Positive downstream effect: The way software is built will need to be rethought and improved to utilize efficiencies for stagnating hardware compute. Think of how staggering the step from the start of a console generation to the end used to be. Native-compiled languages have made bounding leaps that might be worth pursuing again.

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yooogurt a day ago | parent | next [-]

Alternatively, we'll see a drop in deployment diversity, with more and more functionality shifted to centralised providers that have economies of scale and the resources to optimise.

E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop.

If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable.

Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.

	▲	linguae 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’d feel better about the RAM price spikes if they were caused by a natural disaster and not by Sam Altman buying up 40% of the raw wafer supply, other Big Tech companies buying up RAM, and the RAM oligopoly situation restricting supply. This will only serve to increase the power of big players who can afford higher component prices (and who, thanks to their oligopoly status, can effectively set the market price for everyone else), while individuals and smaller institutions are forced to either spend more or work with less computing resources. The optimistic take is that this will force software vendors into shipping more efficient software, but I also agree with this pessimistic take, that companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can’t afford tech at inflated prices. I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.

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piskov a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some Soviet humor will help you understand the true course of events:

A dad comes home and tells his kid, “Hey, vodka’s more expensive now.” “So you’re gonna drink less?” “Nope. You’re gonna eat less.”

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ip26 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have some hope for transpiling to become more commonplace. What would happen if you could write in Python, but trivially transpile to C++ and back?