It all makes sense if we remember that the garden variety AI we have today (ChatGPT, etc) are nothing more than fancy models that predict which words typically appear one after the other in books and reddit posts.

I enjoyed the depth of this answer. That being said…

4 copies seems like a level of paranoia that is not practical for the average consumer.

3 is what I use, and I consider that an already more advanced use case.

2 is probably most practical for the average person.

Why do I say this? The cost of the backup solution needs to be less than the value of the data itself x the effort to recover the incrementally missing data x the value of your time x the chance of failure.

In my experience, very few people have data that is so valuable that they need such a very thorough backup solution. Honestly, a 2$ thumb drive can contain most of the data the average user would actually miss and can’t easily find again scouring online.

You think console prices won’t be affected by ram supply issues?

It’s a very easy movie, almost guaranteed to work, and makes them money. I don’t know why they’re not doing it.

Probably because export tariffs make your product less appealing to import compared to other potential competing exporters who don’t collude on an export tax, or the target country who might be incentives to produce domestically instead of importing. Obviously, some industries are more geographically locked than others, but these deals still have knock on effects.

While you are not wrong about these different specialities within the trade, there can still be an effect. Let me illustrate:

Suppose you like bananas but not apples. One day there is an apple disease that kills most of the apple trees leading to a collapse of the apple market. You feel relieved because you don’t eat bananas anyways. But you go to the supermarket and find that not only are the apple shelves empty, the banana shelves are empty too! Why? Well people still gotta eat, and not everyone is as picky as you, they switched to bananas and now the banana market is under supplied too. And it’s not like you can build a banana farm overnight.

Back to electricians, if the salaries of data center electricians increases rapidly, you will find that those electricians who are qualified for both (even if it is just a very small number) might focus on data centres, straining the supply of residential electricians. Just like with banana orchards, it takes time for new electricians to enter the market, and those new hires will further be swayed to the data center specialty first, further straining the residential market.

We can see a real example of this with the price of RAM. RAM manufacturers saw increased demand for data centre RAM so they switched focus to that market and it ended up drying out the consumer side supply, hence the surge in price. And just as with banana plantations and electricians, you can’t start up a RAM fab overnight.

Ding ding ding. If they had made changes to improve the game, they would be advertising those changes. No rational company invests time and money into improving a product without capitalizing on those changes. Best case scenario, nothing noticable changes, worst case scenario, they have added anti-consumer features, like drm, game store/3rd party launchers, sign-in, telemetry, ads, and other crap.

Accountability in the court of public opinion, the last line of defense. The public needs to understand that institutions will not save us. They are corruptable.

You don’t need the latest Nvidea GPU to self host your own computing. You don’t even need ssds. You arguably don’t even need that much RAM. A ten year old Dell work fine. Are you self hosting your own AI? Probably not. So what? AI is not mature enough that it is a necessity.

Are computing prices coming down? Unlikely before the AI bubble pops. I think we have taken for granted that computing will perpetually improve price/performance. This is not sustainable.