Hetzner Price Adjustment(docs.hetzner.com) |
Hetzner Price Adjustment(docs.hetzner.com) |
At that same time, I was reading about this story about WireCard. It was like Stripe for Europe and worth billions. Turns out it was run by a Russian spy network and was all a sham. That video alleged Germany’s bureaucracy is filled with Russian agents and this can be traced back to the East/West Berlin days.
To save a few bucks a month over DO didn’t seem worth it to me to send my passport to a foreign country.
I don't really understand what bothers you so much about providing a photo of a "passport" (if you are an European citizen they require a ID card) but credit card info didn't registered as a concern worth noting. Can you explain what is the difference?
FWIW, if Hetzner had asked for my passport when I signed up, I would not have given it either.
Hetzner was widely recommended and I was more than happy to pay a premium for their supposedly-excellent service, but I guess they didn't want my money.
Oh well. Went with OVH instead, and haven't had any issues since.
They also don’t ask every person for the passport picture so maybe me using a custom DNS and VPN might’ve triggered something on their end.
I feel like the whole password thing was meant as a protection against SPAM or using servers for nefarious purposes as they know who's really behind every server.
Although, I can also see how real criminals would work around that easily by supplying fake identities. Sounds like one of those "why we can't have nice things". Well, at least the password I gave them 17 years ago has expired since.
Fuck no. I too decided to stick with DO.
Russian spies? WOW, the earth got really flat these days. Seeing what US is doing with citizens and private companies I would love some Russian spy to be interested in exactly mine, boring passport.
- Jeff Bezos
There are just 3 or 4 DDRAM manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron). They fully intend to make it impractical to purchase a server outside of the hyperscalers.
Germany also has legal KYC requirements for web hosting and most other things relating to telecommunications.
When I read about the WireCard scandal, the KYC stuff sent to them over the years is probably in the hands of foreign intelligence already. That’s what gave me pause.
This belief is deeply misguided. Do you understand that credit card transactions are used to provide access to your personal information?
Some companies even employ small token charges as identity verification processes. Payment systems such as MasterCard even explocitly offer identity verification services built around their payment system.
https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/business/cybersecurity-...
But a photo of your id card with your mobile camera is where you draw the line?
I'll probably find the time and energy to move to OVH or something some time.
After that experience (I've written about it multiple times in the past on HN), I really don't understand why people still defend DO.
I don’t “defend DO”, I just use it for now; but as someone whose opinion on DO is at least neutral-to-positive, it is that way because I have never experienced what you did nor even read about similar experiences before. Your experiences don’t automatically impact my opinions without any form of communication.
I was an early wirecard customer, just using their prepaid debit cards, but I cancelled in 2017 because I didn't even trust them to keep a balance of 30€ safe.
Sorry, but anyone who didn't see that scam coming from 10 miles away was either gambling, complicit, or an idiot.
I don't expect this to persuade, to be clear. I don't believe that people engaging in whataboutism are unable to understand why it's wrong so much as they have a different approach to language that detaches it from accountability to any sort of conceptual coherence that people are normally searching for when testing integrity of arguments; commenting on it is more about revealing a difference in which background values inform the way you choose to communicate.
If you just run some blogs, of course, this is not important.
Renewed M1 Mac in 2026: <$400
Entry level MacBook in 2006: $1099
This hardware price spike is just a blip.
Number of living cells when I'm 99: 100000000000000
Number of living cells when I'm a 2 day embryo: 50
This decline in my living cells is just a blip
Tech is killing itself until this idiotic bubble bursts.
Then we'll be in a decade of drought again like 2001
Why? From what I understand, Ram production is not ramping up. Even if a bubble does pop, I don't think it's even guaranteed to drop to where it was.
There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?
Americans:
Does anyone else have any suggestions for competitive pricing for this kind of thing (e.g. batch jobs)? Was this applied retrospectively to existing customers?
They are quite good at costs remaining predictable. However, a few years back they cut the low-end hosts 1Gbps unlimited data transfer down to a 20GiB/month cap, and wanted everyone to go full cloud/retard to fully leverage the hardware infrastructure.
If you serve large files, a CDN may have a very narrow use case where the budgets make sense. If you are already pushing 23 TiB/month, than cloud providers are usually not worth the effort. Some rent colocation rack space. =3
Unfortunately I'm needing to run a lot of batch compute jobs (for which the hyperscalers are just insanely expensive - even to have a machine that outclasses a nice laptop becomes silly very rapidly)
I'm considering buying some machines and racking them in a colo but it feels like buying right now is also insane because of current pricing.
cloud up to 3x inexistent auction servers
AI must really be something.
waiting for the bear...
