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.
> companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can't afford tech at inflated tech
These big companies are competing with each other, and they're willing and able to spend much more for compute/RAM than we are.
> 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.
A few ideas:
* Use/develop/optimise local tooling
* Pool resources with friends/communities towards shared compute.
I hope prices drop sooner than projects dev tools all move to the cloud.
It's not all bad news: as tooling/builds move to the cloud, they'll become available to those that have thus far been unable or unwilling to afford a fast computer to be mostly idle.
This is a loss of autonomy for those who were able to afford such machines though.
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.