This is good news.

I’m really hoping that Valve will end up being a better stewart of the PC ecosystem than Microsoft in the long run.

Sometimes, It does really feel like the PC ecosystem can wither and die without them. I know we’re all enthusiasts here but I need to remind myself that we really do benefit from the larger ecosystem of PC owners. Without that demand being present, personal computers would really be for a few choice people and not all of us.

If the larger ecosystem collapses under the weight of one company (like Microsoft or valve) then there are bigger problems to solve like supply chain, trust, and support that no free and open source project will be able to handle. Not because it’s free and open source, but because the problems are just really really big and they take a lot of money to fix.

More people working on these problems is a good thing. I’m happy to see so much more happening on Linux regardless of my preferences.

Right… In this instance I would argue openAI is the shared channel. There are three memory manufacturers now illegally rigging the market as a push back against the corporate AI. Something like a memory oligopoly VS ai monopsony?

If we all have inference, we avoid clogging shared channel.

And as for megabytes, the value of the megabyte isn’t a finite resource and the value of it is determined by what data is served in the megabyte and the cell companies didn’t care what megabytes you’re getting charged for (example full bitrate advertisements on YouTube). I still think that’s a valid argument to be had.

By the value based on scarcity of bandwidth logic, the phone companies would be able to charge peak megabyte hours to specific websites (again like they used to for telephone calls with plans that included free calls at night) when in fact they can handle much more bandwidth now. In reality when it comes to that traffic, it’s often the providers at the ends of the line who have to suffer the constraints of demand. Maybe they should charge per minute of video accessed or it could be a solved problem in a hyper-competitive, over-saturated marketplace.

I understand what you are saying. I just don’t believe it applies in this specific domain any longer. This is potentially a more valid take an underserved market.

Ram is so cheap to make that until the AI demand companies basically had to create new levels of density/speed and sell for less just to keep the business afloat. This is like when cellphone companies tried to claim megabytes were a precious finite resource. We live in a post scarcity society and these billion assholes are like “well that just won’t do”.

It reminds me of that kid we all know who just learned economics from school house rock and then goes “now if I can simply find every evee Pokémon card in the world and burn them all except for the one I have, I’ll be rich!”

It’s just so frustrating to see this sheer stupid amount of greed all of the time. Thanks for coming to my TEDex talk.