Oh boy, if its not the consequences of their own actions.
Good! Motherboard prices have been wildly out of control for a while now. Asus selling 1k motherboards when that same tier of motherboard used to top out at 400 bucks max. Let these greedy fucks have their lunch.
Don’t forget gutting the connectivity on lower end motherboards. Apparently PS/2 ports and LED error lights are premium features now.
Do people still use PS/2 ports?
Yea, those with balls.
It’s important for my PS2 mouse!
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting. They tried with Stadia to get people to play games hosted in the cloud, but that was never going to fly.
With the compute demands of AI (which is comparable to a AAA game except for the largest models), they dont want to make the same mistake and let you have the compute. They see this as an oppurtunity for subscription fees for the earth.
The fact that we cant get hardware for a reasonable price is an added bonus to this plan.
All of this only works of everyone subscribes to this shit. Businesses will, because its just easier to manage it. Consumers though should not give in. If you want to run an agent, use a small local model.
The best thing that can be done is to make local open source agents and models approachable for regular users. Right now, they arent.
I work for a large retailer that you’ve definitely heard of. We are pulling away from our cloud hosted presence and are building out a self-managed virtual data center in one of our own physical data centers.
Even enterprise knows that paying a monthly uncontrolled cost is shit.
So you guys are bascially building out your own cloud? Where does one even start with something like that?
We are fully cloud where I am, but i have this dream where we self host our inferrence. Ever since i learned more about that 40k acre data cneter in Utah offering capacity for the big guys (AWS, etc), im very skeptical about how safe our data is when sending it to a model. Ethical issues aside
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.
Imagine the mental health benefits when AI datacentres make computers unaffordable, so we all have to go outside more, and then the AI datacentres shrivel because they have no customers, because we can’t access anything with no computers. So the AI companies die off.
I can dream, ok?
I would love this to be an unintended outcome from all this. However, I don’t think that’s where we’re headed.
I, for one, think there’s a lot of slop in and around the engineering of phones. We might see a lot more software, storage, and overall activity crunched, compressed, and crammed into our portable devices instead. And with more stuff in the cloud/SaaS realm, they can also become (even) thinner clients at the same time. :(
It’s “heavier” gear like laptops and desktops that’ll probably get pushed into the pro and “prosumer” market.
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.
Thankfully there’s a growing number of businesses that have been burned by this, and it seems like companies are starting to try bringing their critical systems back in-house again
There is this tipping point where it becomes more cost effective to bring it inhouse, even with the staffing requirements. For small to medium sized buinesses though cloud all the way.
where it becomes more cost effective
Reliability and risk are also factors. What do you do when a vendor tries to lock you into a walled garden before cranking up prices? What about storage of sensitive information? Sometimes the additional cost of doing it in-house pays off in ways that are difficult to track
Me running old Asus B350 AM4 Board from 2017…
Hey, it works! I’m running a 5800x and don’t plan on touching a thing unless I need to.
I run 5700X3D on this thing combined with 7900XTX. It just works. I’m going to use this motherboard until that setup is outdated
AI is an amazing tool for fascists.
Annihilate private access to computing, censor and rewrite all comms, destroy free software and the last remnants of education…
Every single decision made for evil.
And all these vendors who are locking themselves into one customer are about to learn why that’s a bad idea.
The worst thing is that when used for good AI is fantastic! Scientific progress with purpose built AI to find planets, predict the weather, and tons of pattern matching has been in use for decades with positive benefits!
Even LLMs can be a useful tool in the right situations where looking like words people would say but accuracy is NOT important.
The problem is trying to use LLMs to do everything and failing while running the tech industry, the environment, and soon the economy into the ground. They took something positive, ruined it and coopted the terminology while shoving it down everyone’s throats.
Sorry but I’m so done with hearing about how cool and useful the knife that they’re plunging into our necks is.
Maybe try reading my comment again?
This article talks exactly about that: https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
How are they about to learn why that’s a bad idea? Like, when the bubble pops?
