cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/53870509
Guys guys chill. Just use Claude to reverse engineer everything you use in Rust and it'll all fit in 4gb
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
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We allowed tech companies to have more money than entire countries by repealing the laws that forced them to reinvest their profits. They in turn bought out supplier's entire stock of RAM to stifle their competition and eventually remove tech ownership from the lower classes. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with greed.
The WEF: All according to keikaku.
TL Note
Keikaku means plan
Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn't actually use yet. I'm convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn't capable.
If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.
Nothing quite like offloading all the heavy lifting to massive data centers in the cloud, only to bottleneck your $2,000 laptop because a todo-list app needed its own dedicated copy of Chrome just to render three lines of text.
That sounds disgusting. I'm willing to fall back to like DDR2 and my Core 2 Duo again, if it means maintaining my digital sovereignty.
Jokes on them, I have converted my entire workflow to be as simple as possible and I like playing retro games. I am good with using old "outdated" hardware.
Hell my laptop is 10+ years old now.
Fuck their subscriptions. I'll game locally on the thin clients if I have to. 2034, 512MB of RAM? It will fucking run Doom! Fuck it I remember running a Minecraft server with 768MB of system memory back in 2011. It worked for over 10 people.
Its going to be odd having really powerful CPUs and being limited by memory, what that leaves us able to run or not and how well it will run. Discord should be sweating, return to IRC!
Tbh, thanks to Wirth's Law there's a lot of unoptimized code out there. With the squeeze on hardware there's incentive for developers to actually give a shit about making their software run well so they can maintain/build their userbase.
Don't get me wrong, the current hardware situation is bullshit, but there's ways to minimize its impact on consumers
Thanks. I didn't know that had a name.
I hate wasting resources. The service i work on processes millions of transactions a month on a $14 AWS instance with spare capacity. Did I need to do that? No. But wherever we have performance issues I like to fix it before scaling the instance up. It was on the $7 instance for a while but 1GB memory wasn't quite cutting it.
Unused RAM is RAM wasted /s
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To be fair, the amount of RAM was stagnating for a decade already.
Let's see the positive part of it! Now programmers will have to learn how to actually optimise their programs and NOT to use Electron, Tauri and any other hybrid framework ever again!! /s
Looks around Oh fu- Everyones just vibecoding their shit
8gb don't fit windows 11 plus chrome
Why the fuck is anyone still using Chrome when there's so many good forks of Firefox? I refuse to use any browser that doesn't support adblockers on principal. I haven't willingly seen an ad in over a decade and I'm not about to start doing that again.
That's why I run Linux, then Chrome can be unleashed. Who needs all those dumb spyware services gobbling up ram in the background or an update service that installs in the background only to snipe your presentation for an update.
I also enjoy that Linux will roll upgrades easy-peasy, unlike Windows where "ope, you've gotta buy new hardware because we're bankrolled by OEMs"
Maybe Windows 12 is just around the corner, with dark mode as default and completely focused on AI. So basically just a black box with text input and output. Have we seen that before?
Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way...
What's coming... is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them... and all the hardware is in forms that aren't going to be convertable into consumer devices.
What's going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade... Remember google Stadia, Luna etc...
People won't be buying PCs... they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content... governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that's a security risk they can't control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS's or firmware that can't be controlled.
Best of all it's super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month... and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts... you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you'll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.
this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.
i think more or less that’s it’s difficult to foresee what will happen in the next 5 years.
what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”. it only takes a handful of poor decisions for a company to fail, and many more better decisions for it to succeed.
what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”.
Well, I don't think people generally think that literally anymore. Nowadays what it ends up meaning is that if the company is such a monolith central to modern life, it can make the stupidest decisions imaginable and simply be "propped up" by sucking money out of our pockets.
Less "They're too big to fail" and more "They won't let it fail, even if it should."
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I'll give up on technology before becoming dependent on the cloud. I'm set with what I have now for at least a decade, I'll downsize down to my last RPi or equivalent if I can't get components.
I brought my 23 year old IBM x31 back to life last year just to see if I could, and it's happy to be dragged kicking and screaming until 2031, when I'm pretty sure it'll no longer be supported in the Linux kernel. I'll do it with the rest of my devices if I have to while cannibalizing components to keep others going.
I can probably completely disconnect my network from the internet and live happily on the services I have running and my library card.
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What you describe needs continued investment into datacenters, which will be a no go when the bubble pops. The hardware doesn't last forever (avg. life expectancy is somewhere around 6 years iirc), and running that hardware also isn't free at all.
