I have somewhat similar concerns. I’m not as worried about sanitized Linux as I am about new mandates entrenching Microsoft, Apple, and Google as the only valid options. Even it it is an enormous pain in the ass for everyone, including those big three, it would infinitely preferably for them to more widespread adoption of alternatives.

Just propose solutions/mandates that are fundamentally incompatible with GPL and FOSS ideals, or deeply contentious within open source communities and you can do irreparable damage to the growth of Linux and any space that needs to adapt to those new mandates. Linux moving into education? Pretend it is needed to protect the children. Linux moving into government? Pretend it’s needed to protect security or efficiency. Linux moving into the workplace? Pretend it’s needed to protect AI or liability or synergy or whatever the fuck gets CEO dicks hard these days. BAM - Linux gets hit with massive internal strife and splitting of vital communities and resources. I know it was already absurdly contentious before, but seeing what happened when storing a users age hit systemd really worried me.

I think it’s already been kind of ongoing by co-opting or even creating “open source initiatives” from the business world who ultimately just jump in when things look mature and rapidly implement profit extraction and enshittification.

And yet, they did it, very quickly, and will do so again when the market shifts again.

These aren’t typical conditions. There is a world of difference between “Yo, here is a truckload of money. Give me all your RAM for the next two years!” (AI right now) and “We need to align our capacity to the current needs of the market in order to not flood the market with product we can’t sell.” (normal conditions).

Look at the memory market before this AI shitshow. It’s cyclical as the fabs try to match demand without flooding the market. It typically takes several quarters to ramp capacity up and down, causing shortages and then oversaturating the market because they can’t do it fast enough. Returning to that kind of production is also likely to be more difficult than it would otherwise be to adjust while already in it. There are so many unknowns in this wild situation. How much DRAM should they commit to making?

Anyway, I’m not even a business person so what the fuck do I know. I’m getting tired of this conversation. It would be great to be optimistic, but that’s not something I’m capable of right now. Best of luck. I hope it pops and prices plummet.

Please indicate the point at which we no longer agree.

• The price of consumer hardware, like RAM and SSDs, is high right now.

• Supply for consumer hardware is low right now.

• The reason that the price of consumer hardware is high right now is because supply is low.

• The reason this supply is low is because manufacturing capacity that used to be committed to consumer variants of this hardware has been converted to manufacturing datacenter variants of this hardware.

• The reason for the manufacturing shift is that, because of the AI bubble, demand for datacenter hardware is high.

• It takes time and money to convert manufacturing capacity between consumer hardware to datacenter hardware.

• This conversion also includes changing investment, R&D, and employment priorities. Companies like Micron (one of the three major/noteworthy memory suppliers in the world) have cut/gutted their B2C divisions to focus their resources entirely on the more profitable datacenter B2B efforts.

• Datacenter variants of this hardware are substantially different than consumer variants and are not interchangeable.

• Higher prices, slimmer margins, and lower sales have caused some consumer electronics businesses to cut back, focus on narrower market segments, pivot to other markets, or exit the market entirely.

If we agree on all of the above, I’m not sure why you are confused.

If the bubble pops today, it very well may cause demand for datacenter hardware to crater, assuming they don’t get creative and find a way to pivot hard toward other SaaS somehow. Since the parts are not at all compatible with consumer electronics, this would not provide an instant increase in consumer hardware supply nor would it crater consumer hardware demand.

If the crash is bad enough, some of the businesses that pivoted to B2B/datacenter hardware may fail or have to be bailed out by their governments. Even if they all survived, fewer consumer product businesses exist in the market to sell to consumers and they have fewer product lines in development. Companies like Micron, who abandoned their established brands and/or relationships with resellers or partners that would use their parts in consumer products, will need to rebuild those things. Manufacturing would need to be converted, updated to the latest consumer hardware needs, taking more time and money.

It would take quite a while to rebuild consumer hardware supply. Without that supply, demand will not be met and prices will be high.

My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved now that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.

Why would it be immediate? Where is the new supply coming from to alleviate the demand?

I feel like you didn’t read what I wrote. If the bubble pops today, how long do you think it will take for prices to drop?

…why would it need to be?

It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.

The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.

The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.

Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.

Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.

I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.

But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.

Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.

I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.

As I recall, they were actually naked and didn’t feel the need to cover themselves until after eating from the “tree of knowledge of good and evil”.

Thanks to that stupid fucking story and all the others, many cultures heavily influenced by Christian mythology feel the need to add those leaves because they can’t handle nudity.

Depending on the lore, running water can also stop vampires… though I suspect a squirt gun would not count. Though it could be blessed/holy water in the squirt gun…

Communism, socialism, and the theoretically fairer alternatives I speak of have a number of possible implementations and, for the reasons I mentioned above, virtually no untainted historical examples for us to cleanly learn from. Every time someone takes a crack at it, the circumstances are unique and the powers looking to sabotage the system or seize it for themselves are different. It usually gets dismantled or becomes so corrupted as to be nothing more than another attempt.

I know nothing about what happened in Egypt and I’m commenting solely on my general knowledge and the words you have provided me.

The president back then decided to take a big chunk of land from the ultra rich and divide it among the farmers. Factories were nationalized, big chains and businesses were taken away.

