Let's see, this is a low speed 2x16GB DDR4 kit for $300.
The closest option on the pcpartpicker chart was about $75 as a stable price. So that one's only a 4x increase.
Versus DDR5 where... it looks like a 5x increase to me? I'm seeing a jump from 200USD up to 1000USD. Edit: Oh there's an extra jump in the last month on the CAD version but not the USD version.
> Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one.
You're comparing to memory sticks that went up 6x. If you were offering anywhere near 6x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
> If you were offering 5x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
My 1080Ti had died. I had to use a 8800GTS from the late 2000s for about a year. As that was the only GPU I had. I have no iGPU on my CPU.
There was at one time, no stock available. Not on Amazon, Not on Overclockers, Not on Scan. They had some weird lotto system taking place on most sites.
Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
> Unless this article is massively misleading, sure it was out of stock at 1x price but it wasn't out of stock at 2-3x price.
Again I am in the UK. You could not buy any PI other than 1GB model and maybe the zero. Both of which were useless to me.
> Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
Ah, so you could have bought one, but you judged the available suppliers to be too risky.
Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.
Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
> Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.
You are being pedantic. I find this type of discussion very tiresome. I've explained why in other forks of this thread. Quite honestly it pisses me off.
> Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
Not in the UK. Someone was running a site with all the places that you could buy from. I was checking most days. Stock was extremely limited other than a few models.
This was my experience, too. Pis would disappear from online retailers before you noticed the stock alert email.
I only got hold of a Pi 4 by chance when Raspberry Pi did an official pop-up store in Southampton for one day only. The queue to get in was about 45 mins long.
Okay, UK, maybe that changes things more than I expected. But what about ebay and the sites that replaced classified ads? And is it unreasonable for me to say that you could have bought a US listing and had it reshipped?
Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
Even with ebay's buyer protection?
Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place.
There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card.
> Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
I would be foolish to trust some overpriced (or underpriced) listing on ebay. I've had an ebay/paypal account now for 25+ years, I've learned to never do this because I got screwed every time I did.
> What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your comment upthread.
> If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
And please, there's no need to call the other poster names. That's uncalled-for and childish. You seem to be new here (9-day-old account), so please read the site guidelines and turn it down a notch or three.
> That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were simply unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment.
It is for any normal person in relatively normal setting.
Only amongst technical people is this sort of discourse tolerated where someone pretends that an unreasonable option (the scalper in this case as you admitted yourself) should be included in a statement when it is perfectly obvious it should not be included because it is not in any way reasonable.
I could have flown to the US and bought a card or China. Is that reasonable? For most people it isn't reasonable. It wasn't for me. Buying from an untrustworthy seller, is unreasonable.
> the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment.
They were out of stock on every reputable site. Therefore I could not buy a card at any price from them because they didn't exist.
> That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
I was honest and correct to begin with. The poster was using prices and availability in the US and not the UK.
> And please, there's no need to call the other poster names.
I never called them names. I expressed my annoyance at their behaviour.
You are being a pendant as far as I am concerned and arguing semantics with me is not going to convince me and many others.
So I suggest in future you should learn that using this line of logic (where you expect me to do something unreasonable to a huge number of people) is not something that people are going to put up with. It is really annoying to have to converse in this manner and in fact I believe that often that is wholly disingenuous and I no longer wish to speak to you.
If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant.
But I see things a different way. The logic I'm actually using is not pedantic.
You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second. We're using different premises, and we're reaching different conclusions because of that. My logic is fine, and your logic is fine.
> If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant.
I am not categorising any situation. The vast majority of people would omit unreasonable options.
I could buy a racing bike that is £5000 new, for £200 when I live in London (back in 2000s). The bike would most likely would have been stolen. So technically I can buy a £5000 bike for £200. But most people wouldn't want to buy from a thief and consider it unethical.
People feel similarly about scalpers and other untrustworthy sellers.
> You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second.
