1 out of 10 posts is directly about selling something. With AI artists, it’s more like 9 out of 10.

It might take a while for all the grifters to realize that making a living from creative work is very hard before more genuinely interesting AI art starts to surface eventually. I started following a few because I liked an image that showed up in my feed, but quickly unfollowed after being hit with a daily barrage of NFT promotions.

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong.

Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.

> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography.

Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"

Keyboards have had functions that let them play music at the touch of button for decades.

Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician.

>actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art.

writing a prompt lol

We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world.

But hey think about how much money you could save on a wedding photographer if you just generate a few images of what the wedding probably looked like!

THING IN PAST SIMILAR MUST BE SAME THING

you enjoy your industrial effluent, I'm gonna stick to human artists making art

Face-to-face social gatherings - parties, dinners, clubs, meetups

Membership organizations - country clubs, professional associations, alumni networks, charitable boards

Personal introductions and referrals - being introduced through mutual acquaintances

Cultural and civic participation - involvement in local institutions, community organizations, religious groups

The weird thing is that the AI companies themselves are hiring like there's no tomorrow, doing talent aquisitions etc. Why would you do that if the purpose of your product is to reduce necessary workforce?

Why isn't that the first question that comes to mind for a journalist covering the latest acquisition? It's like an open secret that nobody really talks about.

It's always about cutting the OpEx spend. Companies are nothing more than giant piles of money seeking to grow themselves in any way possible.

> A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation

You mean like Sam Altman, who repeatedly claimed AI will cure all cancers and diseases, solve the housing crisis, poverty, and democracy? I was going to add erectile disfunction as a joke, but then realised he probably believes that too.

https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60

It’s hard to point fingers at “AI influencers”, as if they’re a fringe group, when the guy who’s the face of the whole AI movement is the one making the wild claims.

> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two.

I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on.

Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream.

Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income.

Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work.

Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone.

All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet.

But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.

> Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider.

Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?

I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy

I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.

We are now moving to a post human economy. When AGI automates all human labour, the consumer i.e. the bulk of humanity stops mattering (economically speaking). It then just becomes Mega corps run by machines making stuff for each other. Resources are then strictly priorities for the machines over everything else. We are seeing this movement already with silicon wafers and electricity.

Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.

Yes. Like theft.

It going to be misleading to look at the fraction and I think it's misleading to only look at PE investors. It's more important to look at the fraction of demand for homes that are on the market.

Investors bought 1/3 of the US homes sold in 2023. This is, I think, quite alarming, especially since a small amount of extra demand can have a large effect on prices.

Of the housing market? That seems to be what GP said, doesn’t it?

They create demand which increases price. Plus they can afford to hold their asset longer, this reducing supply.

I think one of these fab compaies have already invested/talked about investing 700 BILLION dollars (I think it was micron? but I am not sure)

I have heard that in the fab making industry, things moves in cycles and this cycle has been repeated so many times and the reason that ram is so expensive was that at one time during covid there was shortage so they built more factories and they built so so many that these companies took a hit in stocks so they then went and closed and at just the bottom of their factory production levels, the AI bubble started to pop in and need their ram's and now they are once again increasing factory levels

And after the supply due to AI gets closed with the additional compute etc., I doubt it

I think that within 2-3 or maybe 4 years of timeframe ram will get cheaper imo.

The problem is, if someone can fill the market till that time.

And they never went down to pre-crypto pricing. For quite a while, Intel was the only company producing reasonably specced GPUs at somewhat reasonable prices.

They decreased 2025 production, to increase memory prices, profits and their stock prices,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776

Someone, I can't remember who, explained it better than me, but the gist of it is by not voting, you are effectively checking yourself out of politician consideration.

If we see politician as just a machine who's only job is to get elected, they have to get as many votes as possible. Pandering to the individual is unrealistic, so you usually target groups of people who share some common interest. As your aim is to get as many votes as possible, you will want to target the “bigger” (in amount of potential vote) groups. Then it is a game of trying to get the bigger groups which don't have conflicting interest. While this is theory and a simplification of reality, all decent political party do absolutely look at statistics and survey to for a strategy for the election.

If you are part of a group that, even though might be big in population, doesn't vote, politician have no reason to try to pander to you. As a concrete example, in a lot of “western” country right now, a lot of politician elected are almost completely ignoring the youth. Why ? Because in those same country the youth is the age group which vote the less.

