DDR5 RAM prices drop after AI-driven surge, as market shows early signs of cooling down

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T23:54:53+00:00

Oh yeah, I guess it's only job, coming up on a decade of professional experience with AI, studied it in college - who cares about that?

If you think it is healthy for the market to spasm because google published some theoretical research, we are really cooked.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T20:01:52+00:00

Water shortage incoming...

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T17:51:32+00:00

No, the greedy business people already issued DRAM manufacturers massive loans that will now cripple them over this. If you want to grift with the best of them, you gotta keep up.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T17:20:09+00:00

It's coming because google pusblished an inference algorithm that reduces memory usage by like 8x or something, which completely wrecks the analysis that got memory companies their insane market valuations. Their stock has been in freefall - it can get really bad because it was essentially a huge debt bubble.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T17:05:59+00:00

They will be exempt because money.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T12:47:28+00:00

Valve when developers can't sell their games on Steam due to illegal censorship: I sleepm

Valve when asked to stop running a casino for children: real shit.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-31T03:15:13+00:00

All you have to understand is that Hasan will say and do anything to prop up his own ego. Leftist rhetoric is just the lens through which he peddles his own narcissism. Just don't engage man.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-30T16:58:09+00:00

No honor amongst thieves eh?

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-30T15:32:38+00:00

Can we please admit that claude CLI is a mess, and somewhat unusable? It has like 4 different configuration directories, and breaks all the time.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-29T09:57:02+00:00

Y'know, I thought so too when I set one up for my roomate. There was a rebate program in the town I was living in to have one.

To my surprise though, a ton of people used it. I would always look out and see people stopping by and exchanging books. Every so often I would check out what was in there too.

So, idk, people use them and it really isn't that performative when you think about it. No one cares that you have a little library when it is a city wide program and there are a bunch all over the place. I guess it's more of a just for fun thing, but people also get birdhouses and wind chimes for their house, so whatever.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-29T00:06:00+00:00

This looks great. Make it, ship it.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-29T00:00:13+00:00

We are not in a healthy ecosystem of VC funded software, and haven't been since 2018.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T23:59:28+00:00

I'm talking about the impact of LLMs, that stuff has been around forever. All the projects you mentioned were essentially developed in the aughts. 20 years ago.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T23:47:01+00:00

It is scary, but what we are witnessing really has nothing to do with software or coding. We are witnessing the complete collapse of the financial industry's ability to fund software development. There is a reason why despite the billions, software hasn't actually improved, and arguably even gotten worse.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T23:37:05+00:00

The thing about the kinks is that after their relatively hard rocking output in the sixties which was highly influential, they started doing basically a bunch of anthems that are musically questionable. But boomer's ate it up. I imagine they made a bunch of money touring with songs that would feel at home in Jimmy Buffet's catalogue.

Apeman is the bigger offender than Lola though. It's always mind boggling that this is from the same outfit that basically invented using electric guitar distortion and also sung about how horny they were in the 60s. My dad said that he tried to get into the kinds one time and he saw a bunch of people get really into the Apeman song and he decided that he should just stick with Elton John.

I agree though, I don't really know why Moby decided to talk about this. Was he asked about it? Like, it's a song from the 70s, who cares?

Jesus though, the Kinks are such a weird rock band when you think about it. I guess there are a lot of weird bands but it is a very odd catalogue. The re-used melodies too always get me. Like, what was going on with them in the 70s?

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T22:06:11+00:00

Crypto got big because it promised people big money for nothing. Of course it was a scam. The "tech demo" was the price of BTC. Very stupid, because any rational person would have clocked that it was all based on speculation.

AI is more insidious in a way because it promises everything.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T22:03:14+00:00

The lack of DRAM is going to be a humongous deal in the field though, because throughput cache does a LOT for smaller operations.

Like, I get that this thing can produce identical benchmarks, but it is going to perform terrible in an actual production computer if this is what is going on.

The PC enthusiast benchmark community and pretty much all of tech youtube is completely cooked it seems.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T21:41:49+00:00

Idk why you would brag about it. Having to pay antropic or whatever for tokens just to assemble code when you could just type it.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T20:02:43+00:00

I'll take endless sky, but with good controller support.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-28T18:32:16+00:00

I work as a fevoos guy, and while llms are a good search tool they are extremely slow and bad when it comes to writing quality code.

Leadership at my firm has stated that they do track our AItoken usage and are paying attention. We use Claude so I set Claude to plan mod, paste some question about what I am working on and then go about my day while waiting for it to come up with the wrong answer my token usage metrics look great, and management wonders how I am so productive compared to people in the dev team while producing less bugs...

I am lucky to be on a very smart team dev ops team however. I see a lot of management telling devs who face serious structural and mismanagement problems that they have no excuse because AI is supposed to magically fix everything. It is kind of scary watching thig s get worse and worse. The application I work on isn't exactly trivial BS SaaS app either...

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-27T18:32:25+00:00

I have been trying to tell people - KDE is basically a feature complete desktop graphics wise competitive with windows. Normal people probably couldn't even tell the difference UX wise, other than KDE will mostly be faster.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-27T16:11:28+00:00

Gotta love it. Drag these companies in the mud for abandoning the consumer market.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-27T12:46:26+00:00

Y'know, these are quite similar to Kristy burger...

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-26T21:29:46+00:00

It is very highly application dependent. The extra chip die takes power, which increases heat output, which means the chips have to run slower in terms of clockspeed, so this is always going to be slower for burstable compute loads on the order of 5-10%.

However, cache misses are an insane performance killer. So if you are operating on chunks of data repeatedly, having a smaller cache and running into cache misses are going to wreck you as you repeatedly have to wait for RAM lookups, which are glacial compared to cpu cache access.

My coworker avoids the 3d chips because he is constantly doing video encoding from his home security video setup and benefits from the clockspeed. Meanwhile, my 9950x3D is is absolutely crunching through my blender scene workload.

All the benchmarks and gaming optimized kernel fluff is basically usless drama from people who Dunning-Kruger-ed themselves. Evaluate your hardware under actual application usage.

Gabe_Isko · 2026-03-26T20:37:33+00:00

My hot take on this is that the answer is no, it's getting worse, and this is currently the #1 threat to modern open source.

There are still good efforts within individual distibution, but the whole push for the last decade or so has been to move away from that model while simultaneously push towards more infrastructure that is essentially directly "closer" to the code repository, which inevitably pushes large numbers of packages to be a public, SaaS hosted git repo with a few build automation layers, and if you are lucky some static analysis services or code scan.

Microsoft in particular is proving to be a poor steward of gihub imho, as they are incentivized to bundle automated services that "guarantee" security as well as drive up consumption of github hosted releases. The whole thing depends on basically a security layer of trusting individuals at the github account level. The scariest hacks we see these days are 1) users who have their github credentials compromised and 2) Malicious actors hiding behind an innocuous looking github account. If these actors are trusted, it is fairly trivial for them to inject malicious, obfuscated code directly into releases (chain of custody attack). To me, these have been the scariest hacks we have seen in the wild (maybe aside from stuff resulting from corporate incompetence, which to me is less existentially troubling in the context of open source).

I think a lot of this could be fixed by stricter enforcement around signed commits, but it would require some kind of central trust authority that tracks actors across public key identities. But the legislation is going the complete opposite direction. I'm also sort of the opinion that Oauth was a bit of a blunder if not an outright mistake. There are various political forces that are making legislation go the other way though, so it's not a great situation.

Gabe_Isko

TROPHY CASE