I like to think of them like Docker. None of Docker's functionality was new, they just wrapped it in a smooth enough DX for it to reach escape velocity.
I agree with your sentiment, and no I’m not surprised, which is why I’m reading this as being “it was sitting on an unsecured S3 bucket but nobody was supposed to directly access it”.
At this point I no longer think the US can say anything about the Chinese. Yes they have a surveillance dystopia and highly entrenched state crony capitalism, but we now have exactly the same thing.
You don't have remotely the same thing. You don't have high-speed trains, housing that populace who don't already own real estate can afford, a government that keeps the tech-oligarchs at a short leash and who mercilessly removes corrupt officials, functional public transit, functional anything public really.
I think it's a bit reductive to compare China taking inspiration from America in the 20th century to Nazi Germany's explicit admiration for slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.
> Yeah okay bud, anyone checked in with the state of consumer hardware recently? Not the author, evidently.
RAM prices will crash when demand drops even a little. They'll probably crash to a lower (inflation adjusted) level than before. This has happened before.
Industrial scaling in general often looks like a sawtooth: price spike, capacity investment, crash, repeat.
Part of what's keeping prices high a little longer is that everyone knows this and is a little reluctant to plow resources into chip fabs for fear of having the bottom fall out before they recoup or sell that to someone else to hold that bag.
Graph the average compute and RAM in a mid-high end laptop at an inflation adjusted price point for the past 40 years. It's very exponential and hasn't slowed down much.
No. Prices will crash when supply side expands to meet the increased demand. Because demand won't go down to pre-bubble times any time soon. Unfortunately the supply side has been very slow in increasing production, partly because most steps of the production chain are all maxed out.
On a long enough scale you are right that prices will likely normalize to a better level, but before 2030? That would mean the factories are built quickly once they begin.
The entire reason why hardware prices are so absurd right now is because manufacturers across the board are doing everything to prevent that crash.
They all collectively chose NOT to increase supply with increased demand. So if the bubble pops, they just go back to previous prices without oversupply driving the prices to rock bottom.
This is the core of my belief that data center construction is a huge bubble.
AI is not a bubble, IMO, though we may see a retrench and some companies with sky-high valuations will crash to more reasonable ones. But data center demand is probably a bubble, and the main driver will be reduction in the actual amount of power and data center space required to serve escalating demand.
I think hardware and model improvements will pace or maybe outrun demand and then when demand starts to saturate will keep going and leave a lot of orphaned data centers.
Bull case - spend to date is about $1tn or 0.8% of global GDP. If AI becomes comparable with people for doing jobs it makes sense to put a few percent of GDP into it.
I disagree. I own over 1TB of vram at home. I can tell you that it's not a bubble. From my builds, I would rather have cloud, cloud is easier. From running small models like Qwen3.8-27B to large models like Qwen3.8-2.4T. I can tell you that small models will never be enough or match up. Everyone will want the smartest model, not just a good enough model.
> Everyone will want the smartest model, not just a good enough model.
Not so sure about this. There’s always a potential threshold. After all, we don’t all use the most powerful computers, the latest phones, the highest resolution cameras, the fastest or best cars.
I am already not interested in cloud LLMs and I don’t even use the best (on paper) model that I can run locally. I prefer a model that people insisted (here) was “dead on arrival” but appears to work better for me.
I think the difference is that AI as an edge. That edge will turn into more money, better quality of life, etc. Of course, with serious skills, you might be able to use use a not so smart model to keep up with folks with smart models. People are lazy tho, and will prefer for AI to do all the work if it means they do none.
I don’t know. But if you assume that the AI companies have an enterprise subscription product available to any given market sector then given their desperate need for money they will sell it to anyone and everyone. So it becomes a widely used standard feature. Having access to it doesn’t give you an edge; it puts you on the same surface as everyone else.
It’s like being an algorithmic betting exchange gambler; being the first with access to some new stream of information may give you a very temporary advantage but once everyone has access to it, the market prices it in.
If you want an advantage you have to seek it out elsewhere.
It might be in the harness or tooling, but if your cloud LLM can write it quickly for you, it’s the same for your competitors; their cloud LLM can write it for them.
The idea that using a cloud LLM is an edge — an advantage — doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny.
Jevon's paradox isn't a physical law, it doesn't magically apply to everything. Millions more copies of Atari's ET game didn't cause everyone to pickup a cheap copy, and cause extra demand for a garbage video game. Some times (actually, usually, I'd argue) things are made that will sell for less than the cost of construction because of irrationality, and they don't induce extra demand and they don't change the negative profit margins.
You can't simply wave Jevon's paradox at things. Thousands of miles of canals were dug in the UK that couldn't be sustained and were abandoned. Thousands of miles of railways were laid that could be sustained and were abandoned. And those are potentially durable investments, unlike cheap walls, pillars and roofs laid over a levelled concrete slab full of fast depreciating IT equipment.
I'm so glad the tide here is turning on this talking point, brought on by exactly the same people beating us over the head with it for months while no progress is made towards it materializing.
Many, many people who post here are capable neither of real analysis nor distinguishing real analysis from memes. They aren't hackers, they are adherents of a cult that happens to focus on the same subject matter as hackers.
Jevon's paradox only applies to products with near infinite demand. Energy being the most famous example. I dont think its difficult to argue that compute/intelligence is also a base input into the economy and theres almost no limit to the amount of intelligence the world will want.
Read a rant about corporate Scrum hellholes before AI existed. Reddit and this site is full of them.
This is similar except mindlessly churning short tickets with no time to plan or think and producing crap has been replaced my mindlessly herding bots and producing crap. Management doesn’t care and just wants to push tickets is a constant.
I’ve seen the term “code grinding” for these environments and I saw that phrase as far back as the 2000s.
This isn’t a new type of workplace. I’m willing to believe AI has made it even more dull.
It’s an interesting point made in about 10X the words it should have taken.
It’s a major issue I have with nonfiction in general though. Most of the words are superfluous. Unlike fiction it’s not prose-poetry or storytelling art either, just dry filler.
I'm skeptical of whether that's always true, especially today.
Usually when I want pure facts I now want concise and to the point. If I want art I read fiction. Fiction can convey other things, even facts and new ideas, but the main reason it exists (at least for me) is that it's art.
What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
> There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.
Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.
> Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs.
Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.
There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
> The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.
Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
I thought about this in a different context many years back. A friend lent me a GP2X, a Linux based handheld game console. I already had a Nintendo DS, with one of those homebrew cartridges (which I used for the officially advertised purposes, rather than the wink-wink-nudge-nudge purposes). That got me to thinking whether locked down platforms were okay, that they may actually provide opportunities for developers of open systems.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.
> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
Actually they don't work because those apps suck. Typically the banks are responsible for preventing their own apps from working there. Because they don't care or because they follow some bullshit security-theatre policies, or because they just don't understand security, I don't know.
It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.
But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.
lol. what an android user comment. “Simply install LineageOS! All you have to do is extract this tarball…”
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
> What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
We're on HN. If you're on Android and seeing ads then you're doing something wrong.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.
Google Photos is always trying to upsell storage beyond 15GB: "(you're going to lose your pictures), turn on backup?". Even pressing the "Search" button got me that prompt once, with some blah blah that AI-assisted search only works when the photos are on the cloud...
Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
I have used several models of Sony Compact phones, until Sony discontinued that line of products, then ASUS phones.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same.
However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.
Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