So by not voting, you are making absolutely sure that your interest won't be defended. You can argue that once elected, you have no guarantee that the politician will actually defend your interest, or even do the opposite (as an example, soybean farmer and trump in the U.S). But then you won't be satisfied and possibly not vote for the same guy / party next election (which is what a lot of swing voters do).

But yeah, in an ideal world, everyone would vote, see through communication tactics and actually study the party, program and the candidate they vote for, before voting.

I don't have a stake in forcing people to vote or not, because I generally agree that uninformed people shouldn't be pressured to make a last minute decision if they don't want to. I think everyone knows elections are at their least honest days before the vote.

But to engage with your question, not voting is the same as voting. You are forgoing your voice and giving more weight to the people that do vote. It's limited to your district, yes, but whatever the outcome, you gave the majority power to do that. So it's not surprising that people get frustrated when non-voters see themselves as "outside" of politics, especially when they complain about the state of things.

Just so we're double clear, the other voter base says this is exactly how it should be, using with different words.

All the ills of modern (American) politics stem by the blaming one side for the problems caused by both.

Just so we're clear, the voter base of over a year ago asked for this because they were actively lied to, and were foolish enough to believe said lies.

Current polling however says the current voter base is quite unhappy with how this is

Those are all temporary events and circumstances.

If the market is big enough, competitors will appear. And if the margins are high enough, competitors can always price-compete down to capture market-share.

> Crucial is dead.

Micron stopped selling to consumers to focus on the high margin enteprise market. Might change in the future.

The business that owns crucial is producing more chips than ever.

Rare earth metals are in the dirt around the world.

Supply and demand curves shifting, hence prices increasing (and decreasing) is an expected part of life due to the inability to see the future.

It's not even the economical theory. Supply should not increase to increased demand. They want more profit, and if less supplies is what accomplishes that, they will absolutely keep the supplies constant and manufacture a scarcity. This is the economical theory.

You are wrong. Memory production is being expanded in 2026 and will expand further in 2027 and 2028 as the memory suppliers catch up on fab shell capacity.

This is exactly it: supply of high margin products is increasing at the cost of low margin products. Expect the low end margin to catch up to the high end as long as manufacturing capacity is constrained (at least 1 year).

They aren't making less though.

No just stop being cynical. The reason almost every electronic item is cheaper now than 2 decades back is just becuase the demand(and thus supply) is higher.

Am not talking about LLMs this is like making an argument about DC power. I am talking about inventing intelligence which is greater even than fire.

Dedicated GPUs in gaming laptops are a necessity for the IT industry, as it forces manufacturers, assemblers and software makers to be more creative and ambitious with power draw and graphics software, and better optimal usage of available hardware resources (e.g., better battery and different performance modes to compensate for the higher power consumption due to the GPU; so a low-power mode enabled by casual user will disable the dedicated GPU and make the OS and apps dependent on the integrated GPU instead, but same/another user using same PC can switch to dedicated GPU when playing a game or doing VFX or modeling).

Without dedicated GPUs, we consumers will get only weaker hardware, slower software and the slow death of graphics software market. See the fate of Chromebooks market segment - it is almost dead, and ChromeOS itself got abandoned.

Meanwhile, the same Google which made ChromeOS as a fresh alternative OS to Windows, Mac and Linux, is trying to gobble the AI market. And the AI race is on.

And the result of all this AI focus and veering away from dedicated GPUs (even by market leader nVidia, which is no longer having GPUs as a priority) is not only the skyrocketing price hikes in hardware components, but also other side effects. e.g., new laptops are being launched with NPUs which are good for AI but bad for gaming and VFX/CAD-CAM work, yet they cost a bomb, and the result is that budget laptop market segment has suffered - new budget laptops have just 8GB RAM, 250GB/500GB SSD, and poor CPU, and such weak hardware, so even basic software (MS Office) struggles on such laptops. And yet even such poor laptops are having a higher cost these days. This kind of deliberate market crippling affects hundreds of millions of students and middle class customers who need affordable yet decent performance PCs.

For me it's a necessity to run the software I need to do my work (CAD design)

Same here... I do not wish for a laptop with >65W USB-C power requirements.

