I’d rather use a weak single board computer for all my computing needs than rely on some corporate-controlled remote server. As much as these corporations would love for us to only have a dumb terminal, the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
Usually enough to watch any sort of video content in HD and play thousands upon thousands of games with zero issue. Just the PS2 library alone is several years worth of content and you can play them all with a good emulator (PCSX2) and a computer from the last 15 years… I’m hoping there’s a silver lining in the price hikes, like seeing a renaissance of video game development, with actually optimized games that focus on gameplay and don’t take 100gb per map, or maybe people start going back and playing the OG SW: Battlefront II online again.
People use PC for work too.
Most work requiring a PC can be performed by hardware released in the last 15 years.
20 if you are being minimalist.
I set up an enterprise grade firewall on a computer I got from a deceased relative. It was probably already 8+ years old when I got it and had been replaced with something newer. I had it for a long damn time; during covid when everyone was home and a lot of people were having their home internet connection clogged up with multiple users doing zoom sessions and remote work, my crusty machine was doing a good job of balancing out and shaping our meager 100mbps connection for five people. I think the CPU maybe got to about 10% at peak, but usually ran closer to 4% most of the time. It used up all the memory, but that was how it was supposed to work. It had a traditional spinning hard drive in it.
I kept it until it was about 18 years old when I finally retired it. It never broke, never failed, hardware just quietly ran and ran. I never turned it off unless the power went out. I only retired it because it was too big (full desktop tower case) for the home I had moved into. I wiped the disk, loaded a minimalist linux on it and donated the whole thing, monitor, keyboard mouse all in perfect order.
Hardware lasts and you don’t even have to be nice to it.
I upgraded last December from almost top tier 2014 pc to mid level pc from 2024 and it’s a significant upgrade. From ddr3 to 5, i7 4790k to AMD 5 7600. I draw and can do it on an old ipad pro, still new pc feels good, mostly from the stability point.
I could have done 99% of my last job from an old Atom X5-8500 tablet if I bolted on a good external display and HID. I am perfectly happy navigating with a little J5005 Pentium Silver NUC since everything lived in a browser anyways.
If excel needed more time, let it cook, long as you don’t exceed a million rows it’ll probably get there someday.
Video and production work requires real compute, but 99% of us desk jockeys could have got by with thin clients and a little elbow grease. But I would contend that we may be living int he golden age of low-watt computing because we have the some combination of all computer games ever written in the history of man, the vast majority of them compilable and runnable on today’s ardware or otherwise emulatable
And thanks to Valve, there is it now a very established market for running even AAA 3D titles on dog shit commodity hardware. It’s pretty much just the mfps crowd that have to buy each next years release of post-processing laden Call Of Modern Battlefied Spartan Halo 2027, that need to worry about graphics falling behind, when we have such a rich ecosystem of excellent indies. All of my favorite games are like five or eight years old (I play a ton of Crab Champions, and Risk of Rain 2, etc with my gaming crew, these days).
All that to say, old hardware will keep us gaming indefinitely if the will is there. I think the big threat is people forfeiting the sovereignty of their compute and consumption for the illusion of convenience, the same way so few people own ebikes in my country while everyone has Uber and Lyft fees every month on their statements.
Wair till people figure out they can be their own GeForce Now for $0 with Tailscale and Artemis/Apollo.
Thank god I bought those two 32 TB drives last November for 750 Euro each. With the feeling of getting ripped off.
Now one of those drives is at 1100 Euros, and every day prices go further up. I made the right call, this will last me a couple of years.
But this is all fucked up.
“Son, why are you collecting all those old PCs?” This is why, I’m not going to use a fucking Windows Portal or a xAI TerminalX (or whatever the elongated muskrat will name it) to use whatever OS they allow, while surveilling me 24/7 for my own safety.
ChatGPT summarize this video.
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You’ll own nothing and be happy.
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Ugh I can’t fucking stand this dude, love the work he is doing, and he is spot on with his assertions, accusations, and documentation! He is clearly 100% correct.
But absolutely cannot bear physically watching/listening to him for longer than 8 minutes…
Is there any source for this information that doesn’t constantly attack industry allies and content creators in adjacent channels, that doesn’t have a bombastic and self-aggrandizing view of their role in the cosmos, and that knows where to find some hair clippers, or at least a ponytail scrunchie?
