Big AI has PC users furious. Nvidia and Micron's weird emotional appeals make it worse
7 months ago by Lee Duna to c/technology
- 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.
this is actually happening
my elecric company just raised its rates 13% and forcast rasing 25% next year after
we have a power making dam in town
historically we have had some of the cheapest power in the USA
they send us these cute charts and stuff about our usage
they show you a "you are using xyz% more then previous year" type stuff
but my wife keeps it and their little bullshit is because they keep changing the rate and then using the new rate against your old usage as comparison. Looks like OMG we used a lot more power then last year! We should consider cutting something out.
But the actual meter reading numbers are almost always the same year after year
I like the suggestions to save money and lower usage.
"Have you tried living in complete darkness this month? You could save $2 off your bill!"
"Perhaps try not using electricity this month. Or, consider getting a second source of income to turn on your fridge for a few hours a day!"
Mine does that too, and there’s $300 in fees that don’t relate to the actual power used. Using no utilities, I’d still have to pay that much.
If the data center is causing all that power drain, they should be the ones footing the damned bill
they also, businesses get wholesale lower rates than residential consumers. which is one of the big issues about them not paying thier fair share.
The aura that the US irradiates is just preposterous. At this point the only sound you can hear is the sound of boots being licked, evil corpos are doing what they please while the general populace is disregarded.
mmmm Facsism, feels good right?
FUCK TRUMP and FUCK THE REPUBLICANS THAT ENABLED HIM
↙↙↙
i heard datacenter requires most of our electricity generation eventually.
With gas prices at multiyear lows and electricity being so expensive it’s really hard to justify electrifying appliances. I was considering doing so (gas dryer, stove, water heater, furnace), but I think if I did I’d be paying an extra $300/month for quite a long time and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
I went through this process in 2012-2016 - took out the gas dryer, gas stove and replaced them with electric. Mostly because my wife's family has a history of asthma and the data for gas appliances and asthma is disconcerting to say the least. Especially for kids.
Good luck with your eventual transition!
and anyone near datacenters get polluted water or any unforseen pollution, contamination that has yet been studied.
Computer electronics are like my main hobby. It was expensive on a good day. This makes it unaffordable.
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.
Well hey, I appreciate the recommendation. Maybe it’s time to get back into Windows 98 gaming. Just like mom used to make.
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.
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.
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
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.
IMHO there's much hobbiness and fun to be had with creating a second or third life for "outdated" hardware. The current RAM crisis leaves me cool, on a 2014 ThinkPad. My kitchen server was a 2008 HP laptop.
Serves kitchens
I used to have a static IP at home so I cold run my own physical server. I stuck it under the fridge because there were wall plugs and I didn't want it in my living room. Hence the name.
It used to serve NFS shares locally, websites and CalDAV/CardDAV globally. A dual-core-but-32-bit stone old intel processor, 2GB of RAM, and never a performance problem.
What's funny is that ding this makes it kinda obvious how incremental a lot if improvements really were. Like on paper DDR5 is MUCH better than DDR3, but somehow my old gaming machine is only a little slower than a new system playing shit that I actually run.
For sure. Buying higher performance machines didn't get us better performing games, it just got us lazy developers.
it would be more unaffordable once people dont have jobs from all the layoffs.
> 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)
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.
... 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.
I can't take anything that uses the word "tremendously" seriously any more.
They gotta get while the getting's good or they'll miss out on that margin
Yeah but your TAM (who you could possibly sell to) is the biggest concentric circle, inside that is the Servicable Addressable Market (who you could feasibly sell to) and your SOM (serviceable obtainable market, who you are actually selling to) and the consumer market is who you were actually selling to.
It could be that these data centers never become serviceable or obtainable, and this is all just predictions with no actual product making it into a machine.
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.
It almost seems like they want to make home computing unaffordable, so you have to rent PC time from a cloud provider. This way they nickel and dime you, and use your data to train their LLMs.
Micron and nvidia get their cut by being able to set whatever prices they can imagine.
there are plenty of home computers for sale for under $500. i'm on a $700 laptop right now that's 4 years old.
they just can't run modern games. i can run 2d games just fine or old games.
the gaming crowd seems to forget that most computers don't use integrated graphics and a $1000 PC is a luxury purchase.