Yea I agree it's not worth it to have a igpu a dedicated. If I'm correct in what you are talking about. There's always issues with that setup in laptops. But I'd stay away from all laptops at this point until we get an Adminstration that enforces anti trust. All manufactures have been cutting so many corners, your likely to have hardware problems within a year unless it's a MacBook or a business class laptop.

Low end gaming ia 2d indie titles and they now run on toasters.

All the popular mass matket games work on iGPU: fortnite, roblox, mmos, arena shooters, battlen royales. Good chunk of cross platform console titles also work just fine.

You can play Cyberpunk or BG3 on damn Steam Deck. I wont call this low end.

Number of games that dont run to some extent without dGPU is limited to heavy AAA titles and niche PC only genres.

No Ryzen 5 system should have any trouble playing YouTube videos, there must have been something wrong with your system.

Thats a problem with youtube not your gpu!

What processor are we talking about?

Your experience is extremely weird

> RAM and SSDs both use NAND flash and are equally affected by wafer hoarding, strategic supply reductions and market price manipulation.

Why on earth you think RAM uses NAND flash ?

You can impose CPU restrictions in Windows 10 or 11 too...

You can limit CPU usage for a program in Windows by adjusting the "Maximum processor state" in the power options to a lower percentage, such as 80%. Additionally, you can set the program's CPU affinity in Task Manager. Please note this will only affect the process scheduling.

You can also use a free tool like Process Lasso or BES to limit the CPU for a Windows application. You can use a free tools like HWInfo, SysInternals (ProcMon, SysMom, ProcDump) to monitor and check for CPU usage, especially to investigate CPU spikes caused by rogue (malware or poor performance) apps.

Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.

I was being lazy, but optimized I guess I could get down to 4GB of ram.

More like 128MB.

512MB in 2000 was like HEDT level (though I'm not sure that acronym existed back then)

Eh? As I see it, we've got options.

Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required

Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past.

Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one where the Ballchinians are friendly)

---

To evaluate these in no particular order:

Option B doesn't sound very fruitful. I mean: It can be fun to wish, but magical thinking doesn't usually get very far.

Option C sounds fun, but my time-bender got roached after the last jump and the version of Costco we have here doesn't sell them. (Maybe someone else has a working one, but they seem to be pretty rare here.)

That leaves option A: Optimize the software once, and duplicate that optimized software to whomever it is useful using that "Internet" thing that the cool kids were talking about back in the 1980s.

> I think root comment is looking at the overall picture of what all customers can get for their money, and see it getting worse.

A $999 MacBook Air today is vastly better than the same $999 MacBook Air 5 years ago (and even more so once you count inflation).

Ah that makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

This is it. Buy used Dell and HP hardware with 32 GB of RAM and swap the pcie ssd for 4 TB.

Exclusively using a ever dwindling stock of old hardware is not really a practical solution to preserving hardware rights in the long term

Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended? Capital is gonna pour into memory fabrication over the next year or two, and there will probably be a glut 2-3 years from now, followed by retrenchment and wails that innovation has come to a halt because demand has stalled.

If "performant" devices are not widespread then telemetry will reveal that the app is performing poorly for most users. If a new festure uses more memory and sugnificantly increases the crash rate, it will be disabled.

Apps are optimized for the install base, not for the engineer's own hardware.

Can confirm, I'm currently requesting as much RAM as can fit in the chassis and permission to install an OS not too divorced from what we run in prod.

On the bright side, I'm not responsible for the UI abominations people seem to complain about WRT laptop specs.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

> a significant part of the world is already running lower powered devices

but you cannot consider this in isolation.

The developed markets have vastly higher spending consumers, which means companies cater to those higher spending customers proportionately more (as profits demand it). Therefore, the implication is that lower spending markets gets less investment and less catered to; after all, R&D spending is still a limiting factor.

If the entirety of the market is running on lower powered devices, then it would get catered for - because there'd be no (or not enough) customers with high powered devices to profit off.

It has also made it easier than ever to build native applications that use the os provided toolkits and avoid adding a complete web-tech stack to everything.

> dropping the expensive things that are less understood

If "old" devices outperform new devices, consumers will gain new understanding from efficient market feedback, influencing purchase decisions and demand for "new" devices.

