:insert Will Smith presenting meme:
The Cloud
Maybe it's a regional thing? I live in Europe.
Lot of people using their office-notebooks at home, even if its not allowed. Most people out of tech do not have big hardware at home anymore.
The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.
I am using AI now to make a game engine that will run and make 'nice enough' graphics on simpler machines. things like laptops with iGPU and 4gb of ram.
U can still get quite ok graphics, and make very complex and rich gameplay systems using such a machine. It just needs to be the target machine while developing so the right tradeoffs are made.
But yes, it has been a test of just how few tokens you can get by on.
Which would not be all too bad. It would also mean the end of stupid SaaS subscription services, and mass surveillance, adtech. And shitty propaganda.
And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.
Like talking to people?
In fact, it was closer to the opposite.
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.
5 years ago it would have been science fiction
I don't even understand your analogy. I'm not watching the youtube video or reading the book. The model is. And, unlike me, a big computer can watch 20 youtube videos faster than a small computer can watch 1, and do a far better job understanding (bigger model at data center scale is both smarter and faster than smaller model at local scale).
Are you trying to one shot create the Linux kernel?
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
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.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
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.
So yes maybe it happens more often now, but it’s still not new.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.
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.
I bought it at the middle/end of 2024, and I paid 3790 NOK (~357 USD at the time).
The lowest price online 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 any over on it.
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 and reliability_ (that's what I get, anyway) in contrast with prevailing marketed garbage that is bloated and sluggish by commparison
Other times, claims of "minimalism" might be tryinng 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, certainnly not for such a high cost to the environment
I have all the "convenience" I can handle
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.)
Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.
A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.
If you're not partaking that's only on you.
> If you're not partaking that's only on you.
There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.
They absolutely can't do what, or more of what the biggest models can do. There's nothing frontier about small local Qwen or Gemma models.
2899$ gets you a machine that is just good enough to run some small models, slowly, with terrible context, requires a ton of tinkering and fine tuning, managing and constantly downloading a bunch of huge file blobs, etc.
Partaking those $2899 in most of the large cloud models would bring you much more productivity, much less boilerplate and time spent in setup, etc.
So.. just weird accusing people here of "not partaking" in AI when you're just essentially toying around if you're actually comparing local Qwen and Gemma's with frontier models.
Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.
It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).
You might say that this is impossible but look at current trends. A lot of information today is getting shared in the walled gardens of Internet. You have to login to social media to view posts. The Twitter, Reddit threads that were accessible freely now require you to log in. Similar thing is happening across other networks. People are no longer asking questions on Stackoverflow. All those queries are gonig to AI. If someone chooses to not use AI, their options will be limited in future.
The free sharing of information on Internet is I think coming to an end.
Not even talking dictatotship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason.
I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.
So it’s plausible they’ll block me from accessing Mistral since they host DeepSeek models.
New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)
Maybe arcade games?
- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute
- Wired is better than wireless
- The public wants new things
- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power
As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.
- local latency is lower than network latency
- latency is important for action games
But then it became normal.
The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.
But, the “good enough for most lay people” intelligence bar will for sure miniaturize, especially as inference ASICs get more specialized.
Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.