- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
That was their plan all along. Resist by gaming twice as hard.
> has an AI slop summary
Yeah I noticed that lmao, definitely AI slop.
AI slop with the audacity to block anyone with Privacy Badger enabled, like, “we worked hard to produce this AI slop so we deserve to make money scraping your personal data”
(edit: oh wait, I just noticed you meant OP’s summary. Yeah, blatant slop, get to fuck OP)
In order to appeal to others’ emotions, it really helps to have emotions of your own and feel empathy.
It’s just the same old tactics advertising and marketing shitheads have been using for decades. Just ignore them.
Nothing like a call for empathy from the morally bankrupt.
Way, way back, capitalism was a version of “the customer is always right.” Various companies would compete to sell a product at the right price point and quality the customer could accept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pointed mostly the right direction.
Now capitalism is just the few major companies competing to see who can make the biggest cash grab and fuck the regular customer with prices, fees, and enshittification. Now we have dystopian monopolies divorced from the consumers.
It’s exactly what monopolies and oligopolies end up doing, whatever is in their interest to do. If anti-trust laws were actually used to enforce competition, we wouldn’t be here. But since we can’t compete with the campaign donations of the companies those laws should be regulating, we get no regulation at all and end up here. Selfish people, being selfish, making everything worse for everyone else.
The customer is always right was never a thing.
For a start, it’s an intentional shortening of the actual phrase, for exploitative reasons, of “the customer is always right in matters of taste”
Which just means “if they want to buy ugly shit, let them”
The “in matters of taste” line is misinformation started in the last decade online by people who repeat things without looking up if they’re true or not.
Huh, til
Well shit, that’s interesting. Thanks for the link.
I have been staring at the original comment trying to figure out how to basically say this, so thank you. lol. “The customer is always right” just means don’t tell the customer that green and purple polka dot curtains are fuck-ugly because it will hurt the company’s bottom line.
I don’t think Capitalism has ever been this romanticized version, at least not in my lifetime. It has always been about how much money “they” can squeeze out of consumers, and they have been inching more and more constantly for a long time to get where we are now. The companies have always wanted to manipulate to make more money, and the only slight road blocks or steps in the right direction have come from government regulation.
You could go further and say what’s happening now isn’t capitalism at all. Yanis Varoufakis calls the modern world economy “technofeudalism”: it’s controlled by information hypercompanies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, that make money not by producing anything, but by controlling the flow of information between consumers and producers, and charging producers rent for access to consumers.
If you’re an app developer, you pay Google and Apple whatever they ask, and you follow their rules, or you don’t get to sell your product in their app stores; if you sell products, you give Amazon their cut, or you don’t get to sell in their market. And because Google and Apple and Amazon have so effectively entrapped customers, capitalists who don’t agree to their terms can’t get to their consumers at all.
Capitalists aren’t the masters of the economy - they’re vassals. They pay their technofeudal lords their tribute, their 30% cut of revenue, and compete with each other for the remaining scraps. And then they raise prices and cut wages, squeeze their workers and exploit their consumers even more, in order to make enough money to survive at all.
I don’t disagree. I don’t know about strictly “techno-“, because it isn’t restricted just to the insertion of technological rent extractors every step of the way, it’s also every single business trying to maximize profits at every step along the production line, and they’re all effective monopolies that have no other way to make the line move up other than to charge for it. Almost nobody is making anything new, it’s just putting different color lipstick on a pig.
Capitalism, when unchecked, tends to create those giant monopolies you’ve mentioned. It is capitalism at its end game, total consolidation.
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I remember back in the reddit days telling people that the EU doesn’t have trillion dollar tech megacorps because we don’t want companies to have this much power and the americans calling it cope. Well no ones laughing now.
But today’s money doesn’t really have any frontiers our boundaries. If a corp is being openly traded in the stock market, it belongs to the very same assholes that own the americans megacorps.
“Actually, real capitalism has never been tried”
I don’t think that’s what they were saying, but I also think you probably don’t care.
They(the companies) want AI to takeover so badly. They know they can control everyone if only we would embrace their slop. The idea we all have a terminal that has no storage and no computing ability that just allows us to access their slop remotely. For a forever fee of course.
currently its very useful for propaganda, thats why conservatives are all in on it.
Don’t forget obligatory data mining the crap out of you!
speaking of gaming i know people with recent degree in gaming related field, not surprise he couldnt find a job in that field.
They are going to kill an industry and damage peoples ability to access technology.
Im kind of wondering if that isnt the real end game- there was a Bezos quote i saw the other day, where he said he wants to see personal computing die out in favor of essentially cloud based, where users own minimal hardware and just rent compute time for everything.
It kind of feels like they dont actually need ai to succeed- its already achieving the goal of denying components to end users. If they maintain that scarcity long enough, they can kill the pc/ laptop status quo. (Especially if chip makers abandon those fabs for data center tailored units for a whole generation, until theres nothing viable left on the market)
Such crazy logic from Bezos, personal computers are now more powerful and capable than ever, fulfilling the average users needs easily. Hey let’s just get rid of that and make them use our servers. He tries to frame it as the logical conclusion but the only conclusion I can see is he wants more money.
The good thing is that we have a few giants with vested interests in resisting that. PC OEMs like Dell and HP, Clevo, Intel/AMD who still have huge consumer sales, and the big one:
Apple.
