this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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This really is a new front in the war on general-purpose computing for regular people. The EU or some entity big enough that's outside of the US needs to fund new memory fabs ASAP and get this industry out of the hands of the present cartel.
new fabs is iffy… samsung chose not to scale up production because they’re betting that the AI bubble is just a bubble, and in that case any change in the short term will be bad in the long term… building a factory for DRAM takes years: let’s hope the bubble of AI enshittification doesn’t last that long
it's infuriating and honestly kind of scary. They're making gaming a luxury hobby, one auxiliary industry at a time. Every component that goes up in price is another reason for consoles to go up in price. More and more cool hobbies are slowly growing out of reach for the average person. Soon the only thing left to fill your free time will be alcohol and the sound of silence.
There are still some factors providing weight on the other end of that lever. Valve is doing good things with Steam Deck and the popularity of it is keeping developers supporting lower spec hardware. Remote play codecs (both Steam's own and Moonlight/Sunshine) reduce the need to have more than one capable gaming computer as you can just stream from the one you do have to any others. Raspberry Pi is a great way to access non-gaming computing cheaply. Arduino, even though the company itself is kind of doing some shit, still has an ecosystem big enough to survive even if the company itself completely sabotages it. And of course the used/surplus PC market is thriving, even more than ever before with Windows 11 forcing millions of PCs into early retirement for no good reason. They're still perfectly capable machines that will run Linux without an issue and you get them cheap as a song or even free if you play your cards right.
I'm not saying any of this to dispute anything you're saying, I'm just pointing out these resources we still have so that we can take advantage of them while we still can and protect our continued access to them. It's clear the claws are coming out to start locking down consumer computing, but people need to know there is a resistance to it and there are ways to resist. And we should.
More and more products that were previously targeted at what was the middle class are now targeting solely the top 10% of income earners. It's pretty tragic, and corrosive to the long term health of society.
Phones as well. Each increase in the nand/chips makes phones and ANY consumer electronics that use it much more expensive.
It doesnt help when most devices that we buy are not designed to be repaired.
This seems to be the way things are going. On the plus side all of this has pushed me outside more. I've been picking up cheap or free outdoor activities that I now love. Birding and amateur photography have been my latest passions and they can be pretty cheap.
You'll still be able to get consoles and cloud stream. The real problem is that the power to create is being taken away from regular people.
There's a reason I'm still rocking CS6. Fuck you for wanting me to pay monthly.
Could just use GIMP at that point.
I've tried. SO many times. It's just so damn clunky. I ended up using Krita (also FOSS) instead.
That literally plays into the concept of big business having a monopoly
It seems the wealthy elite got sick of the "poors" creating memes and having discussions about their stupidity and horrendous actions and want to go back to us plebs just reading a finely reviewed newspaper with all the correct opinions they want us to have in it and none of this "free thought" nonsense.
Like everything else in this world, we need to wait for HBM to crash or for a competitor to get massive funding for DRAM when it becomes more profitable.
Companies only exist to seek profit, and HBM is way more profitable than anything they made for consumers.
It's possible this will precipitate a reduction in HBM costs until they come down to consumer levels, then we might end up with HBM instead of (G)DDR.
Oh, I drink lots of beer while not wanting to call attention to my rave on wheels.