Add to that that you can nowadays run Cyberpunk 2077 on medium detail with 60 FPS on a freaking Android Phone with FEX and Proton, and personal computing is far from dead, regardless of what they want.
Edit: I'd rather expect mainboards that make HBM available for consumer PCs to pop up, and that hardware for personal inference drops in price dramatically.
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my main computer has 48GB of RAM.
And I don't even game.
Damn, you could join two calls on MS Teams
You wish.
In 2015 it would've shipped with a functional operating system.
Windows 7 was discontinued by then.
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I bought a computer in 2007 that was 8GB of RAM and a TB Hard-drive, but a recent windows update bricked the machine because it didn't have enough space. Is that what's going to happen to these machines? Just, right off-the-line and into the garbage?
Not sure, on Linux I don't really think about these things. Never had a computer become "bricked".
Tbh it's great for the Linux community because we can pick them up secondhand cheap and continue using them.
Brick more laptops Windows. 🐸
I doubt its fundamentally destroyed unless it did that during a bios update. You can probably install linux on it
Well what happened is it tried to update, got stuck, and now won't start. tried starting it over and over and over again while hitting F1 and F2 and it just spins it's fans. Though it randomly will start-up into a weird BIOS safe mode and give me a couple options, but I've yet to find the magic option that let's me boot it up using the previous version of windows just so I can turn it into a Linux machine. It's gotten to the point that I'm willing to pay someone to take it and convert it into Linux Fedora or Debian for me (and then pay for a quick tutorial in how tf Linux works 😭 )
EDIT is this actually a service? If this exists I'll fucking do it, I swear
We can do some troubleshooting. Assuming its just software, you should be able to mash any of f11, f12, delete, or f2. Depending on the laptop, you may need to also press Fn. If that doesnt work, you get into the weeds of attempting to remove the bios coin battery or maybe (what worked for me one time) removing then reinserting the RAM sticks or shuffling them around.
From there, you should get a bios menu (UEFI most likely, but thats semantics). You should have a boot option, which you can use to follow any OS installation tutorial youd like.
The short version is find a working pc (library works) and an empty USB drive, download rufus, use Rufus to make a bootable usb, plug it into pc, do the thing that worked above, and bobs your uncle!
Id highly recommend CachyOs, choosing KDE Plasma and Limine, with BTRFS. None of those things have to make sense to you, but theyre probably the right choice for 9/10 laypeople.
Also you get "I use arch btw" bragging rights (I say so; some may disagree but theyll have to personally fight me irl)
Good luck!
Is the BIOS battery just dead?
Tip: you don’t need to boot in to windows to install Linux. If you can access the BIOS and/or a boot menu, you can boot off a USB stick and install from there.
Here’s one of many guides out there: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-create-bootable-linux-usb-drive/
EDIT is this actually a service? If this exists I'll fucking do it, I swear
It technically is for a lot of PC repair shops that don't otherwise advertise it, but I remember some ye olde Craigslist posts offering such a service back in the day lol.
I'd honestly do it for free if I knew you in person lmao.
Same. I used to work in IT and this was my bread and butter for on-the-side money; "broken" laptops
I am fucking 🤏 this close to starting a business where I just slam LMDE on poor people's laptops and put on LXQT and call it a day.
The only problem is that if someone can't afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.
Also, I'm only good enough to just shove linux on a shitty computer, not be a 24/7 linux customiser. Also, getting paid to install linux on people's computers seems like it violates... something.
Also, getting paid to install linux on people's computers seems like it violates... something.
Nah, even the GNU people themselves explicitly encourage that.
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You'd be getting paid for the service, not for the software, so it's fine
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My Latitude from like 2019 with 32GB of DDR4 sure is feeling fancy these days.
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Welcome to the Brazilian personal computer experience. Enjoy!
Silver lining? Just maybe software vendors might be a little more careful with memory usage.
I won't hold my breath though.
Nah, everything's gonna be a web app
Wait no, everything's already a fucking web app
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Just wait until AI sends most of us back to a time when we were unemployed.
I had 32 gigs of RAM in the PC I built in 2015.
I need to be honest here. I bought my current "gaming" laptop in 2020 because my PC got struck by lightning right at the height of the last GPU crisis and I needed something. It came with 8gb of RAM, upgradable to 32 gb. I have never needed more. That system runs Cyberpunk at 100 steady fps, and I have no desire to play anything more graphically intense than that.
That being said, I wanted to upgrade last year because it was possible. I looked up the price for SO-DIMM RAM right after it skyrocketed and said "nope, I'm good".
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