This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
And people who have an issue with this are called luddites
Absolute clown show
We've been told historical lies. People who have an issue with this are like Luddites, but that's because the Luddites were justified too!
They weren't against technology; they were against it being used to abuse and exploit them as workers.
I've only heard that term being used to insult, that's actually a real thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who protested the usage of certain types of automated machinery owing to their concerns relating to worker pay, labour savings, child labour, working conditions, and output quality. They often destroyed said machines in organised raids. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
History is written by the victors, and the luddites lost. That's why they're maligned as backwards idiots who didn't want tech to succeed.
They weren't stupid. They knew precisely what was going to happen, and did their best to stop it. Generally they took care to target only machines as their goal wasn't to harm people but to remain employed, and have money to survive with. Naturally there were exceptions, and sometimes people did get hurt.
But then, the bourgeoisie enacted law to prevent this where destroying mechanical looms became punishable by... oh let's see...
The act, as passed, made the destruction of mechanised looms [...] a capital felony (and hence a crime punishable by death).
Right! Death! Destruction of company property became punishable by death.
And people did die. Children died. Mind you, back then workers were anyone capable of working, and they had no rights. They didn't vote for the people who passed this act; workers weren't supposed to have a voice, and so the only recourse was rebellion.
This didn't stop things immediately, there's quite a lot of really cool worker history here, but eventually the government sent in the military and couple that with nothing really changing despite widespread rebellion, the luddite movement fizzled out.
This is why I am opposed to the death penalty and I want the police disarmed. It is also why I still believe in workers arming themselves.
They confuse us with legitimate technophobes.
My stepmother was a technophobe. She read articles about school shootings in the US, and thought if I got addicted to video games like Quake, I'll be buying a machine gun from the black market, then end up as a murderer. Yes, she also had a moral panic about drug use, all while she was a borderline alcoholic. The farce in it was that while I wasn't allowed to play any Quake games, there was no harm in Unreal games, which arguably are better. The tragedy in it was that she tried her best to steer me away from computers, giving me some disadvantage in college, also she lied to the doctors about my first seizure to make it seem like it was due to the computer, which lead to the doctors not doing tests besides EEG and strobe lights. Once social media rolled out, she somewhat changed her mind on the subject, though she was still ignorant enough to think "software developer" and "CNC programmer" are the same, and almost got me a job at a local factory (she feared that if I lived on Budapest for a bit longer, I'd get some lung disease, because big city equals bad air).
I am infinitely grateful to my past self that I purchased an on-sale 64GB RAM upgrade for my Framework 13 in 2024 before prices skyrocketed. It was $119, and checking back right now... Holy crap the same thing is $1,079 now.
Yeah, I put 96GB of DDR4 in a PC just before prices went wild and my only regret is that I didn't also do my server. Garage sales have been interesting this summer. Always hoping to find old PCs or TiVo devices so I can grab the hard drives and/or ram.
Give it 10 years and civilians won't be able to own PCs... We will be forced to the cloud computers. And by that time AI surveillance and profiling will already have its infrastructure built.
We need to figure out how to do our daily things with very few computing resources. Gaming and heavy workloads excepted, most things we do ought to be possible on 15 year old CPU’s and 2GB. All we need is efficiency and low expectations. Fuck em.
It was already possible to do that. Then Electron came in and developers thought it was better to just release stupid apps that take 4 GB of RAM each.
Yeah. We went to the moon with, like, 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB RAM.
Not even. The Intel 8008 didn't even break 1MHz and that was a few years later.
I don't know what they used on the moon landing, though.
I don't know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of "fly a spacecraft" tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11's crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with "pay attention to me" interrupts, and it couldn't service the radar and run through it's task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team's credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
This is the type of dystopia that I cannot bear to live in.
Its already here. Most "regular" users already depend for most part of there digital life on subscription based cloud computing. Al lot of people don't even own a PC anymore, only mobile devices.
I got some 16gb of DDR4 i found in a closet. You guys can start bidding.
And suddenly me "unjustifiably" buying 128gb of DDR5 was a good investment of money.
Yeah, I splurged on some hardware upgrades with great shame almost 2 years ago because I was preparing for the idiotic tariffs, expecting modest price increases.
I did not expect a 5x. So glad that I did it. It would no longer be an option.
I did not ever think PC prices would go as crazy as they are now.
but I thank my fucking asscheeks every day that I upgraded my CPU, GPU and RAM right before the shit hit the fan just by pure luck and coincidence.
I still wish I had a better GPU, I had to settle for the one I got cause finances.. but I sure as fuck aint getting anything better for a reasonable price at this rate.
Do I want more memory or do I wait for two years...
I wait for two years. As long as the existing memory modules doesn't break, Linux will continue to be happy with existing amount.
If you are on windows, good luck.
I fucking had to keep pushing back buying some more RAM. Yeah, that was a great move. Now I can only hope the bubble bursts and prices crash.
I mean, I get by fine with the RAM I have. I don't need much. It's the principle of the thing, you know? Sometimes being financially responsible and careful sucks.
The thing with the bubble bursting is it will still take time for it to come down, as they'll need to start manufacturering consumer RAM again. The stuff they're churning out now can't be thrown into a PC or laptop.
And they'll NEVER allow prices to drop back to reasonable levels. They've already learned people will pay a premium during a shortage, so they can still artificially control the supply to keep prices high.
If competitors ever emerge making RAM at reasonable prices, we need to boycott the current fuckwads even when they undercut the new players.
I dont... I am absolutely stressing the DDR3 I have. But no way I am going to pay 500% for some memory!
AI bubble will burst.
I mean, today I saw a chocolate company ad saying no AI was needed. For chocolate. Anti-AI in a chocolate ad.
If Sees Candy is getting in on AI hate to sell shit, obviously people are tired of this crap. The bubble will burst.
and if it doesn't, let em have it. I'll cancel my internet, and start overloading all other infrastructure with confusion from not knowing how to deal with humans and paper..
idgaf. I can't and won't be forced to comply to a subscription.
It seems the more this shit happens the less I need tech in my life (pulls notebook out of back pocket and writes this down for posterity).
I could have bought a 16 GB DDR4 stick at 30, now they go for 150, I'm going to be stuck at 24 GB forever now.
I wonder if the fed gov cares that entire sectors of the tech economy are being threatened by one (AI).
On the plus side, all the game companies are going to finally start optimizing games and quit pushing out more and more demanding shit. A big win for smaller devs and creative\fun game developers too. My steam deck and old PC gonna keep on winning.
No big. Guess I'll have to wait another year before upgrading my laptop. Sorry for the loss of business.
They want you to get a cloud computer subscription. They want you to buy a Windows Portal, or whatever garbage small "terminal" device they will come up, and force regulators to make it be called a "fully fledged computer".
I've called it. Laptops and PCs will be outlawed and hunted down like hiding a radio unit in WW2. Think Farenheit 451 levels of dogma
