Apes

Datacenters aren't free to run.

You have land taxes and or rent, building upkeep, staffing costs, electricity, water, hardware replacement costs.

And new build DCs have blown all these costs through the roof justifying the decision because the price of compute is so high. When the prices come crashing down, the expenses will remain fixed where they are now.

I think you're conflating the impact of a small bubble on a narrow market space with our current situation. The current bubble is larger than anything ever seen before, and is now encompassing nearly the entire economy.

New datacenter builds are so far along the curve of diminishing returns it's absurd. No one is going to want to pay to run a datacenter that costs 10x as much to run for the same compute.

And the problem is with all these "freed" resources, the entire pipeline will be affected. No one will want to buy any new silicon if they can buy a B200 for $1000. We could potentially see a decade or more of stagnation in the chip sector, or even significant regressions in capabilities as foundries are shut down due to lack of demand.

The impact of what is coming scares me to my core. I don't think we're going to bounce back from this any time soon.

If it costs you more to generate the tokens that the market is willing to pay for those tokens, then not even bankruptcy will save any of the costs invested in one of these datacenters.

If the cutting edge OpenAI token prices are $80 per 1M token, and the open source tokens are $1 per 1M token, that's a huge gap of "this will never be able to make money under any scenario if the bubble bursts" that will catch a lot of these new datacenters. No one will run a datacenter that costs $5 per 1M token to sell at $1 per 1M token even if the debts are cleared.

We're already seeing repercussions from an economy that has been retooled not to actually produce anything of value, but to produce more air to fill up the largest economic bubble in the history of the world.

National debt through the roof, inflation through the roof, PHD and research programs gutted, non-ai startups dead and unfunded for the last 4 years. These are just a few things that have been sacrificed on the altar of this bubble - there's far more I haven't recounted.

We're already in a widespread long term economic collapse, but the delusion just hasn't broken yet.

I'll believe it the day SpaceX - the AI company that is mostly making money selling datacenter compute using gas turbines for energy - takes a single day 90% or greater drop in stock price.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding - but I thought there's already "dumb" headsets doing foveated eye tracking, like the Pimax headsets. If that's the case, then you don't need $300 of ram and a $200 CPU to perform this locally.

I'm not sure going from less than $50 of RAM and a $50 processor for foveated eye tracking to 16 GiB of RAM ($300) and a Snapdragon 8 ($200) is a "slight bump".

The real question is why did they release this as a standalone unit for $1049 and then claim they couldn't sell it for less due to the RAM shortage - when that implies they could have released a dumb unit that depends on the Steam Deck or Steam Machine for far less?

This isn't a very productive statement by any standard.

No argument against VMs - just that they have a different risk profile and a different set of trade-offs than containers. They're not a silver bullet, but if they're working for you, then go for it.

You can't really do anything useful with a VM either unless you start punching holes in those boundaries.

If you're connecting to a host on a port < 1024, then you know a SysAdmin must have set it up, and it must be trustworthy. It was a simpler time.

If you have write access to nginx.conf, you can set "user root root;"