Every video I ever tried to watch of him made me cringe, and I get that we are imperfect vessels deserving of grace, but I’m just not here for all the ambulance chasing and weird factional tiffs this guy kicks off seemingly recreationally.
Weirdly purist about his reviews too, his approach to hardware would ice out so many of us, but I’m not going to trust him to meaningfully democratize access pretty much ever.
edit: down vote away, gents! Just, it would be helpful while you do so, if you can share any other sources for the topic if you’re serious about the cause and not about the character
edit2: keep going, folks! -30 karma on a post asking for citations is a personal record for me, and I’m sure we can get me to -100 if we try hard enough! All it took was being out of alignment with the groupthink and disliking a self-indulgent YouTube character, and sharing bad (but very importantly, they are not dangerously harmful) opinions aloud. I’ve seen J6’ers get warmer receptions.
He talks with people from cooler master, hyte, gskill so I suppose that is where the source information is coming from.
industry allies
how broken of a human being do you have to be to say this lmao
That’s right, anyone with a perspective different than yours is clearly broken and incapable of rehabilitation!
edit: it dawns on me that if I only answer with snark I’m not doing any better than the people that are just attacking me. Perhaps it’s worth defining terms so that we can argue more clearly about the subject. I apologize if you already know all of this and I’m just trying to get on the same page, here.
For most products that you and I want to run in our tech stacks, we are relying on packagers, whether that’s software or hardware i rely on someone to make my shit accessible and useful to me. Skhynix or TSMC has some teeny tiny silicone stack roll off the line, I can’t just cram that into my tower or phone. I need a company like PNY or EVGA (rrrriiiiippp) to actually wrap those up with cooling components and distribution lanes, and interfaces, which allowed them to run with all of our cool devices based on industry standards.
The thesis for a lot of our community these days, and for sensationalist ambulance chasing video publishers, seems to be that every board partner has grown to be a Mustachio-twirling villain, as if ASrock or BeeTech just simply hate their user base.
From where I’m sitting, I can see material costs for these most basic components in our systems (the storage and memory) are likely going to double and triple the bill of materials going into my gear, as the Barabones version is my yesteryear PC has gone down in price, but buying my variant has increased by at least 30%.
I would entertain a conversation of grand conspiracy and villainous collusion, but not if I have to sit through three and a half hours of everyone’s favorite neckbeard droning on in front of his camera while I desperately wish that I could My Little Pony the shit out of his straggly mane of hair, brushing him out for hours.
I walked away from giving Mr Nexus any viewership whey he started going after the jugular on adjacent tech channels, often the ones who actuary explained the mechanics of board partners to me first when I was younger.
I have always focused on, and advocated for, low-watt competing and with an emphasis on gaming. I cared more abut Atoms than Threadrippers, and have not bothered with purists that works trek new that everyone needs the best of the best.
My interest is more in accessibility than anything else, which is why I’m absolutely f****** thrilled and delighted that we now have Chinese silicon vendors looking to flood the zone with cheap DDR4 and slower DDR5.
But through it all, if we find out that, as a wild counterexample, " making the next iPhone in the domestic us would make each unit cost $30,000usd" for instance, that means that our smart devices never actually only cost $1,000. It means that we have all been comfortable with subsidized devices and sponsored exploitation under the surface."
If the labor the crafts are things, from fabrication, to packaging, to distribution, cannot operate with the cost of labor, services, and materials, then we should absolutely expect prices to spike horrendously.
But for most folks supply chain woes aren’t about human rights abuses (unless they happen to hate a specific brand, the way that Foxconn critics would lambast apple but not sony or microsoft, and the same one facility complex in Shenzhen might be manufacturing iPhones, PlayStations and Xboxes all at the same time).
To bring together my big, haphazard, stupid point: Conspiracies can exist, and I would be interested to hear analysis around Market collusion from literally any other source on the planet, I don’t believe Everyone’s Favorite Burke would be the only voice to promote this issue and I don’t trust his track record of cherry picking and sensationalism to actually arrive at a serious conversation about equitable distribution of our technologies and equitable valuation of the labor that goes into it. Instead, I expect more selective outrage, and I expect people won’t read past my criticisms if one man, but will continue to fail to bring anything worth reading and discussing to this forum. You know, the table where we read and write and discuss.
Thst, or I’m just a “broken human” – and what does that say about you, if I’m what you see in your own team, here? These communities are what we make of them.