I think. Most likely they going to be outcompeted by china.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/why-china-s-deepseek-qwen-and-moonshot-are-a-worry-for-us-ai-rivals
AI is used as propaganda tools to spread it, and it can bee seen on youtube, social media quite readily. plus it sexualizes victims to like csam, and festishized unattainable “women” for conservatives.
conservaties pretty much buys into/believes in anything that is scammy.
I don’t know if spending unfathomable amounts of money buying up the entire global supply of computing products can be considered a “tool”.
I’m not here to argue for or against LLMs in general, but self-hostable AI is a thing. Actually open AI is a thing.
A blanket statement saying about AI as a whole technology being good for fascism is about as useful as saying “roads are good for fascism” (they’re great for troop movement after all).
You can’t self host anything when the hardware is no longer affordable.
I recently saw a Hacker News article on people running some Deepseek V4 Flash variant on macOS, which is a surprisingly capable model for its size
Or available. Companies have pre-sold years worth of inventory to AI companies.
You see hot that’s tangential to what you’re replying to?
Ai is evil
LOCAL AI is not all evil
Computers are expensive
Your point is completely valid, but in another discussion.
Sorry, but I think the point about local AI not necessarily being evil is the tangent here.
The OP is about motherboard shortages, which is being driven by the big AI companies and is making hardware unaffordable for normal users
The top level reply to that is about how that’s bad because it removes the ability for people to be in control of their own computing
Then someone comes in, saying “yeah, but you can host your own AI so that it’s not evil so not all AI is bad”
Then someone points out that you can only host your AI if you can afford the hardware to do so which, as the OP and the comment you replied to pointed out, is getting really hard to do.
Only when you ignore what was literally the first premise and conclusion.
if you did not understand the comment from above it’s fine but splitting hairs like you are doing is silly (everybody knows it’s not 100 % of AI is 100% evil)…
your comment is exactly the same as when people say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”… yes, we all know guns are not autonomously killing people, the point is that guns, as a tool, are remarkably good at doing something we do not want, which is to kill people
Not to go on a separate tangent, but that’s the entire point of guns. They are supposed to kill. That’s not meant to be some crazy conservative defense of them or opposition to regulating them. Just pointing out something that seems to get lost in conversations.
Correct… so when I tell you “guns DON’T kill people, people kill people” you are right to assume and I am just an idiot trying to jingle keys in front of you to distract you from the fact that guns do in fact kill people.
Corps want to privatize roads and make them all toll roads too
They are succeeding in my area.
Roads were also useful for random citizens and people who happened to be in the area.
LLMs are overwhelmingly more useful to bad actors.
I’ve looked into self-hosted AI and decided it’s not worth the cost - both in terms of hardware and energy - when compared to the relative value to be gotten out of it. YMMV.
Same, pretty much. It is possible though, which makes LLMs a more democratic technology than, say, nuclear reactors.
The models you can run on consumer hardware are still nowhere near the stuff that runs in corporate data centers. To stick with your metaphor, its like running a little steam engine at home while the big guys get to operate nuclear reactors…
You can get pretty far with a stack of 5090s and llama.cpp with split mode graph (or so I’ve heard, I’ve never tried), or AMD’s unified memory CPU thing.
It’s not as good as data centre grade stuff, but it’s not nothing either.
The US government is already setting down the legal framework to make self hostable AI ilegal so good luck with that. Also self hostable AI is still being trained on stolen material so still fascist.
That’s kinda my point. Roads are a useful technology, but they can be used by fascists.
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Sure, you may be able to buy a cheaper motherboard for a while. But you’ll pay through the nose to populate it, hence the falling motherboard sales.
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How has this whole saga not been an obvious indictment of ‘the free market?’
Big players shouldn’t be allowed to gobble up all the resources needed by small ones. How is it not obvious that they need to wait until production increases to meet their needs before embarking on their little project?
The free market means the market is free to fuck you. Yes you in particular 😅
mankind’s oldest trade, but doesnt compare to the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table.