Still - AI is a great achievement?
I’m so tired of this timeline. Rich people pillaging everything, governments happily allowing it, cost of living rising everywhere, a lot of environmental improvements have been put on pause (to prioritize profits for the aforementioned people)
Everything keeps going up.
Those are some huge increases.
Raw number comparison for those interested: Tried to format it to be readable but its [Plan] [Old Hourly] [New Hourly] [Percent Change] [Old Monthly] [New Monthly] [Percent Change]
Germany (FSN/NBG) / Finland (HEL) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CAX11 0.0072 0.0096 33.33% 4.49 5.99 33.41%
CAX21 0.0128 0.0168 31.25% 7.99 10.49 31.29%
CAX31 0.0256 0.0336 31.25% 15.99 20.99 31.27%
CAX41 0.0505 0.0657 30.10% 31.49 40.99 30.17%
CCX13 0.0256 0.0689 169.14% 15.99 42.99 168.86%
CCX23 0.0505 0.1378 172.87% 31.49 85.99 173.07%
CCX33 0.1001 0.2219 121.68% 62.49 138.49 121.62%
CCX43 0.2003 0.4423 120.82% 124.99 275.99 120.81%
CCX53 0.4006 0.855 113.43% 249.99 533.49 113.40%
CCX63 0.6001 1.3678 127.93% 374.49 853.49 127.91%
CPX22 0.0128 0.0312 143.75% 7.99 19.49 143.93%
CPX32 0.0224 0.0569 154.02% 13.99 35.49 153.68%
CPX42 0.0408 0.1114 173.04% 25.49 69.49 172.62%
CPX52 0.0585 0.161 175.21% 36.49 100.49 175.39%
CPX62 0.0809 0.2083 157.48% 50.49 129.99 157.46%
CX23 0.0064 0.0088 37.50% 3.99 5.49 37.59%
CX33 0.0104 0.0136 30.77% 6.49 8.49 30.82%
CX43 0.0192 0.0256 33.33% 11.99 15.99 33.36%
CX53 0.036 0.0473 31.39% 22.49 29.49 31.12%
Germany (FSN/NBG) / Finland (HEL) Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CAX11 0.0088 0.0112 27.27% 5.49 6.99 27.32%
CAX21 0.0152 0.02 31.58% 9.49 12.49 31.61%
CAX31 0.0296 0.04 35.14% 18.49 24.99 35.15%
CAX41 0.0593 0.0777 31.03% 36.99 48.49 31.09%
CCX13 0.0296 0.0809 173.31% 18.49 50.49 173.07%
CCX23 0.0593 0.1626 174.20% 36.99 101.49 174.37%
CCX33 0.1186 0.2612 120.24% 73.99 162.99 120.29%
CCX43 0.2364 0.5216 120.64% 147.49 325.49 120.69%
CCX53 0.4727 1.0088 113.41% 294.99 629.49 113.39%
CCX63 0.7083 1.6138 127.84% 441.99 1006.99 127.83%
CPX22 0.0152 0.0368 142.11% 9.49 22.99 142.26%
CPX32 0.0256 0.0673 162.89% 15.99 41.99 162.60%
CPX42 0.0481 0.1314 173.18% 29.99 81.99 173.39%
CPX52 0.0689 0.1907 176.78% 42.99 118.99 176.79%
CPX62 0.0953 0.2452 157.29% 59.49 152.99 157.17%
CX23 0.008 0.0104 30.00% 4.99 6.49 30.06%
CX33 0.0128 0.016 25.00% 7.99 9.99 25.03%
CX43 0.0224 0.0296 32.14% 13.99 18.49 32.17%
CX53 0.0425 0.0561 32.00% 26.49 34.99 32.09%
USA (ASH/HIL) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0272 0.0697 156.25% 16.99 43.49 155.97%
CCX23 0.0545 0.1402 157.25% 33.99 87.49 157.40%
CCX33 0.1042 0.2259 116.79% 64.99 140.99 116.94%
CCX43 0.2083 0.4479 115.03% 129.99 279.49 115.01%
CCX53 0.4167 0.863 107.10% 259.99 538.49 107.12%
CCX63 0.625 1.3782 120.51% 389.99 853.49 118.85%
CPX11 0.0096 0.028 191.67% 5.99 17.49 191.99%
CPX21 0.0192 0.0513 167.19% 11.99 31.99 166.81%
CPX31 0.0336 0.1001 197.92% 20.99 62.49 197.71%
CPX41 0.0625 0.1931 208.96% 38.99 120.49 209.03%
CPX51 0.125 0.3814 205.12% 77.99 237.99 205.15%
USA (ASH/HIL)Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.032 0.0817 155.31% 19.99 50.99 155.08%
CCX23 0.0641 0.165 157.41% 39.99 102.99 157.54%