You started the conversation claiming I was outright lying. Then when I clarified to you what I meant you continued claiming I was lying/misstating. That is really annoying.
If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
> You started the conversation claiming I was outright lying. Then when I clarified to you what I meant you continued claiming I was lying/misstating. That is really annoying.
I said "If you were offering anywhere near 6x MSRP" I didn't believe you, and it turns out you weren't offering 6x MSRP. So I wasn't calling you a liar.
> If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
So if I had explicitly said "I think it's fine you didn't use ebay" that would have fixed everything? Because I never argued about your personal choice, I argued about you calling ebay "unreasonable".
Well for the record, I was going to say something like that in response to "If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one"."
But then I saw you had called me "hyper-pedantic" and I focused on rebuffing that attack instead.
Edit: And it doesn't help that you never actually did that modification, and instead keep insisting that what you originally said means the same thing.
> So if I had explicitly said "I think it's fine you didn't use ebay" that would have fixed everything? Because I never argued about your personal choice, I argued about you calling ebay "unreasonable".
Ebay in itself isn't unreasonable.
Ebay is unreasonable when the only sellers are untrustworthy sellers, when there was a bunch of scams at the time. Which there were.
I've clarified this many times now. I don't care what interpretation is now of what I said.
> Well for the record, I was going to say something like that in response to "If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one"."
I don't believe you. I've had plenty of stupid conversations like this, with plenty of tech nerds. Rarely happens with non-tech people. I spend some time in non-tech hobby spaces that are technical (Classic Car / Bike repairs) and this convo style never happens.
People like yourself think you are being clever buy poking holes in everything that said. I am quite happy to be quite obnoxious in pointing this out. I am tired of it. I am this cantankerous IRL about this btw.
The fact is that you could not buy a new graphics card in the UK for some time during COVID via almost every online retailers. I had conversations with other people in the UK that wanted to buy PC hardware and they were in the same situation. The same was true for the Pi 4 at the time. Making stupid semantic arguments doesn't change that fact.
> Edit: And it doesn't help that you never actually did that modification, and instead keep insisting that what you originally said means the same thing.
For all intents and purposes it is the same thing if you aren't engaging in pedantry and semantics. I try not to engage in it anymore (unless it is tit for tat), because I understand it pisses people off. You obviously don't care.
I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown. The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree
> I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown.
You like the other people are was arguing with are pretending that the options were reasonable. They weren't at the time. Many other people I know thought the same.
There was no stock for any GPU except for absolute crap on any of the retail sites in the UK. There are not many options in the UK generally. It is not like the US.
As far as I am concerned what you are engaging is effectively gas-lighting.
> The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree
If you deliberately want to misunderstand what is said you could draw that conclusion. Which is blatantly what you are doing.
The only thing I claimed about the current high price DRAM situation is:
1) It is likely to get worse before it gets better (due to supply chain issues due to current wars).
2) It resolve itself over time and you should be patient and just make your existing stuff last as long as possible.
That is how any crisis often plays out and I was actually telling people in my original statement not to be all doom and gloom and just be patient. It will sort itself out. It won't be this year for sure.
My favorite part would have to be where you can’t remember the actual, structurally crucial piece of information that your argument rests on and just said that you didn’t feel like getting a GPU off eBay.
>I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place.
As your evidence that
> Doomers IMO are just click baiting.
Like you admitted that you _do not remember_ why it was entirely unreasonable or impossible and are arguing against people that do possess memory of it being possible and reasonable enough for them at the time. Amazing stuff.
> My favorite part would have to be where you can’t remember the actual, structurally crucial piece of information that your argument rests on and just said that you didn’t feel like getting a GPU off eBay.
You are misunderstanding what is being said. I suspect it is deliberate.
It is often said that "Prevention is often better than the cure". Similarly it is often better not to risk spending your money unwisely than to have to go through processes to recover your money. It matters not what the specifics of the situation was (it happened a decade or more ago)
I communicated that quite clearly. So you either didn't understand or you are deliberately misunderstanding what I said.
