But think about Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron shareholders
I do think of them.
Who cares, they’re Korean
Micron Technology, Inc. is an American multinational semiconductor company that manufactures computer memory and computer data storage products, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), flash memory, and solid-state drives (SSDs). Founded in 1978 in Boise, Idaho, Micron is the only major American computer memory manufacturer.[
I just bought 2x 8gb ddr3 for €25 so I can play games from 10+ years ago.
You can try games from 20 or even 30 years ago. Plenty of bangers in any genre.
Yeah exactly! Any recommendations?
Idk i didn’t play all that many games back then, Deus Ex, Return to castle Wolfenstein, Arma cold war assault, Vice City, Warcraft 2, Batrle realms, check those best games of all time lists. I mainly play racing games from back in the day, maybe you like different stuff. But if there is a community that takes care of the game to be up to modern resolutions and easy to run, it’s a good game worth trying out. Guy made a modernized port of the OG Medal of honor, it’s free and it’s alright. You can also emulate consoles so you can play Playstation 1 and 2 games, Nintendo and Sega stuff. I have like six golf games emulated on my phone, playing Silent Hill when i get a chance (good thing with emulation is you can save progress regardless of the game’s saves so you don’t need to grind like back on the day). For Dos games check out Exodos project. There are so many amazing games already made, polished and maintained by the community.
The Chinese AI labs are really trying to pop the bubble, too.
How?
Well lemme ask you this. What if models 80-90% as good as Claude, with weights just thrown out there for any provider (or homelab) to host, flood the market? What if they’re so dirt cheap to run, they’re almost free, and don’t even need Nvidia GPUs? What they need fewer resources to run with each update, instead of more?
…What if this already happened, and Big Tech is maddly lobbying to ban/censor them before people realize it, and that the “infinite scaling” thing is a big fat lie?
That’s the state of things.
Yep, the Chinese models are already up 10 times cheaper and now that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, all are increasing prices up to 10 more for models like Opus, it will make Chinese models anywhere from 50 to 100 times cheaper.
American corps. are betting that since people have their workflow already established they won’t switch to other providers, but that’s not the case. There’s already a mass move to Chinese models.
People keep talking about Chinese models, where are they? How do I used them instead of Claude? Are they safe?
Agreed. I am not longer paying token fees as I am running QWEN 3.6 27B MTP on my 4090 GPU and it is as good and as fast as the frontier models for agentic coding.
In a way it has actually.
Deepseek was big because not only did they publish the full model for everyone to use, but the MoE structure significantly brought down the hardware requirements in terms of processing power. As long as you have enough VRAM, you can run it on older hardware with no need for the latest Nvidia stuff.
Now they got v4 which many have found to be within a 10% margin of Claude and ChatGPT.
On top of that, China has cheapo VRAM GPUs available or soon to be released, like the MTT S80. Yeah it sucks as a Graphics card because the chip is behind, but you get 16Gb of GDDR6 for much cheaper than anything else.
But its not a conspiracy to fight China. The infinite scaling was just Nvidia solidifying themselves as the monopoly because they want all AI infrastructure to be dependent on them, which is why they still illegally export to China, despite an export ban attempting to reduce their potential competition.
Moore Threads (MTT) already has their own CUDA like system called MUSA, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to put in proper hardware support for new stuff like Bf16 and FP8/4. It’ll take a few years, but eventually China will catch up to the point where Nvidia gets shanked by cheaper hardware.
Wasn’t there development of a linux translation layer for CUDA workloads to run on AMD GPUs? I haven’t heard about it in a while, but I’d imagine that’d help the situation.
MTT is just a pipe dream, last I checked. But Deepseek is actively being served, in mixed FP8/FP4, on racks of Huawei accelerators.
I believe Baidu trained a model on them, too. But most training (like Deepseek’s) is still done on CUDA.
…Also, be careful equating this stuff with any kind of “consumer friendly” hardware you or I could buy. That’s less likely. The Huawei accelerators (and other local Chinese hardware experiments) are geared towards huge servers serving requests in parallel.
Hyper scaling was always about cornering the computer market, It was never about providing us some vastly new and superior service.
They should be strung up. And middle management needs to return to fucking school.
It’s like Kyle Kulinski said “I’m starting to understand re-education camps now”
Hyper scaling was always about cornering the computer market, It was never about providing us some vastly new and superior service.
Exactly, its a method of taking tens of billions of dollars in capital and buying a near monopoly. No other providers can compete if the hyperscalers buy all of the hardware, driving up the prices while also selling the service at a loss.
