The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*.

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@furicle @cstross It is not what it was and a whole lot of effort has gone into, e.g. doing things with on board computers to prevent off-brand parts. (Not, in autos, as much as in heavy machinery including farm machinery.) "Right to repair" didn't start with small electronic gadgets.

Or look at the cost of replacing a headlight; lots of effort has gone into making you buy the big assembly and not either a standard headlight or replacing a bulb.

[drchaos@sauropods.win]

@cstross @blogdiva Sell it and retire with a huge pile of cash?

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

it’s been so cheap to add another drive or RAM, IF YOU HAVE THE MONEY.

since my divorce, been so broke, everything i have is a hand-me down or refurbished.

that’s why i switched to linux. i’ve squeezed the proverbial blood from Dell Inspiron bricks with SOLDERED RAM. i have ran webservers on tablets meant for kids to play CandyCrush.

don't matter if the tech is cheap if i got no money to spend.

it’s why i can see the scarcity they are creating.

it’s like a divorce.

@cstross

[bashstkid@mastodon.online]

@cstross There was a nice analogy for this on Greg Jenner’s You’re Dead to Me history programme;
back in the days of the viciously colonial spice trade, the Dutch tried to maintain high prices by burning spices in the Amsterdam docks; no matter that thousands of islanders had been killed, and hundreds of sailors drowned to get them, they burned them rather than accept a less than stratospheric price, while also starving their competition of product.

[shadows@beige.party]

@graydon @cstross and you know they probably won’t even have to tell governments that they will implement whatever sort of age gating or identity verification/tracking governments want on those systems. Because the governments will easily be able to force them to even assuming the system owners don’t want to in the first place.

[adamrice@c.im]

@graydon @furicle @cstross The headlight thing is less bad in the USA today than it was in, say, the 80s, when all cars had “sealed beam” headlights by law. With ordinary headlights today, you can buy just the bulb. I’m guessing that LED headlights require you to buy the whole unit.

[graydon@canada.masto.host]

@cstross @furicle Back to at least to the 1970s!

The core point I'm after is that collusion across entire industries to prevent unwanted behavior (that is, not giving them maximal money) has a deep history of being found completely legal and proper and more or less working.

A combination of pricing people out of the market and pressure to make every device a managed device has been going on about personal computing hardware for at least ten years. Turning that up to 11 isn't implausible.

[furicle@mastodon.social]

@graydon @cstross again, wasn't the intention.

Modern headlights throw a lot more light than any old headlamp, and aerodynamic styling and mileage drives custom swept shapes that aren't standard

We used to replace bulbs often, now it's only when defective or damaged.

There was no conspiracy to kill the aftermarket

[pare@kamu.social]

@cstross @blogdiva My desktop computer broke a year ago. I replaced the required parts and now it’s working again, of course on paper, as the old one was over ten years old — mostly.

But in practice, the difference is not very kuch. Disk access is faster as I upgraded the spinning metal with SSDs, but mostly it does what its previous incarnation did.

And I’ve also been running a Thinkpad over a decade old (with debian), and it, too, does most of the things I want a computer to do.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@cstross The RAM shortage doesn't even add up. An LLM's size is roughly its number of parameters times their precision. So even a hypothetical, 10 trillion parameter llm using single precision (32 bits) floating point would fit in roughly 40 terabytes. This has no business crashing any market at the scale we're seeing now, it's like 100 high-end gaming rigs.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@cstross @blogdiva Somebody is bragging how rich they are :)

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@mbpaz @cstross There is so much untapped wealth in all the old tech collecting dust all over the world. Commercial software steals this wealth from us by dropping support but free software unlocks it all back.

I'm writing this on a laptop from 2010 that I've been using as my only personal computer for about two years. It's running linux and can stream video in 720p when the website isn't too bloated, 480p otherwise, and I can use it to work on my godot game.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@falken @furicle @graydon @cstross Speaking of parking sensors, my mother bought a new car 3 years ago. The model she chose included parking sensors, and had to be sold with them – except thanks to the shortages, Opel couldn't actually include them, so the dealership had to add aftermarket sensors to the car.

[drwho@masto.hackers.town]

@graydon @furicle @cstross And dismantle a great deal of the front end to be able to replace it.