Technically, no. However, in today’s society if you aren’t making more profit this quarter (line go up) than last quarter you are seen as failing to meet your fiduciary duty to shareholders. More accurately, if the rate at which your profit is increasing isn’t increasing (line describing line go up) you are likely seen as failing the shareholders.

It’s no longer acceptable to deliver to your customers, make a steady profit, and be sustainable. Now you must cut every possible corner, deliver as little value and use as little labor as possible, make more profit, and “stay competitive” or your company may as well be failing… in the eyes of investors.

Unless you claim you are working on a technology like AI that can eventually let the company fire all of its workers and make all the money without having to pay humans for labor… in which case ignorant investors will light money on fire for you until they think someone else is definitely going to do it better or they think you can’t deliver.

I think the idea is that it is not something separately securable? I don’t disagree, I’d like to be able to disallow any app not explicitly granted permission to use any method to determine my location. Unfortunately if Google can scan WiFi and figure out your location, anything with access to WiFi can too maybe?

I don’t know. I love technology but this fucking surveillance state situation is really getting to me. Routers using WiFi signal passing through your body to identify and locate you regardless of whether or not you are carrying any tech and all the other shit I don’t know about… ugh.

It’s actually a bit informative. I believe Android approximates location using the SSID/WiFi information, so it’s not just network that it’s used for.

Reminds me of when I first tried to play Quake (I think? some old arena FPS) over dialup. I tried for a few minutes hoping my ping would even out. At one point I had ~4,500 ping. That’s 4.5 seconds between my input affection what I saw on the screen. Needless to say, I was often gibbed before I got to see my inputs manifest.

Is there not a future in which the AI bubble bursts, and we are in a glut of datacentre memory and storage with no buyers?

There is. Unfortunately, not even the chips on the memory used by data centers is compatible with consumer hardware. They use extremely high performance, expensive HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), we use DDR memory. Unless consumers start getting affordable devices that are compatible with such memory, there is not much hope of buying what has been or is in the process of being made for data centers.

Nobody needs any entertainment, but some people enjoy hobbies like gaming.

no company has ever responded to more sales with lower prices

Prices are going up rapidly thanks to AI data centers exploding demand by orders of magnitude more than retail customers. There is no end in sight to the price increases.

If you want a gaming device, buy it sooner rather than later. That’s all I am saying.

Sure. I guess it depends on your anticipated financial situation and your priorities.

Honestly, the way shit is going, get what you can while you can. Gaming is only going to get worse and more expensive by the week.

This is a question that might require a bit of “prior knowledge” in order for an answer to make sense.

Basically computers keep track of each other with complicated, unique numbers. This isn’t easy for humans to deal with so instead we have websites like netflix.com. DNS is a system that translates “netflix.com” to it’s more complicated unique computer address so that your computer connects to the netflix server when you type in that web address.

There are a number of servers (DNS Servers) on the Internet with databases that keep track of which website has what computer address. Usually, the company (ISP or Internet Service Provider) that you get Internet from has their own DNS Server and tells your modem to tell your computer or phone to use that server to look things up when you browse the web, but it is possible to use alternative servers.

Technically, the system is very trust-based - it’s just assumed that they are going to respond accurately and in good faith. It is possible to mess with this but there are other layers of security and authorities your computer should be using to make sure that you are actually visiting the website you think you are visiting. Usually ISPs just use this server to keep track of the websites you visit so they can sell your data to advertisers.

If I remember correctly, some of the ROG phones could actually run directly from the cable bypassing the battery. I think the idea was that it could be plugged in and gaming without wearing down the battery.

I agree that Valve has, in some instances, succeeded primarily because they’re not aggressively anti-consumer in a market of aggressively anti-consumer alternatives. However, they are not innocent by any means.

Last I checked, they are still automated when it comes to the majority of their “customer services”. Getting an actual human to consider things is expensive and they don’t want to spend money on that.

(Edit: Their solution to cleaning up their storefront is algorithms and crowd sourcing. The don’t manually do much of anything to filter the selection - it’s more algorithms, policies, and crowd sourcing reviews, tags, reports, etc. This prevents them from looking like they are actively controlling the storefront and is waaaay cheaper. They would much rather let influencers publish recommended lists for free than pay someone to find and remove asset flip garbage games. Systems like this are what gets you results like the opaque decision to ban Horses and financially devastate an indie studio without telling them why. It’s what gets you massive review bombs from China cratering reviews for great games because Valve isn’t willing to spend time working out an alternative method for Chinese gamers to communicate with game developers about games sold on their storefront - because typical feedback methods like discord are banned in China. Valve’s solution is to just default to filtering out reviews made in languages other than your own, entirely.)

They are very conscious of the numbers behind their success and the money that their platform and marketplace rakes in. They have worked with literal economists when it comes to their marketplace. Yet they turn a blind eye to concerns like skin gambling with children.

They do sometimes behave like bullies when negotiating with those who want to sell their games on Steam. The proportion of money paid out to devs/publishers is a factor of success and benefit to valve rather than anything else - if your game makes a lot of money (for Valve), you get a discount on the percentage taken. Some of that bullying behavior is also anticompetitive - as has been brought up in lawsuits. Their policies use “most favored nation” clauses.

• Basically if you want to benefit from Steam, the dominant marketplace, you have to offer Steam customers nothing less than you offer customers anywhere else. No discounts on another store or your website. No bonus content or service that might make a non-steam purchase feel better than a purchase on Steam.

Finally, they may not be anti-consumer but they haven’t exactly been spending a lot of effort on improving the functionality of services that their platform has. The clearest example would be issues with their friends-related services like voice chat that have plagued the platform for a long time, though some have recently been improved. They know they are dominant and don’t spend money when they don’t need to in order to keep customers.

All said and done, I use them as my default though I’ve made efforts to be more dev and indie dev conscious. Unfortunately, greed fuels most of the world and makes it hard to do anything that favors anyone besides those with power.

Republicans are beyond hypocrisy. They are overtly, shamelessly, and thoroughly duplicitous. They have gone so far as to wage war on language itself. Words having consistent definitions is too inconvenient for them and their need to constantly deceive in order to get their way.

The majority of his presidency he’s kept them with too few members to have a quorum and therefore unable to do much of anything.

Last I’d heard, Trump was officially allowed to dismiss members of the NLRB at will. His administration is basically the definition of corruption and regulatory capture.

Don’t get me wrong - I’d be happy to see things go well for unions but I have zero faith in anything good happening. Shit is so fucked I’m legitimately worried about any legal challenges to anything because we might get another Roe v. Wade.

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.