Nobody working out of their garage with a cool idea for a better service can compete if they can’t get hardware and have to charge double what the hyperscalers are charging because they can’t burn capital for years.
It’s a practice that should be considered illegal market manipulation, because that’s what it i
e: extraneous ‘completely’
‘Dumping’ is considered anti-competitive behaviour in a lot of places. This sounds a lot like that.
The state of things is what if, that’s true. It has not happened. :)
At some point, it should happen. Still not going to put a dent in the datacenter / dystopia rally though, since they will pick Nvidia and known brands.
Thank you China
Semi related note: Is there any reason not to buy the cheaper SSD brands like kingspec and team group?
Failure rates and RMAs might be more common when manufactuerers save a buck. Samsung SSDs for example are expensive AF, but they have a good reputation for reliablility and lifespan.
Of course, being diligent about backing up your data means that you might benefit from the savings with less worry about the risk. Or you could use the cheaper SSD for something like a Steam library where you may not care as much about long term data preservation.
Word of warning though: super cheap end might end up with you getting scammed, or things like SSDs without DRAM caches, which are slower than even HDDs.
As a personal example of Samsung reliability, my 11 years old samsung SSD is still kicking, despite being used as a cache for my Truenas homelab for half of it. This thing will outlive me 😆
From what I‘ve heard it‘s all about guarantees because SSDs have a tendency to just go bad sometimes. Some SSDs are more expensive because the manufacturer will offer a replacement for up to 5 years. You can expect these manufacturers to have better quality control too. They don‘t want to replace SSDs left and right after all.
Take this with a grain of salt because I never actually had to get an SSD replaced myself. But I would only trust a manufacturer that‘s been in business with a good reputation for 5 to 10 years. Cheap storage sounds tempting but for me it‘s not worth risking to lose my data over. Yes I make backups but still.
YMMV.
You gotta look up reviews. Both buyer track records, and focused reviews that look at what controller/NAND they use.
Many SSDs are basically the same as other brands internally. A few are wonky. It just depends.
It depends on the use case. I use teamgroup high capacity SSD drives for short load things on my homelab but they are super slow for any kind of extended writing due to a number of factors such as cache writes. I had to warranty two of 5 that died within a few weeks but it has been fine once the duds were replaced and they were easy about honoring the warranty.
Again, fine for a homelab but I wouldn’t use them in my gaming rig where speed matters. For things like readimg of stored video and Linux isos, they work pretty good.
I got like 4 kingspecs. Work fine since 2025
Crazy how USA seems unable to keep up, and it appears its best chance of maintaining hegemony is bringing China down, not improving itself. Never expected to see this shift in my lifetime.
USA is the new Russia.
Crazy how USA seems unable to keep up
The decline started by the 70s.
Just look at the EV’s. The CEO of Ford was shocked about the quality and innovation of the Chinese cars. He’s driving a Xiaomi SU7 and refuses to give it up. At least Canada is now free of the US chains and letting Chinese EV’s in. The movement is unstoppable in the rest of the world. The only place resisting innovation is the US with its current regime.
His current job is also as a spoke person for Chinese electric vehicles. So take that with a grain of salt.
His current job is also as a spoke person for Chinese electric vehicles
The CEO of Ford? What are you talking about?
It’s been coming for a long time. While the rest of us have been fighting among ourselves, China stayed out of it all, and improved their country. I’m not surprised that they’ve emerged as a powerhouse, while we volunteered to give a lunatic the nukes.
Doesnt have anything to do with fighting with ourselves. America has never invested a lot of money into its own population and environment.
A big part of that is because we blow the money on endless wars, which China doesn’t do.
Add that to their good-faith commitment to invest in, and substantially improve, their country, compared to our lack of investment in our own nation, which you mentioned.
I’m just saying, we shouldn’t be surprised. This is nothing new to anyone who’s been paying attention for a while.
Yeah and the wars are created by America many times, because its huge profits for the military industrial complex and also serves as a way to increase the American presence in countries with resources like oil.
The CIA is super good at what it does actually.
China’s been at war in Mali since 2012
They had a few hundred troops there as part of a UN peace-keeping force, who left with the rest of the UN troops in 2020 when the new government asked them to.
Not really that crazy when you consider that the people in charge could have had a sweetheart deal with manufacturers in China, but they cut off all trade partners and all soft power channels, because they’re drooling buffoons who won’t accept that the US shifted to a global economy decades ago nor do they grasp how global economies work—mainly because they fired every expert under the pretense of “government waste.”
All they know how to do is grift and defraud, and the chance to maintain global hegemony is long past. It’s China’s time, now, and they know it.
Also crazy that a communist country would master capitalism.