Micron reported a revenue of $37.38 billion for fiscal year 2025. Nvidia reported a revenue of $57 billion for just its latest quarter. AI is hot. Meanwhile, inflation and interest rates continue to depress consumer spending power here in the U.S., which is reflected abroad as well. AI has also torched jobs—it’s fueled thousands of layoffs already.
Torched jobs, the environment, and climate.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the fevered pace of tech often has led to good outcomes in the end.
Only when it's well-planned and well executed, with people and our habitat treated well.
But that doesn’t change the individual impact of incomes lost, plans destroyed, security evaporated. So when a company makes a play for my agreement through emotion, I always wonder: Who benefits from this vision?
Lol
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
Let me translate that for you:
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they're willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that... We're gonna make so much money!
But uh, yeah uh, I feel you, that sucks bro and I appreciate you. But, dude, seriously, look at all this money! So yeah, stay strong guys, tweet about us! And don't forget, if you want to be informed about the best memory deals, definitely sign up for our newsletter! Just put your email right in this field...
Yes we definitely want to support the consumers, but hey look, the thing is, these data centers want to buy a lot of memory, and guess what, they’re willing to buy it in bulk even at a huge mark up! Like just think about that… We’re gonna make so much money!
To be fair I would not be mad if that was the response, It's the pandering that get's me fuming
Yeah, some honesty would be refreshing.
Though to be fair, when that actually happens you know what we call that? "X company just said the quiet part out loud".
So yeah, there's kinda no pleasing us either....
LOL If companies were honest we’d have a socialist revolution within 48 hours.
highest quality.
Man's got jokes!
Idk I've seen better in the amateur section
In the "amateur" section with professional cameras and pretty experienced (one could say glorified) "amateurs".
All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it's not physically possible to [xyz].
Are they really able to replicate pornography like that? I know that for normal stuff, the videos are only under ten seconds or so.
You can get up to 12 minutes locally even if you're patient. Technically you can go way further if you do it in parts though, and use multiple generations. Might take a few weeks to "direct" it right though, depending what you want to make. If it's vanilla stuff, maybe 3 days for a 45 minute video on a 3090? (Via 3-5 minute chained segments, with smaller second long segments for smooth camera angle changes)
This guy is an expert at jerking off to AI porn.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I said before and I will say it again. AI is product being built by its users, an unfinished program that it is used wrong just for companies to make money. AI hasn't made any progress and we won't see any progress, because it is used by companies to profit.
They don't care about the economy and the downsides, they care to make us use AI.
i overheard today on the bus, that someone(assume in grad school) as a TA was planning to use AI to grade all the classes homework without care if it was inconsistently correct or not, it isnt going to end well.
weird emotional appeals
“I think we’ve done a lot of damage lately with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. […] It’s not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments.”
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
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)
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.
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.
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.
I might buy a new tennis racquet instead. Humanity emerges blinking into the sunlight as hypnotic little black rectangles become unaffordable.
they have to give up their bragging rights if they don't upgrade their PCs
Apart from a bit of simracing, I game almost exclusively on my Steam Deck lately. I upgraded a bunch of hardware early last year, and have no plans to upgrade again any time soon. I'm kinda glad I got it when I did.
I could care less about Asus and many more of those fuckers, but this is impacting every single part of the consumer electronics environment.
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.
motherboard prices haven't inflated too much yet. gaming/consumer motherboards aren't in demand from the AI industry. the want server hardware
The motherboard was from over ten years ago, that means that I probably won't find one that matches the old APU and RAM that's on it. I already can't find a matching CPU fan for the APU, also no motherboard with DDR3 around. Part of the HHD is malfunction, but it's workable. I was considering replacing them altogether someday, but maybe not so much now. The best scenario is I find out what's wrong with the motherboard and fix it, then just keep using it.
speaking of gaming i know people with recent degree in gaming related field, not surprise he couldnt find a job in that field.
It's not a win-win, it's a silver lining amongst a shitstorm of suck.
Why? Because what if you're not trying to upgrade but just maintain? What if your RAM fails? Or your GPU? Now you're out there with the AI tech bros vying for a piece of a production line that you have no influence over, but they do. If you just built your rig, you might be safe to wait a while, but what if you built in 2020? Those parts are getting old, by computer standards; they don't last forever.
We don't actually know when prices will normalize, because nobody is calling in the IOUs, and nobody is clamping down on that circular economy; 2027 is just a guess. We might be waiting even longer.
