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points by orlp 18 hours ago | 0 comments

> Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point?

Forget about AI, the entire PC market is getting killed over this.

As an avid gamer I'm unsure if in 5 years I can even buy a gaming PC anymore. Not even because of cost, but it's unclear if anyone will still make the components anymore.

NVIDIA isn't interested, nor is AMD.

[–] MisterTea 16 hours ago

Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.

BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.

Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.

To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.

[–] QuantumNomad_ 14 hours ago

I have an external USB-C 4 TB portable SSD called the Samsung T7 Shield 4TB Black.

I bought it at the middle/end of 2024, and I paid 3790 NOK (~357 USD at the time).

The lowest price online in my country for the same product new online today is 10233 NOK (~1085 USD)!

270% of what it was before, it’s absolutely bonkers.

I was even considering putting it up for sale a few weeks ago. But of course what I would be able to get for it would be no where near $1000 when selling second hand. Instead I might if I am lucky get slightly more than I originally paid which would be nice and all except that if I then regret selling it it’s still expensive to replace, or I have to also buy it second hand from someone else that may have worn theirs out considerably more compared to what I have done to the one I currently have. Mine is very well taken care of since the start, and although it’s nearing capacity now I haven’t written and deleted data over and over on it. So there has been very little wear on the flash.

[–] 1vuio0pswjnm7 12 hours ago

"... we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have..."

Been doing that for myself for the past 15 years

Advances in hardware are only impressive and useful for me when I avoid the so-called "tech" company "engineer" BS

The reason I stop using old computers is never due to software. It's always outdated proprietary cables, failing power adapters, screens, hinges, and so on

Sometimes "minimalism" is simply for _speed, resource usage control and/or reliability_ (that's what I get from small software, anyway) in contrast with prevailing marketed garbage that is bloated and sluggish by commparison

Other times, claims of "minimalism" might be trying to capitalise on some silly trend

Personally I like what the computers I own can do for me and learning to make them do more. I have a brain, I don't do much "guessing" and I don't really need "inference" on a daily basis, certainly not for such a high cost

I have all the "convenience" I can handle

[–] ruszki 18 hours ago

I think there is a second order effect of this: it won't be worth making games for PC. At least, large budget games.

[–] rbits 16 hours ago

It also won't be worth it to make games for next gen consoles if the prices end up being what people are saying. So in the end they'll just keep doing what they're doing right now, and not increase the hardware requirements of their games.

[–] nine_k 15 hours ago

The extensive use of AI for producing better code (if so instructed) may even decrease the hardware requirements.

[–] saidnooneever 18 hours ago

not true. it wont be worth it anymore to implement Path Tracing or Ray tracing which is absolutely not needed for a prime gaming experience. its deterimental even because ull only get into games with a certain type of person who can afford a big machine.

Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.

[–] the_snooze 15 hours ago

AI slop-cloning is killing small indie games too.

[–] jasomill 15 hours ago

Is it really? Slop clones of games have been a thing for ages, I’d expext the market to be reasonably resistant by now.

[–] PaulStatezny 15 hours ago

Here's how it's been going:

1. Indy developer releases a game or trailer of a game. 2. Within an extremely short time (days to weeks at most) there are clones on the market. 3. These games often outperform the original.

It's absolutely not something that's gone on for ages.

It might be a novel gameplay idea / twist on a genre, and mere days after launch instead of being able to stand on its own and gather attention it's drowning in a pool of lookalikes. It's no longer distinct.

The speed of being able to slop together something like this is less than 1% of what it used to be.

[–] MetaWhirledPeas 14 hours ago

Clones are not going to be the problem. The slopalanch will be the problem. Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/playmygame/. There's a new game every few minutes and pretty much zero of them are getting any attention. And this is only the beginning.

So it's easier than ever to make a game, but it's more difficult than ever to get anyone to try what you've made. I'd say that's just as bad, and in some ways worse, than having your game cloned.

For someone looking to play a new game it will be difficult to sort through all the bad games to find the good ones. And for anyone pouring their soul into a game they will more likely than not have an audience of one.

Our eventual destination is probably going to be a) pick up a device, b) ask your bot to make up a game on the spot, c) play. It sounds so lonely and depressing.

[–] acheron 15 hours ago

HN went crazy over 2048, which was a slop clone of Threes, something like 15 years ago.

So yes maybe it happens more often now, but it’s still not new.

[–] birdsongs 14 hours ago

> So yes maybe it happens more often now

Yes, that's literally the point of the people you're responding to. Has HN lost reading comprehension, or are you arguing in bad faith?

It used to happen occasionally. Now it happens instantly. That delta is the problem.

[–] TobiasJacob 18 hours ago

I'm still hoping some future LLM is good and small enough for people to run local AI for everyday life.

[–] jrm4 16 hours ago

It's interesting trying to be an AI "moderate," which as the owner of a 16gb card I definitely am. Still working on the balance, but it really does feel like I'm going to land on something like "use external AI services to build a few tools, but use my local rig to actually handle everything personal once those tools are built."

[–] trollbridge 17 hours ago

Already here. 3.8-27b is good enough.

5 years ago it would have been science fiction

[–] 72deluxe 16 hours ago

Do you find it intelligent enough? What hardware are you using?

[–] criley2 16 hours ago

For me, qwen 3.8 27b on my m5 max is so slow and dumb that I can't think of a single use for it. Haiku, Luna, or data center scale open models are ten times faster and ten times smarter (and inference so cheap that it's essentially free). It was a nifty toy to brag to friends about but why would I waste my time goofing with something so slow and dumb?