When a land lord owned vast amount of land, he had enough money to buy most advanced equipments and most talented and experienced engineers in agriculture but when the land got divided among many poor farmers, they couldn’t afford any of that and productivity went down fast and the effect is lasting until now.

So the farmers had no assistance and no plan to implement this massive change? Land was just taken from a large owner and haphazardly distributed to poor farmers?

While I don’t doubt that the loss of productivity has had a detrimental effect and caused harm, how were conditions for the laborers and those in poverty before this happened, when “productivity” was great? I’m not sure what the greater “good” conditions would be since I’m not familiar with the situation, the region, or its struggles. It is just notable that your description focuses on productivity.

Nationalized factories and businesses were given to people who - at best - didn’t worry too much if they’d succeed or not and at worse wanted to make as much cash as possible. Add to that people feared of succeeding too much least their possessions get confiscated.

Nationalized tends to mean state ownership rather than distributed or worker ownership. Who were the factories “given to” and what does that mean? Again, was there a plan or were they just seized and handed off without serious consideration for how they should be managed and maintained?

Perhaps there is a reason I’ve never heard of the Egyptian communism you speak of. It sounds like it was not implemented with any kind of long term plan and, unsurprisingly, didn’t achieve very much. Or it might just be that it received little attention because it wasn’t a country of “white” people.

What shakes me to my core is that any attempt to establish a fair system is immediately bombarded by countless external and internal malicious actors looking to either exploit any loophole they can find for their own benefit or sabotage the system to prevent it from gaining any traction because it threatens their power.

I don’t think capitalism or any of the similarly exploitative systems that came before it are superior solutions to proposed fairer alternatives, but the wealth disparity they have created and the perverse incentive structure they push on society leave us ill equipped to transition away from them. Right now, our economies are all so interconnected and interdependent that it’s impossible to exist outside of the influence of capitalism or it’s awful predecessors.

IT is a very wide field, and maybe that generalization is actually not good

That was what set me off. I was having a bad morning and misread the tone to be more dismissive than it likely was.

I’ve misread the tone, I agree. I apologize for that. However, I find that his complaints were not about things that are always “fundamental core principals of working in IT”. For some, sure, but where I work I’m by far the employee with the most familiarity with CLI/powershell and scripting. Almost everything is done via a GUI or web interface if it can be. I would tell any of my coworkers that maybe IT isn’t for them.

I also, in a rush to finish, misremembered and incorrectly reread some of your words too quickly. You did not recommend the “clone a repo” solutions, you advised against them. Again, I apologize. I still am suspicious of this massive collection of self hosted services that work perfectly with each other after like 20 minutes of tweaking and little maintenance. That was what I was trying to imply with that section. I’ve lost close to a dozen 6-10 hour sessions on Saturdays pulling my hair out because I can’t seem to find out how to do some specific things that it seems like I need to do to make some “easy” new service to work with my setup. It’s like that Malcom in the Middle (?) clip of the dad 5 projects deep at the end of the day trying to fix some simple problem in the morning.

I’ll try to document some of my issues this weekend. I would honestly appreciate any help or recommendations.

That being said, I think there’s a bigger issue at play here. If you “work in IT” and are burnt out from “15 containers and a lack of a gui” I’m afraid to say you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

Honestly, this is the kind of response that actually makes me want to stop self hosting. Community members that have little empathy.

I work in IT and like most we’re also a Windows shop. I have zero professional experience with Linux but I’m learning through my home lab while simultaneously trying extract myself from the privacy cluster fuck that is the current consumer tech industry. It’s a transition and the documentation I find more or less matches the OPs experience.

I research, pick what seems to be the best for my situation (often most popular), get it working with sustainable, minimal complexity, and in short time find that some small, vital aspect of its setup (like reverse proxy) has literally zero documentation for getting it to work with some other vital part of my setup. I guess I should have made a better choice 18 months ago when I didn’t expect to find this new service accessible. I find some two year old Github issue comment that allegedly solves my exact problem that I can’t translate to the version I’m running because it’s two revisions newer. Most other responses are incomplete, RTFM, or “git gud n00b”, like your response here

Wherever you work, whatever industry, you can get burnt out. It’s got nothing to do with if you’ve “got what it takes” or whatever bullshit you think “you’re in the wrong field of work and you’re trying to jam a square peg in a round hole” equates to.

I run close to 100 services all using docker compose and it’s an incredibly simple, repeatable, self documenting process. Spinning up some new things is effortless and takes minutes to have it set up, accessible from the internet, and connected to my SSO.

If it’s that easy, then point me to where you’ve written about it. I’d love to learn what 100 services you’ve cloned the repos for, tweaked a few files in a few minutes, and run with minimal maintenance all working together harmoniously.

they keep like 1 billion of workforce just sit on their ass

A common, but inaccurate, assumption.

Going early and going late often helps a lot with avoiding people who meander around blocking movement through the store.

Unfortunately, where I live is pretty heavily populated so the shelves are also a lot more empty if I go late or go too early.

Just another layer - the button did nothing to begin with.

Ah yes, the old “but racism was so long ago” argument.

Redlining

Voting Rights Act

Voting Rights Act Part 2 (Dec 2025)

“Why should I have to give up my privilege? Racism is over. Whites aren’t benefitting from discrimination of minorities.”

Lol