RAMageddon is here.. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates

Summary: * Massive spikes: Consumer RAM prices have skyrocketed due to a tight supply. Major PC companies have issued warnings of price hikes, with CyberPowerPC stating: "global memory (RAM) prices have surged by 500% and SSD prices have risen by 100%."

* All for AI: The push for increased cloud computing, as seen in the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini, means more data centers are needed, which in turn requires High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Manufacturers like SK Hynix and Micron are now shifting priorities to make HBM instead of PC RAM.

* Limited supply: Companies are now buying up stock of all the remaining supply of standard DRAM chips, leaving crumbs for the consumer market and price hikes for the limited supply there is.

Good luck expecting "value for money" from this "efficient" market.

> The ones that aren't embedded in someway and use industrial grade PCs/control stations? Or ones with large buffers like network routers?

Not sure if they require DDR5 but the AI crisis just caused the prices of DDR5 to rise but the market supply of DDR4 thus grew and that's why they got more expensive too

> I'm also wondering about the supply of the alternate nodes and older technologies.

I suppose these might be chinese companies but there might be some european/american companies (not sure) but if things continue, there is gonna be a strain on them in demand and they might increase their prices too

> Was it micron that abandoned the entire retail market in favor of supplying the hyperscalers?

Yes

So how many GB in total for a Tesla, or say a VW EV? Something like 16-32 GB? Is that not roughly like a $1k phone?

What will probably happen is that the reselling market/2nd market of these might probably rise

> will the DRAM manufactures even keep those nodes running in favor of these industries?

Some will, Some might not, In my opinion, the longevity of these brands will only depend if they allow buying ram for the average person/consumer brands so I guess we might see new competition perhaps or give more marketshare to all the other fab companies beyond the main three of these industries.

I am sure that some company will 100% align with the consumers but the problem to me feels that they wouldn't be able to supply enough production to consumers in the first place so prices still might rise.

And those prices most likely will be paid by you in one form or another but it would be interesting to see how long the companies who buy dram from these providers or build datacenters or anything ram intensive will hold their price up, perhaps they might eat the loss short term similar to what we saw some companies do during trump tarrifs.

Longer contracts are riskier. The benefit of having cheaper RAM when prices spike is not strong enough to outweigh the downside of paying too much for RAM when prices drop or stay the same. If you’re paying a perpetual premium on the spot price to hedge, then your competitors will have pricing power over you and will slowly drive you out of the market. The payoff when the market turns in your favor just won’t be big enough and you might not survive as a business long enough to see it. There’s also counterparty risk, if you hit a big enough jackpot your upside is capped by what would make the supplier insolvent.

All your competitors are in the same boat, so consumers won’t have options. It’s much better to minimize the risk of blowing up by sticking as closely to spot at possible. That’s the whole idea of lean. Consumers and governments were mad about supply chains during the pandemic, but companies survived because they were lean.

In a sense this is the opposite risk profile of futures contracts in trading/portfolio management, even though they share some superficial similarities. Manufacturing businesses are fundamentally different from trading.

They certainly have contracts in place that cover goods already sold. They do a ton of preorders which is great since they get paid before they have to pay their suppliers. Just like airlines trade energy futures because they’ve sold the tickets long before they have to buy the jet fuel.

If you’re Apple, maybe that works, in this case we’re seeing 400% increases in price, instead of your RAM you’ll be delivered a note to pay up or you’ll get your money back with interest and termination fees and the supplier is still net positive.

> longer contracts

the risk is that such longer contracts would then lock you into a higher cost component for longer, if the price drops. Longer contracts only look good in hindsight if ram prices increased (unexpectedly).

Are your two chips in Framework Desktops, or some other package? I'm interested in a unified memory setup and curious about the options.

At the cost of reduced margins, which shareholders may not like.

Non-AMP link:

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ram-shortage...

Yes, but OpenAI wants $200 billion in RAM and Apple wants $10.

Where have you seen 4 GB cut it in the last decade? 2 GB was enough to make Vista chug in 2007?

I've got old linux boxes that feel fine with a couple gig of DDR3, but can't think of a place where that would be acceptable outside of that.

Yea I think the same too. China is notorious for price dumping but this might be good for the end consumer.

Best of luck with your folksy mom & pop DRAM factory.