[–] liuliu 15 hours ago

Try DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017, feels much better: https://github.com/drawthingsai/local-code-community

[–] jrm4 16 hours ago

For roughly the same reason you might slow down and read a book on how to do something as opposed to speedrunning 20 youtube videos?

[–] criley2 13 hours ago

Are you insinuating that your agents are more effective at 20 tok/s than 200 tok/s?

I don't even understand your analogy. I'm not watching the youtube video or reading the book. The model is. And a big computer can watch 20 youtube videos faster than a small computer can watch 1, and do a far better job understanding all of them (bigger model at data center scale is both smarter and faster than smaller model at local scale).

[–] LeBit 14 hours ago

On my Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48G I find Qwen 3.8 27B perfectly usable, useful and fast enough.

Are you trying to one shot create the Linux kernel?

[–] nkrisc 17 hours ago

There a lots and lots of great games that will run on computers that would be considered low power today. And I’m not even talking about older games.

[–] goodmythical 13 hours ago

I was floored to discover that my i3-1215U with integrated graphics can easily run PS2 games at 60ish FPS. These are triple A games, just a little older.

If I started today and played 10 games I can emulate every single day for the rest of my life restricting myself to purely emulation, I wouldn't run out of new games for...five and a half years. (assuming my rough calculation of ~20k available games).

Drop it to a game a day and I will likely never run out of games given my life expectancy.

Consider that I will find some games I like to play for more than a day and there are easily well more than enough games in emulation alone to entertain me for the rest of my life on existing entry level hardware.

Will I ever play MODERN SHOOTER {CURRENT YEAR} on this device? Certainly not, but I can't see a reason to bemoan lack of access to such a small portion of the available industry.

Like, suppose you're a reader. You might be right that you might enjoy your favorites in their original languages, but you'd be silly to be worried about your future ability to enjoy books just because you'll likely never get to experience reading 三体 as a chinese citizen fluent in the language.

[–] consp 17 hours ago

It's also killing the console market. Sharp drops in all console sales after "adjusting" to ram prices.

[–] satirr 17 hours ago

Not just the Console and PC's market, the Phone market to. On my country before, IDR 2.000.000, you can have a 8GB phone with G100 Ultimate. How about Now? On that price, you'll just got the 4/128 with Unisoc T7250.

[–] theptip 13 hours ago

I agree it’s brutal right now.

I have to think, it can’t take much time before the Chinese DUV fabs come online and non-frontier chip prices crater. Sure, you might not be able to get 5090 equivalents, but the 30xx series was DUV and so that should be replicable in a few years.

Whatever quality bar / process node China gets to you know they will scale it out super hard.

(Some quick investigation suggests that the Yuliangsheng DUV machines currently under construction are 28nm, which would map to 2014’s GTX 900. Perhaps I’m being overly bullish but I assume they will recapitulate/clone the tech faster than the rate it was originally discovered.)

[–] ctrlaltdileep 18 hours ago

Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.

Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.

[–] weinzierl 17 hours ago

Most of it has switched to mobile phones and tablets. It doesn't help that almost everywhere digital classroom means tablet instead of laptop. Sure, the control is convenient for the teacher, but it also means we are raising our children in walled gardens. So much so, that whole generations don't even leave that garden in their spare time.

[–] Silagi 15 hours ago

I'm still waiting for the day a mac air style shell exists where I plug my phone in and just get a real desktop experience. The chips in phones these days are plenty powerful. I always thought it would be where we were going, but alas, no major manufacturer seems to want to make it feel like a seamless, premium experience. Samsung got sorta close, but the peripherals involved never felt great or didn't make sense from a cost perspective.

I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.

[–] elorant 14 hours ago

Sure they will. The same components go into every office PC. As for GPUs, we could always play older games.

[–] orlp 9 hours ago

Office tower PCs aren't a market anymore. It's only laptops or single-board mini PCs connecting to a remote environment.

[–] saidnooneever 18 hours ago

intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.

gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...

[–] dmantis 17 hours ago

Cyberpunk runs even on steamdeck, it doesn't need an extreme machine.

[–] dlevine 16 hours ago

Have you seen the current prices on Steam Deck? Almost $800 for the base model.

And I assume they will only continue to go up. When it came out, purchasing one seemed like an easy decision. But I paid half as much for one with the same CPU/RAM (and upgraded my SSD for cheap).

[–] moffkalast 18 hours ago

At least you'll be able to get a Pi 5 for $700.

[–] snitch182 18 hours ago

Pi6 might get very close to buisiness usage but i guess microsoft will use just more cpu/gpu for windows to stop that from happening.

[–] 72deluxe 16 hours ago

What's the rumours on the Pi6?

[–] ZigaoWang 15 hours ago

its gonna be at around early 2028

[–] vitaflo 14 hours ago

If nobody can afford a gaming PC, devs will need to make games that run on older hardware. This isn't a bad thing.

[–] blueshoe 18 hours ago

On the bright side, you’ll be able to play Skyrim-halo-Pokémon-Minecraft as much as you want.

[–] blauditore 18 hours ago

If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.

[–] carlosjobim 16 hours ago

What is more sensible: Listening to the best music on an average sound system or listening to average music on the best sound system?

There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.

[–] swader999 17 hours ago

I'm just sticking with Tetris.

[–] greenchair 17 hours ago

Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.

[–] Imustaskforhelp 17 hours ago

If not for adults, my opinion is that teenagers/younger generations are gonna be interested within buying ultra-realistic games. Aside from Minecraft, Roblox, GTA 5 as indie games, most players in this age do in my opinion play AAA games or the most solid graphics game that the world has to offer (as much as their laptops allow them to)