Apple is all-in on personal compute, and they have the muscle to resist the anticompetitive plays, hopefully.
Apple can make Chrome book equivalents, they want you to rent compute power not computers.
Natively you’d be able to run VLC on a good day if you’re lucky, but everything else will be online with a subscription attached.
Apple likes being able to distribute apps and have users pay subscriptions to run them locally. This is what they already do; even 3rd party apps get a cut to Apple.
And its why iPhones are so powerful, other than their meager RAM capacity.
Tangential, but ironically the only used laptops (e: for repair) you can buy right now that haven’t been gutted for RAM and NVME are macbooks and similar that have everything soldered onto the motherboard.
Yet if prices somehow go back to sanity, people will flock back to nVidia like they always did
They can fuck right off.
For the foreseeable future, DIYPC is dead.
most folks will pay. all my PC gamer friends are just paying $200 per 16GB stick now.
I am in a position to see first hand people regularly dropping ~$4000USD on “mid-range” PCs. It hasn’t slowed down purchasing of PCs, if anything it is speeding up compared to this time last year.
at that pricepoint it’s just about showing off how much money you have.
typical rich way to backhand brag about how rich you are is to whine about how ‘expensive’ things are that are luxury items.
Here’s an idea: a catalogue of companies who pulled this shit during the bubble, so we know who not to buy from when it bursts.
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.
Switch to retrocomputing; it’s currently significantly more affordable.
The solution is to use an old computer?
Sounds like copium
I find it fascinating how the concept of coping with a situation has been made into a negative. “Get bent loser, how dare you try to make the best out of a bad situation”. Hold on, let me unfuck the tech sector real quick.
It goes wrong when you try to convince me that retrocomputing is somehow better than building a reasonably priced new machine.
Oh Steve, you’re so misguided
It is and it isn’t. There’s a ton of tech waste and lots of people get rid of systems that are still quite capable. Obviously there’s less power but even a 6 year old gaming rig can still run most games, just at lower framerates
Not copium when the purpose is different.
Not a bad idea. How do you actually partake that hobby? Is it more the same building things or the challenge of getting old hardware/software working?
A mix of both; finding old gear and combining parts to restore functional units, repairing where needed and learning more about how the systems work in the meantime.
And older SIMMs and DIMMs are relatively cheap right now — you can create a maxed out system for its era and still do everything on the computer that was possible to do when it was new.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
There’s even great web proxies for older systems now, so if you want to, you can browse the modern web on a computer from 1996.
Please tell me more.
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
One of the classics
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works looked smug as hell. They’d been telling everyone for years.
There were actually some genuinely great games in those days, with compelling stories and expansive worlds to explore that still hold up today, it wasn’t all Minesweeper and Pong.
A few highlights: Master Of Orion 2, Deus Ex, SimCity 2000 and 3000, TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Half-Life, Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft II, Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, Mechwarrior 2, Age of Empires, Fury^3, Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate 2, The Sims 2, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation.
Don’t be misled by the fact that some of these games are obviously sequels, or had console versions, or have had other sometimes even more well-known sequels and remakes since then. There are some genuine reasons to play the original specific game versions I’m listing here, to play them exactly as they were originally presented. Many of them have unique features and aspects that haven’t been repeated. It’s not just a Madden 15 vs Madden 16 situation, where you’ve played one you’ve played both. There may be a bit of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles in this list, I would certainly love the chance to go back and play some of these for the first time again, but there are also many genuine outliers even among their own franchises, that are unique and incredible, and genre-defining in many cases.
Master Of Orion 2 … TIE Fighter (or if you’re rebel scum: X-Wing, or X-Wing vs TIE Fighter) … Warcraft II …
X-Wing Alliance too, it’s a relatively modern game, but there’s something about the campaign. You really feel yourself a rebel.
They all have that atmosphere of going into the sea for real, I don’t know how to describe it.
Another old game with it is Ascendancy. I always get too emotional from its style and music, somehow it reminds me of how I dreamed of future in my childhood. But I didn’t play a lot of it for the same reason.
Master of Orion 2 is just very playable and comfortable.
TIE Fighter has that sense of humor similar to Dungeon Keeper in some sense.
X-Wing I like more, because of its atmosphere, again, you really feel yourself a rebel.
XvT is for a group of friends.
WarCraft II has amazing music. Other than feeling yourself in a world where moral alignment is not 2-dimensional, but 3-dimensional, chivalrous honor being the one forgotten. You might not feel yourself the good guy necessarily, but that honor you’ll feel in its campaign. A bit like in Harry Potter such a character as Bellatrix Lestrange has that quality maxed out in the positive direction, which makes her an interesting character compared to most DEs who are both baddies and spineless cowards.
I really need to get a new display replacement for my old vaio f series laptop. The screen layers are doing the funny vinegar thing. That and some sort of ssd. Maybe a USB Dom or some msata thing with a converter board.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
https://wccftech.com/asus-declares-all-in-ai-strategy-as-server-revenue-soars-beyond-expectation/
These people keep saying “it’s the future” but it just seems like they’re chasing pink elephants and forcing us to partake in the delusion.
That delusion keeps pumping up stocks.
… Until it all goes to hell, and their delusion will finally meet its fait.
The C suite and management of these companies want two things - for the stock to go as high as possible, and for them to be able to sell at the top and leave a bunch of bag holders wondering what the fuck just happened.
