• FreddiesLantern@leminal.space
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    3 hours ago

    Theory: the push to get everyone and everything on clouds where they can control it just “happens” to coincide with this development.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 hours ago

      Same with my 4x 16TBs in my NAS.
      God I hope it will craah only once the bubble bursts to high heaven and a disk costs 20% of the current MSRP :|

  • network_switch@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    As others, my basic home lab NAS plans are grounding to a stop because of worsening prices. Next up, phones are going to be even more expensive. Video game console price increases again

  • 4am@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    It sounds conspiratorial to say it seems like they are trying to crash the consumer market so that computing will be entirely dependent on their services, but I mean…

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      22 hours ago

      I think that seems obvious, not conspiratorial.

      They want to make their services cheaper for them to run, and they want to sell them for more money, while buying up hardware so nobody else can compete with them or not depend on them.

    • phx@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I was thinking on that yesterday.Mass local storage affordable? No no no, better to drive those prices way up so that we can sell you “cloud” services instead.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 hours ago

        My company is needing to go away from external storage for local only backups, as 2,4" 4TB HDDs are shit and unreliable and 4TB SSDs (like Samsung T5 Evo) are going from 200€ to 600€ (per disk. And we need 3 of those).
        Instead we are pivoting to S3(-compatible)-Cloud as the main off-site storage.
        I am certainly not thrillee but on the otger side, customers arent willing to lug around 3,5" HDD cases so…What else is there?

    • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

      That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
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      1 day ago

      It’s because the average USA citizen is economically irrelevant. The money is in the top 10% and the big corpos, especially AI with all the money sloshing around there. The 90% consumer market doesn’t matter as much these days.

      • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.

        • plyth@feddit.org
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          1 day ago

          As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us.

          Of all the things to pick from socialism, expecting the rich to care should be the last one.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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          22 hours ago

          The thing is, if they collapse the economy, and nobody can afford to buy their overpriced products, they’re going to suffer too - which is good, it shouldn’t be only us suffering.

          • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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            21 hours ago

            Are they going to suffer? That’s what we’re supposed to believe, but remember that money is a human-made concept that only has value because we collectively give it value, and the economy is built on that very important principle.

            That situation you describe is real, it will disrupt their efforts a little and protect us in the short term, but in the long term, the meaning of money and economy is changing. they’re doing everything they can to use automation to build a new post-scarcity economy based on ownership, membership, services and control. And beyond that, it frankly doesn’t include us or even think about us.

            That’s what the wealth divide is. It’s the way that money, as an economic representation of their values, is telling us that their motivations are not about making all existing humans on this planet more comfortable and productive and independent. In their vision of this future economy, they are instead hoarding humanity’s collective efforts for themselves, reinvesting it into their own technology, They focus their efforts on what they personally consider important for “progress”, chasing their own utopian ideals for the specific goals and groups they consider the best and most important, while the rest of us that aren’t part of those goals or groups are pacified and left behind and, if you really think it out, eventually eliminated. After all, a utopia won’t include teeming, growing masses of humanity using up all the available resources, that would be a plague, and they eventually will decide to cure it if they haven’t already started. Their vision of the future only needs to have enough room for them and the more utopian they make it the less of us there will be. They want to be the main characters, we’re just nameless extras who do chores and fill in the background for now and can be ignored to go wherever extras are supposed to go when they’re no longer on the screen.

            Their view of humanity is abstract, and they believe what they are doing is right, all the way down to the core of their being. They simply don’t value humanity’s rich tapestry of lived experiences or the sanctity of every individual human life. They’ll never make it a priority. They care more about making sure humanity has become “advanced” or is multi-planetary than they do about making sure every human has a home, or food. That’s their vision. It’s about humanity as a whole, not about individual humans. We can all be sacrificed so the species becomes safer. Scientifically, I can’t even say they’re wrong. But philosophically, I hope we can all agree that this is deeply wrong and morally bankrupt. We need to start to reclaim our individual humanity and go back to putting people first. We need to care about people in the present, and always, not just the abstract idea of humanity’s future. We need to take our money back and use it for a different kind of progress.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.

    • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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      1 day ago

      If the demand increases enough, more factories will be built. Right?

      Except most people think it’s a bubble, so won’t risk building and the cost to build factories that technical is so large that most big companies outsource it, never mind new entrants.

      I suspect instead well move more towards a data on demand kind of thing. We don’t need the same thing stored in millions of copies worldwide. Cheaper connectivity and containerization should help, I’d think.

      It will start with rarely used large files like isos, which are already pretty efficiently distributed but then move to more and more, like cdns do for web already.

      I’m just hypothesizing…I’ve nothing to base it on, but it seems redundant to have so much duplication.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    1 day ago

    4% is hardly a spike in the scheme of things. That’s just inflation when things aren’t really coming down in price any more.

    I bought a drive a year or so ago and was surprised how expensive it was. At some point the price just stopped dropping. Presumably there’s a limit on how cheap you can make a spinning rust drive before it just doesn’t work any more.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      For the vast part of the world, that is not the us or the EU, a PC, specially a very powerful one like for gaming, has always been an expensive luxury item. You’re just joining the club late.

      • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Those other parts are turbo fucked now though. I guess I’ll keep my video game consoles going because at least they will always be able to play games; especially all my older ones.

  • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    The bubble cannot burst fast enough. I’m tired of these higher hardware costs because of a feature that nobody wants.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      My fear is that this is only going to become the new pricing floor. Someone suggested that these companies are going to systematically scoop up nearly all remaining tech in an attempt to sell cloud computing etc as the only option for the average consumer (due to lack of affordable or perhaps even available tech)…

      I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they don’t want us having any access to our own computers etc because they can only control so much of what we can do with them.

      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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        23 hours ago

        I think digital fascism is a likely motivator at this point. The ceos have all been hanging out with the political fascists, so there’s not much reason to think otherwise.

      • undeffeined@lemmy.ml
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        24 hours ago

        I’ve also seen this perspective online and I really hope it’s just a theory and not reality.

    • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It’s not really something that no one wants though… Lemmy is loudly against it, but in real life we have tons of people actually asking for it all the time. Hell at work they had to setup a company AI provider account because people using their own subscriptions was happening too much.

      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social
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        23 hours ago

        IT departments are under a lot of pressure by business leadership to have AI offerings. Most businesses are asking to implement a buzzword, not solve any kind of business challenge.

        • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          There is that too, but I am talking about employees asking to use an LLM. Nearly everyone was using one on their own, and leadership didn’t want company data getting spread around, so they setup a business plan. Completely separate from the company leadership wanting AI in our products for the buzzword (though that is still very much a thing too lol)

          All im saying is that people do want LLM chatbots to help with their work, I have dealt with it first hand.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 day ago

        In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.

          • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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            14 hours ago

            More formal layers. Similar amount of real ones.

            Slaves also could own their own things, which were not owned by their own owner (oof). So they could buy their freedom. It’s complicated.

            Free people could carry weapons, participate in politics.