> Like you admitted that you _do not remember_ why it was entirely unreasonable or impossible and are arguing against people that do possess memory of it being possible and
reasonable enough for them at the time. Amazing stuff.
I bet you felt really clever constructing that. However as explained the specifics weren't the point. Avoiding the process entirely for funds recovery is the point.
I don’t know why you’re being so combative here. I said I liked your posts about vaguely feeling that a specific thing was probably worse during covid lockdown than everyone else remembers it and how that means that your are equipped to predict the impact of a completely different phenomenon on something else. I like these posts! Responding to “hmm this specific thing looks bad” with “alright I don’t actually remember what I’m basing this on but I saw a quote about economists that I think means it’s good and it feels like everyone that doesn’t vibe with me and my quote are wrong” is fantastic posting!
I wasn't trying to be a smart arse at all. "I couldn't get a new card from a store" and "I couldn't get a card at all" are extremely different claims in my mind.
I'd rate my pedantry level as quite low. From my point of view this is not a nitpick.
Especially because you emphasized "at any price". It's the scalpers and the used market that were selling at any price. Sticking to reputable stores means sticking close to MSRP.
Paying a scalper on ebay isn't. Which is what I said. Misstating what I said is disingenuous.
> You could have gotten another 1080Ti from a legitimate previous owner.
They were being scalped as well. Also people were holding onto their 10 series cards because the other cards were too expensive. So I would have had to buy an older card (which I had already had one fail) at an inflated price.
I could have bought a GT 710 or a GT1030, but that wouldn't have been any better than my 8800GTS really.
I could have flown to Taiwan and bought a card. I could have stolen one. I am sure you will invent another fantasy scenario where I could have gotten a graphics card that I didn't think about at the time.
The fact is that I could not buy a new card from an online retailer in the UK as they were out of stock. Even when they did come into stock there was a lotto system. So you couldn't really buy one then. That is a fact.
Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices.
Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.
> Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration
I remember a similar situation with neon early in the Ukraine invasion a few years ago. What I expect to happen is some other source coming online that currently doesn't try to capture it for economic reasons.
Helium recovery in scientific settings for cost saving reasons is already done, so it's not like there isn't expertise in using it.
> Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it.
This is wild. I never thought about how they separated gases from natural gas fields. The carbon footprint of each kg of that helium must be astonishingly large.
Helium is actually pretty hard to keep ahold of, being a very light and small noble gas. It can diffuse through a surprising amount of materials, flow through far smaller cracks than you would expect, and is quite hard to filter out of a mixture of gases.
Also superfluid helium (a big chunk of helium used for refrigeration like in e.g. the LHC) has the weird property of flowing the same speed through a tiny hole as a large one and coating everything with a molecular coating. Superfluid helium is basically a bose einstein condensate but macro-scale, totally counterintuitive. Essentially a thermal superconductor. Zero viscosity.
AFAIK they recapture most, but recapturing all simply isn't possible / financially feasible. And they use a lot of helium, so even if they capture most of it, the losses are still higher than the currently available supply.
Some of the april fools things can be annoying, but I have a big shrug for there being less real news for a day. Anything important will get through and most days don't have much interesting news anyway.
While I agree with your first sentence, I haven't been impressed with cloudflare's AI track record. I think my expectations for "cloudflare software on the HN front page that was significantly AI coded" are lower than "random guy's software on the HN front page that was significantly AI coded".
> The term vibe coding does not do that process justice imho.
Well that's because actual vibe coding is a completely separate thing from "LLM assisted coding, know what you’re doing but use LLMs to do tedious stuff".
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "started calling it", but vibe coding doesn't need a new name, it needs people to be clear about what they mean.
I think the jury is still out on this one, meaning people have different meanings when using the term "vibe coding".
OP says "vibe-coded months long project", imho that is not vibe coding? I'd say it's vibe coding if op does not know the programming language and just let the LLM write everything. This does not sound like it.
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