I have a home server waiting around for an SSD for a year now. I have the money, but I don’t like feeling like I’m getting scammed. So I’d rather wait for this market to collapse than give them my money.
Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years but I guess they couldn’t hear them over the sound of the bags of dirty lobbyist money landing on their desks.
And then there are the financial “irregularities” funding the AI boom which are also not getting any attention.
Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years
Unfortunately there’s plenty of economists that still believe in hardcore libertarianism, which is what led to our current situation
Can we create a fund with gamers, and then buy the manufacturers that go under?
We need just one of each, MB, PS, GPU, hopefully something for CPU will be buyable as well.
I literally don’t think we will have enough money. These are near trillion dollar factories we’re talking about. Whole countries can’t even afford to make more.
The sheer amount of global cooperation necessary to make these things is baffling.
If they are going under, maybe we can grab a good deal.
For CPU and GPU, our options are mostly TSMC, Samsung and Intel. Nvidia and AMD don’t really have fabs. Any of those can also help with the other chips on a motherboard. Samsung also do NAND so they’d be the best to acquire.
I think Samsung is going to get hit with helium shortages which are needed in fab, outside of hormuz the US is the only one with a locked supply
right before mother’s day as well! smh.
When is the best time to buy pc parts? Should I still wait?
About 2019.
If it still works, keep using it.
If you need it for work/self now - best time is now, if you don’t need it for now - later.
Speculating for necessary items (even with rental bullshit) won’t help you most likely, and would just add mental pain.
Can always buy used, and older, if that works for you (though the prices are ridiculously also high)
I know you’re just a person but when do you think prices might go back down? I feel like we’re looking at a decade out honestly
We’re mainly just waiting for the AI bubble to pop, and it’s looking more and more likely every day as companies are slowly realising the only people that like AI are the companies selling the solutions.
You are assuming it’s going to break if it gets no better it is already useful and may well get much cheaper after all the dotcom bubble breaking didn’t eliminate computing
Prices are never going to go down. Never in the history of ever has a capitalist reduced their prices after a “crisis” causes an extended period of higher prices. What might happen is that they don’t keep increasing prices for a while to allow consumer purchasing power to rise (basically you have to start earning more money).
Yep, especially because chip manufacturing has such a massive barrier to enter.
Idk man. Shit’s so wild, they might never go down (fascism, ww3, complete meltdown of capitalistic markets due to french revolution levels of incompetent wealth inequality in some specific third world country out in the west, or some wild interpolation of them all).
Or they might go down next week when some specific big AI company starts selling off datacenter parts (get ready for dirt cheap racks)
Though, with datacenter parts, problem is, they’re mostly completely useless for consumers, because of hardware vendor lock in, most likely.
I guess in the end, I am happy I bought more storage space, gpu, and replacement cpu when I needed it, even if it seemed a bit high (now it’s cosmic)
I still see fewer NAS motherboard options on Aliexpress than a year ago.
If we can’t make a time machine to go backwards, can we at least pause time? The future absolutely fucking sucks, let’s just avoid it altogether lol
Death to Chronos?
May shadows conceal you.
Pausing time would be worse than living forever. I could not imagine a greater torture.
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Seed debris in the orbit to destroy current satellites and then prevent new ones from being launched for several decades
Honestly I quite like space.
Better solution is to just kill like six people. Because that’s all the AI industry is, it’s six really annoying rich guys who are having the most extravagant pissing contest in history.
Six? There’s Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai at a minimum to start with, but there are many others too. I’m including the CEOs of Nvidia and AMD because they’ve been pushing AI for years to get more valuable customers than we ever were to them.
Just in case anyone needs a list.
This is our fucking insane reality:
Who wins? 6 rich guys or 8 Billion people?
Easy. 6 rich guys.
…
Honestly I wouldn’t mind so much if someone created an AI that was actually useful.
I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that’s 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That’s not terrible for pricing
According to valves hardware survey over half of all gamers have hardware less powerful than the Steam Machine so provided valve don’t go mad with the pricing that may actually end up happening.
I think the steam deck and the switch 2 are probably too low power to be reasonable targets.