I’m Tired Of These Useless Jackasses Making The Computer Expensive

I have a nice little NAS that I got before the pandemic. NAS stands for “Network Attached Storage;” it’s basically a baby server you shove hard drives into and connect to your router. A NAS is a wonderful thing to have, as it makes the process of storing your files and having them accessible much easier without involving a cloud storage company. You can run a streaming service like Jellyfin or Plex for all your friends, or a music streaming service like Navidrome. 

I’ve been meaning to replace my NAS for a while; she’s a loyal soldier but is at capacity and struggles on 4k videos. I was planning on doing this as an Aftermath piece, but then I looked at the prices of spinning disk drives, which are now twice what I paid for them–just like SSDs, and just like RAM, just like GPUs before them. Despite the world I live in, I love the computer, and I am tired of these useless AI dipshits making the computers expensive.

It has been a historically bad time to buy any computer that is not a Mac mini since about mid September. Sure, the pandemic was bad, but there was a rational enough reason for shortages (untold sickness on a global scale). Price hikes in RAM are entirely thanks to the Y Combinator-brained jackasses pushing AI into everything. 

There is a historic data center buildup going on to fuel this bubble, and what used to be reliable, cheap and boring parts have shot through the roof price wise. If you bought a stick of RAM in September and flipped it you could make more than most stocks. 

The other component of this is that there are functionally three companies that produce this stuff at scale and which dominate the market–SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung–and they kind of don’t give a shit if they sell to Sam Altman or you. But before you get mad, they want you to know that it isn’t their fault and that this was inevitable as their stock shot straight up. Micron shuttered Crucial, their consumer-facing RAM brand, in December to focus on AI. Factories are being built, but scaling up takes years, although there’s some hope that Chinese manufacturers could scale up. What’s worse, this has also come for flash memory as well, and as a guy who had to go to Microcenter and pay twice as much as he would have in August for an M.2 SSD, it’s rough out there. Guess what else uses RAM? Graphics cards! And while prices did briefly crash, they are now shooting back up just in time for, to quote Steve Burke of Gamer’s Nexus, an “inevitable opportunity to screw consumers”.

Simplifying the impact of this to video games is a bit like explaining geopolitics to Americans in terms of burgers, but unfortunately it is dire for gaming hardware. Steam Decks are currently out of stock, with Valve citing the AI crunch. As we previously reported, the Steam Machine has been delayed because stupid little babies can’t stop using AI to write their emails. The Switch 2 might go up in price, and Sony’s plans for the next iteration of the PlayStation might get pushed back, but don’t worry because the PS5 could also get expensive. The Raspberry Pi, the teensy little computer nerds put in their house to do dork tasks like block ads, has gone up in price not once but now twice.  Framework has announced multiple hikes on its laptops. Apple claims it’s trying to avoid raising prices “as much as possible”, whatever that means, but it’s gotten to the point where the obscene premium Apple charges for upgrades is starting to look reasonable, which says as much about the situation as it does Apple. And the CEO of Phison is out here speculating that many consumer electronics businesses will straight up go out of business due to this. Even outside of what we consider consumer electronics, RAM is in so many things that aren’t just phones and laptops that this could get very nasty quite quickly.

And for what? For a speculative bubble that is so clearly unsustainable that you would have to have psychosis to believe it could ever pay out? So that the notoriously corrupt memory industry can get in on this boom before everything craters? Proponents of AI only want to talk about the utility of these things because Claude got slightly better at making the code that they are paid to write. But none of these people want to talk about the externalities attached to making mildly better agentic AI that still fucks up an unacceptable amount, and when they do they sound either profoundly gullible, disingenuous, uninterested or like they’re logged into their Vanguard profile while they’re talking to you.

I would be blissfully happy if I never had to talk about AI ever again. Unfortunately I am compelled to think about this because it’s fucking up computers, and I deeply love computers. I grew up making computers. I went to summer camp for computers (like twice, I’m not kidding). I love writing about computers and telling people why I find them special with all my heart. I enjoy jailbreaking closed hardware that would otherwise become e-waste, like robot vacuums and Amazon devices, and giving them a second life as something ethical. I love solder and burning rosin, and getting a fresh stack of PCBs sent to me from a factory. I love to create a machine from parts, and my heart overflows with joy when that machine does exactly what I want it to do, despite every multinational company stuffing it with shit I never asked for.

The rabid adherents of AI – not those who feel compelled to use it for work, but the ones who won’t shut the fuck up about it – are too blinkered, greedy, or ignorant to see the writing on the wall. They do not love computers; maybe they never did. They love money and having a mistake-prone LLM do their work for them. They love increasingly ugly leather jackets. They fear falling behind their peers, and would do anything to keep up no matter the impact on the world. They love the insular fascist tech culture that radiates like a cancer from the Bay Area, a once vibrant and interesting place made foul by their presence. They love offloading their tasks to something mimicking a human voice, and scaring themselves into thinking it has personhood despite the entire premise being flawed from the jump. They love deskilling themselves in real time and fooling themselves into thinking they’re Albert Einstein 2. 

And that would be bad enough if they kept it in a nasty little Discord server, but like libertarianism, crypto, and NFTs before it, they just refuse to shut the fuck up about it. It’s an endless torrent of tortured blogs delivered in an inhuman chorus of the same mockery of a voice. Who are they trying to convince, me or themselves? Why do they need my validation? To quote the great ethicist Carl Brutananadilewski, “Go away, go away. So tired of this. Friggen go away you freak.” and “What do you need? What do you want? Can I not just live here without occasionally having to deal with you animals?”

I just want to build my computers in peace. Simpler tech is nice, but it’s not a total solution to this. I want to build a new NAS, to tend to it, to manage its Docker Compose file like a garden. I want to make more Proxmox nodes and have them do my little tasks in unison. I want to pull my hair out for hours trying to get a machine to do something like I’m training an unruly dog, only to find a simple solution that a living, breathing person wrote. I want more decommissioned 22TB Exos X22 hard drives that I can shove into a box I’ve frankensteined together, so I can save the media that I love. I love the computer with all my heart, and these jackasses keep making that love impossible.