AI's are more important than humans now. I guess we should get used to this. Line must go up.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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Line must goes up until it hits a ceiling, then system collapses... but line go up again after!
Soon it will just be a bunch of AIs buying, selling, and interacting with each other.
That is what we in the professional world would term the "poop" scenario.
I'm aware, thanks.
Now I'm just contemplating whether I should upgrade from 32 GB DDR4 to 64 or 128 while it's still within the realm of possibility, or bet on memory prices coming back down within the next few years, and upgrade to an entirely new platform with DDR5 then.
At least I'm not planning on buying a brand new car anytime soon, or even a nearly new one. And my phone's fine for a few more years.
Just get a 256GB SSD and boom, cheap RAM - albeit slow
Those are also unobtainium.
Read/write cycles are absurd with RAM. One good way to break SSDs if I am getting this correctly.
I've already got a 64 gig swap file to complement my 32 gigs of RAM tbh. I just wish I didn't have to swap lol
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My most recent hobby has been an old Suzuki Samurai that I dragged out of the woods a few years ago. It doesn't use much RAM. It doesn't even have fuel injection.
I've also been getting back into archery with my kid.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that making it harder to get a computer and play games is a huge miscalculation. If everyone is distracted by Call of Battle: Dutyfield then you have fewer bored assholes casting about for something to do, and if people can still play Factorio, you don't end up with bored, autistic, organized assholes casting about for something to do.
Go Go Gadget zswap!
I'd just point out that now might be a good time to add a whole-house surge arrester and/or get a bunch of new surge arresting power strips for your hardware. They have a useful life measured in joules dissipated so replace them if they're old too or your cheap RAM (among other things) may let out the magic smoke one day.
That is ok we will get more videos of cats making lattes.
Jokes on you...
What if the unintentional consequence of hardware hoarding by AI companies is we have fewer devices being made that spy on us, like smart TVs and appliances.
The idea is that in the future your "personal computer" will be a streaming stick that you plug into a monitor to access your Microslop Copilot Windows 12 OneDrive Azure Cloud Virtual PC for $99 a month.
Yup, they’re 100% trying to shift towards cloud computing. It has already been happening with gaming, and many players have decided that they’re okay with a slightly worse experience if it means they can run their games on a potato PC. Tech companies see the blood in the water, and know that there is money to be made in cloud computing. Everything is shifting to SAAS, so it only makes sense that hardware will be a subscription next.
Thats a nightmare :(
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I took the plunge last month and went with 32GB 6000MT/s DDR5 in a new system. 16GB VRAM card, too.
We'll see if this system will hold up for as long as my old pc did, which was 10 years.
Look at mister millionaire over here!
. . . And then the market will be flooded with RAM that companies preordered and can't pay for, because the AI bubble burst before it could be manufactured.
Hey, I can dream, right? And seriously, I would be quite happy if this causes an increase in dumb appliances, devices, and cars in the meanwhile.
When the bubble bursts it will play out exactly the same as it always does. The government will use money it doesn't have to bail out the too-big-to-fail companies causing runaway inflation, rates will be jacked up to bring inflation down causing a recession, we will all get laid off, and by the time everything starts to stabilize and we have disposable income something will happen to make prices untenable again.
Most of the lithography that is dedicated to RAM is being done for HBM modules, which are not consumer grade. So more likely it will end up in landfills.
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I think calling it a RAM shortage is a bit incorrect. It is not like we are running out of raw materials or something else in the supply chain is broken. It's shitty AI companies buying RAM that is not existing yet with money they don't have. Unfortunately there's no good term for that, I guess.
Supply monopolization?
Consumer fraud?
Sherman Act cartel market manipulation.
Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits price fixing and the operation of cartels, and prohibits other collusive practices that unreasonably restrain trade.
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The supply chain for computing resources is extremely bottlenecked right now. Even with the high demand for open weight AI models the data centers hosting them aren't able to get the computing resources they need and they keep running into rate limits even for paid users. Z.ai's hosting quality has dropped which I suspect may be related. Even over the past few weeks this has gotten much worse with the release of Kimi K2.5 being competitive with closed US-based models and OpenCode becoming popular. Meanwhile we have corporations like OpenAI buying up half the world's RAM fucking both other people and other corporations. So I'm not sure where this is going to end up, but the computer hardware market is going to really suck for a while.
"everything you care about" - Time to change hobbies and care about things that don't have RAM then.
Gunpla and reading are really nice ways to pass the time.
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