People trained in Marxian economics tend to understand capitalism better than stidents of mainstream capitalist economics. China’s using capitalism for what it’s good for - expanding the producive force of the economy, figuring out how to make new products efficiently, and making wide variety of consumer goods. The state still retains control over the capitalist sectors throurh various means. It also owns strategic sectors like banks, etc. The state is controlled via the CCP with membership of over 10% of the pop and growing. It’s an open question whether they’re gonna lose control over the capitalist sector or not but so far it’s subordinate to the state. In capitalist economies the state (and democracy} tend to be subordinate to capital.
Maoist but in name only, as the hardcore Maoists in Mainland China and elsewhere are balking at how the country has become, a hegemony set to replace another.
This is one of those troubles with the whole “communist” and “capitalist” things. None of them are actually truly what they say they are.
China and USSR started competing hard core on the global scale in the capitalism games, and lets be honest, look at China now and it’s fully on the capitalism train while still calling communist.
But that isn’t to say the US is any better on the capitalism wagon. The US is quite happy to drop capitalism if a company desires it. This is where we get our "too big to fail"s or companies that are given “loans” during the pandemic that they never have to pay back.
It’s almost like the terms are a joke by the upper echelon to fuck with the rest of us.
Perhaps ideological purism was never a good idea?
…Like history suggests?
Hence my radical preference: “a la carte” economic systems. Shameless capitalism, frothing communism, anarchism, authoritarian technocracy, even theocratic systems, they all excel in certain sectors and not others. Sometimes, in nutty combinations.
So why idealize one?
A “mix” has been reality for a long time, anyway, but I think that should be embraced more explicitly. Get systems where they’re good instead of shoehorning them where they’re horrific.
I figure that mixing is a good idea, and that was the basis of the “Universal Living” economic system that I have been writing up over the years. Universal Basic Income and socialism is great for establishing a foundation that people can rely upon, but it sucks at offering things that make people unique. Capitalism is terrific at making people into unique individuals, but is horrific at ensuring their basic wellbeing.
As such, socialism should be used to ensure everyone has decent necessities and stability, while money should solely be used for luxury things. Everyone gets a house, but you use money for a bigger house. A basic car is free, but a bigger gas guzzler has to be bought. If the basic car is damaged, just trade it in to the government and get a fresh one - the government keeps the old universal car, either repairing it back into service or scrapping it. Healthcare for most things are free, but cosmetic beautification like butt lifts, cost money. Ozempic is free, because less obesity is good across the board. And so on.
IMO, free basic goods and services would also help regulate the pricing of capitalist luxury, because they are competing against free. That makes it harder to rip off society. Also, if everyone has what they need, they aren’t blackmailed into working for bad corporations or breaking themselves to survive. Work, is just to earn money for cool things in life, but isn’t strictly required. People work by choice.
This translates into people pursuing aspects of life that best suit them - be it a specific career, helping their family, participating in the community, or creating arts. This is more optimal than the forced work of capitalism.
Well, “communist.”
Idk how people think China is communist when they have for-profit hospitals, that’s like one of the biggest no-nos in communism lol.
Even the public hospitals are incentivized towards profit optimizing through over-prescription of medication (or useless stuff like homeopathy) in my experience. But last time I went through Chinese healthcare was all the way back in 2017, so things may have improved now (but I doubt it.)
Please, please bring the world back to sanity. I was like, literally saving up to expand my homelab when my main server went down and have been utterly slapped by prices.
I bought a 2x32gb DDR4 kit for my home server just before it all went to shit. Feels good (though now I want to upgrade my gaming pc and I wish I had bought a DDR5 kit too)
Yeah but apparently GPUs are going up again 🤣…😭
Price of the brick goin up?
China has released their first gen competition to Nvidia cards. First ones kinda suck, but they’re cheap. Let them pump out a few more and they’ll drive the market back down.
More like competition to Intel considering these cards performance is similar to 3060
I got many empty PCI-E slots. Having three or four 3060 clones to accompany my 4090 would make bigger models much more practical.
That’s not too bad. The next generation could be genuinely useful.
Isn’t Nvidia only bumping up the price of the 5090s? Or is there an update to that?
Someone had posted this recently
https://www.thegamer.com/graphics-card-price-hike-again/
Paragraphs 3 and 4, mostly.
🛐
I hope somebody starts to pick up demand for NVME drives too 🤞
Memory includes SSDs. NAND flash chips for storage + small DRAM cache.
Please please I’m begging
Any word on storage?
I have some old Tupperware I could spare.
Tupperware went bankrupt I heard. I’d be cautious with this as there is likely no support for this storage
It’s open hardware tho.
