Let anyone who has never said “this old big ball of mud isn’t even worth fixing, the only move forward is to completely throw it away and rewrite it from scratch!” cast the first stone.

Dr Moreau would like a word with you.

People keep making comments like this about Nokia, but is there really any chance they’d still exist as an independent phone/operating system maker if the Microsoft buyout didn’t occur?

$4k doesn’t even buy you a DGX spark these days. You can get a Ryzen AI max 128GB machine for a bit less than $4k but the models you can run on there aren’t even close to Opus 4.8.

Amazon recently moved $8B in GPUs to a SPV to hide away their expenses. Oracle warned their data center isn’t going to be on schedule. Worst of all, none of the big players are reporting enough deprecations to match up with GPU sales.

All this indicates to me that loads of GPUs were only purchased on paper or are sitting in warehouses unused. This almost certainly means a drop in orders followed by a drop in RAM prices (though that would indicate a demand drop to investors, so maybe it’s better for stock prices to keep paying to bills bigger warehouses and stuff them full of unused GPUs).

The second RAM prices normalize, local LLM becomes much cheaper. A machine that doesn’t make much sense at $10-15k suddenly becomes a lot more feasible at $3-5k. If those stored GPUs flood the market, we might see even bigger price drops.

that's a wild theory. You think there are really warehouses of GPUs that they are just sitting on until data centers are built, that will just all of a sudden flood the market?

First, the form factor of GPUs in data centers aren't the same as desktop GPUs, so you couldn't use them even if you wanted to in a normal rig.

Second, from a business perspective that doesn't make a lot of sense. It's much more likely that GPUs are going to the highest bidder/large contracts who are scooping them up to populate/upgrade data centers that are in operation because they are going to get more money per gpu on newer hardware. The "old" hardware might go to a warehouse to be auctioned to the highest bidder or go to a data center coming online, but I highly doubt they are sitting on market wrecking amounts of GPUs just waiting to flood the market. When they go bankrupt and they have to sell a datacenter or two, those datacenters being parted out as part of a bankruptcy deal I could see. Warehouses full of unused GPUs doesnt make any sense to me though.

"Microsoft Is Warehousing An Estimated $50 Billion to $100 Billion In GPUs" https://www.wheresyoured.at/wherere-all-the-ai-chips/

> First, the form factor of GPUs in data centers aren't the same as desktop GPUs, so you couldn't use them even if you wanted to in a normal rig.

With eGPU PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 x4 links (or even Thunderbolt), that essentially doesn't matter for inference.

You pay the bandwidth hit on model load / unload (a few seconds), but it's irrelevant for post-loaded inference.

Anyone hosting a high wattage GPU is going to be fine hosting in an external enclosure, most of which have generous extra-spec room.

And if they don't, if a flood of cheaper DC GPUs hit the used market, you can bet Chinese manufacturers will have enclosures that fit them available the day after.

It makes sense if you consider that maybe all of these companies are colluding to forward a shared agenda. It is happening whether it makes sense or not. So there's that too.

>>The second RAM prices normalize, local LLM becomes much cheaper. A machine that doesn’t make much sense at $10-15k suddenly becomes a lot more feasible at $3-5k. If those stored GPUs flood the market, we might see even bigger price drops.

Yeah but it's unlikely to happen in coming 2-3 years (at least) and then the SOTA models are going to be a completely different animals.

On a single 3090 while offloading experts to RAM you can run qwen 3.8 next. Which yea is about 2.5k new and yep about opus 4.8.

Salary.com says median compensation for a “mid-level software engineer” is $132K (https://www.salary.com/research/salary/listing/mid-level-sof...). I agree that I’d find it unusual for most electricians to make more than that.

I’m pretty sure today entry level (non-union) factory work is around $15-$20 USD ($21.62-$28.82 AUD at current exchange rate) in most parts of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if it’s lower though in very rural, low income parts of the country like West Virginia.

Federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr, hasn't changed in years but very few jobs today pay less than about 2x that, as people simply won't work for less. Even fast food pays about $15 in most places.

$20 USD is still a banger wage for most people in my rural midwest area, but it was more like $15 even just 6 years ago.

Yeah, in 2005, SHA-1 was just about the best you can do given the constraints of the time (without picking something much more esoteric, much slower, etc.). Using SHA-256 at that time would have been noticeably slower on the computers of the time, and made repo metadata take up a lot more space.

Article says Google wallet works just like Apple Pay, except they don’t charge a 0.15% fee.

Do you mean this part?

> It points to Google's Android, which supports multiple wallets and does not collect a fee from card issuers for contactless payments. It suggests Apple would not be able to continue to charge "substantial fees" if it were forced to support other mobile wallets on Apple devices.

This described supporting multiple wallets, which I don’t care about. I don’t want multiple wallets, I want one wallet.

Android supporting multiple wallets isn’t a feature of Google Pay, it’s a feature of Android. Although the implication in the article is that Google not being able to charge the fee is a side effect of any app being able to act as a “wallet.” Which I’m not 100% sure is true.

Why shouldn’t Apple be able to make money for the service they created?

The phone holds on to a credit card number and some extra information. What service is happening here? Is Apple doing something meaningful every payment?

The phone doesn't store your card number. Apple brokers a token at setup, secures it on-device, and manages it afterward (suspend, re-issue).

So it doesn't generate a second card number like other things I've used?

But anyway it sounds like the answer to my question is no, Apple is not doing anything meaningful per payment. They play a role in setting up a card and that's it. Is that accurate?

When you add a card, your bank creates a device-specific Device Account Number, encrypts it, and sends it to Apple w/ a key used to generate a unique sec code for each transaction.

And is that information stored on the phone? Do Apple's servers need to be running for me to make a purchase?

Not if you're tapping in a store. Apple's servers re-encrypt the payment data for specific merchants if you buy in an app or on a website. Apple brokers requests for adding a card, or suspending one via Find My, or setting one up again whenever a person changes phones.

A service for whom? It has already been paid for by the users when they bought the iPhone.

Users aren’t paying the fee though

Of course they are, passed on as increased prices for everyone, which is exactly the problem. Sure the banks here would like these fees gone, but it also hurts society in general.

And customer are also paying cash handling fees, which in the U.K. at higher than card handling fees.

Companies that prefer or only take cash tend to do it for tax evasion rather than cost purposes.

U.K. fees tend to be about 1-1.5% all in, for cash or card (excluding cost of employee taking cash to bank). Things like pix, net, grocers about 0.5-1%. Nets QR is cheaper than Nets rfid.

That’s true of any cost that any company pays for any service.

Yep, I’ve seen issues like this before. Run it in a profiler and you’ll see it only doing useful work like 5% of the time.

It was a joke based on the commenter’s username.