They ain't gonna optimize shit, they'll tell us to turn on DLSS/FSR/XeSS to exceed 20-30 FPS, or for just $59.99 a month here's time limited access to a streaming computer that can run at decent framerate (no games included)
I hope you are correct, but I don’t think you are.
I don’t think game devs (or web devs or any dev really) even remember what optimization means, at this point. They sure aren’t going to start prioritizing it now, especially if major companies continue to be out of touch about what gamers actually want.
I mean we have microtransactions, we have games as service, we have single player games with online connection requirements, we have games that need logins to other services, etc etc etc. no gamers want these things, but it doesn’t matter because companies do. And companies aren’t going to care if you can’t afford to play their game on your own equipment, they’ll offer you a subscription to stream it from theirs.
You just described the AAA gaming market almost to a T.
The indie market, on the other hand, typically cares about what they produce, and you're far more likely to get optimized games there that don't require extra launchers, internet connections, or a massive GPU—not that it doesn't happen there, mind you, but it's going to tend to be more of a skill issue than a profit-driven one.
Also, there's still very good games in the retro space.
Its just personal evidence but i see more and more indie games using UE5 and a lot of them run like shit. Most games dont need real time lighting, global illumination, software or hardware raytracing based solutions etc. But instead of baking that stuff once onto textures like its 2004 on the developers rig we now have indie titles with artstyles and visuals which were achievable 20 years ago but done with bleeding edge graphics technologies which dont even run well on modern mid tier GPUs.
Dont get me wrong we still have tons of indie titles which run on a potato. But more hardware demanding titles really picked up recently even in the indie space.
Absolutely, I agree. I think we are likely to see a shift in what indie devs use for their game engines (love2d, Godot, etc.) as PC specs stagnate, and I am of the opinion that GOG will see an increase in sales, too.
The "runs like shit" games have a shrinking market.
It’s certainly true that the indie market is better about that stuff, but the indie market also generally isn’t considered the driver or trend-setter of the overall games market the way AAA studios are. It would be amazing if that trend shifts, don’t get me wrong, but until or unless it does, I don’t see this going well overall. It does, though, mean that people who care will still have options, and that’s good, so solid point.
I figure the digital-only consoles are a stepping stone toward this. I’d never consider one myself because if I don’t own a copy of the game that I can sell, I’m not paying for it just in principle. But a ton of people wanted the convenience over the practicality of resale. Digital-only consoles have basically killed the physical game market going forward, since it’s been basically dead on PC for ages. I see the same thing happening with the consoles themselves. I mean ps+ already has a streaming option and a substantial portion of their catalogue is only available to play that way. I’m sure Xbox has the same thing, probably with a similar portion of content locked behind streaming from their servers. I don’t even really understand why they would do this since the bandwidth to stream is far higher than to download and play offline, so I have to assume there’s something behind it like a push toward that model. Get people used to it as an option, then make it the only option.
And there’s nothing indie studios can really do about those big trends led by big studios/companies, except to quietly keep doing what they were already doing, and make a huge fuss about it when they get their 15 minutes like larian has done. Wake up as many people as you can sort of thing.
I agree it's not a win-win, it's more of a win-lose tradeoff, but it will certainly drive customers away from those shitty companies, and towards the indie developers who don't do microtransactions and unoptimized PC-crushing graphics-fests with 16-billion-K textures and Nvidia's latest 600x FSXLAA running on every pixel 3 million times per second.
Indie developers may not prioritize optimization, but if there's a need to, they will, and most of the time, they simply don't have to. Balatro and Vampire Survivors are going to be doing just fine on any hardware.
I really don't know, man. I want to believe that but at the same time I think it will simply be a mediocre situation.
Cheap prices mean a lot of people upgrade and the game companies increase performance demands.
Big prices mean people often can't even get into gaming.
Consumerism is the issue in the first case and greedy companies is the issue in the second... Idk..
I only play PCVR games and i can tell you we are still in a very early stage or development and we need a lot more power. New headsets coming out with insane display resolutions make games need way more power and the games are getting bigger and look better. I'm lucky i need a beefy PC for both work and play so it's a necessary expense for me anyway.
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Forget ram. Wait until there’s widespread power outages yet you’re somehow paying 10x for your electricity bill because of the new data center down the street.
save