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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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192 points redohmy | 3 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.607s | source
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mrsilencedogood ◴[21 Nov 25 21:22 UTC] No.46009135[source]▶
All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

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epistasis ◴[21 Nov 25 21:43 UTC] No.46009325[source]▶
It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

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automatic6131 ◴[21 Nov 25 22:14 UTC] No.46009619[source]▶
We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
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epistasis ◴[21 Nov 25 22:17 UTC] No.46009668[source]▶
This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs.

Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it.

Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.

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CamperBob2 ◴[22 Nov 25 01:35 UTC] No.46011241[source]▶
Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.
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1. adgjlsfhk1 ◴[22 Nov 25 02:09 UTC] No.46011411[source]▶
IMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2 decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years
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2. CamperBob2 ◴[22 Nov 25 02:25 UTC] No.46011506[source]▶
All true, and I'm not making a value statement about whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-blank threatened their fortunes.

Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.

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3. jordanb ◴[22 Nov 25 02:54 UTC] No.46011645[source]▶
The oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler.

That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.