CCX33 0.1234 0.266 115.56% 76.99 165.99 115.60%
CCX43 0.246 0.528 114.63% 153.49 329.49 114.67%
CCX53 0.492 1.0184 106.99% 306.99 635.49 107.01%
CCX63 0.738 1.642 122.49% 460.49 1014.49 120.31%
CPX11 0.0112 0.0328 192.86% 6.99 20.49 193.13%
CPX21 0.0224 0.0601 168.30% 13.99 37.49 167.98%
CPX31 0.04 0.1178 194.50% 24.99 73.49 194.08%
CPX41 0.0745 0.2267 204.30% 46.49 141.49 204.35%
CPX51 0.1482 0.4479 202.23% 92.49 279.49 202.18%
Singapore (SIN) Euro
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0441 0.0865 96.15% 27.49 53.99 96.40%
CCX23 0.0825 0.1739 110.79% 51.49 108.49 110.70%
CCX33 0.1554 0.2796 79.92% 96.99 174.49 79.91%
CCX43 0.286 0.5465 91.08% 178.49 340.99 91.04%
CCX53 0.613 1.0449 70.46% 382.49 651.99 70.46%
CCX63 1.0048 1.661 65.31% 626.99 1,036.49 65.31%
CPX12 0.0128 0.0248 93.75% 7.99 15.49 93.87%
CPX22 0.0256 0.0425 66.02% 15.99 26.49 65.67%
CPX32 0.0521 0.0785 50.67% 32.49 48.99 50.78%
CPX42 0.0897 0.1498 67.00% 55.99 93.49 66.98%
CPX52 0.125 0.2155 72.40% 77.99 134.49 72.45%
CPX62 0.161 0.2756 58.42% 100.49 171.99 58.43%
Singapore (SIN) Dollar
Product OLDHR NEWHR Δ%HR OLDMTH NEWMTH Δ%MTH
CCX13 0.0521 0.1017 95.20% 32.49 63.49 95.41%
CCX23 0.0969 0.2051 111.66% 60.49 127.99 111.59%
CCX33 0.1835 0.3301 79.89% 114.49 205.99 79.92%
CCX43 0.3373 0.6442 90.99% 210.49 401.99 90.98%
CCX53 0.7235 1.2332 70.45% 451.49 769.49 70.43%
CCX63 1.1851 1.9607 65.45% 739.49 1,223.49 65.45%
CPX12 0.0152 0.0288 89.47% 9.49 17.99 89.57%
CPX22 0.0296 0.0497 67.91% 18.49 30.99 67.60%
CPX32 0.0617 0.0929 50.57% 38.49 57.99 50.66%
CPX42 0.1058 0.1763 66.64% 65.99 109.99 66.68%
CPX52 0.1482 0.254 71.39% 92.49 158.49 71.36%
CPX62 0.1899 0.3253 71.30% 118.49 202.99 71.31%"Existing server contracts will keep their terms and conditions and remain active. The changes apply exclusively to new orders and rescales of existing servers, as well as the future products that we will introduct using the new product structure."
All of these price increases are going to get passed down to consumers eventually via increased prices.
2. Volatility creates uncertainty, which always increases cost. And we've seen extreme volatility in energy prices and tariffs under the current US administration.
CPX22 (2vCPU 4GB) seems to be the exact same price as Linode 4GB (24$/month).
Linode dashboard is really good.
But why did the the CX33 only go up by €2 whereas the CPX32 went up by €21.50?
Both have 8GB of RAM, but the CPX32 has 80GB more storage and a bigger slice of CPU time.
You can see the same trend with CX23 vs CPX22.
In fact, CPX22 is now more than twice the price of CX23, despite having the same amount of disk and half the RAM.
Is there a CPU shortage now too?
I told ya about silent happiness…
It's pretty silent happiness over at the Hetzner camp.
If you already moved you're still saving 10x because the increases are for new orders.
AX162 (256GB) went from €274 -> €844
I built a homelab before the crisis started which might allow me to survive this for the next few years.
But man am I sad about folks trying to build new projects.
I wonder if there are underlying component cost connections or just corporate politics and the cold hands of the profit-people.
Firstly, Hetzner is really great, they have good service, good offers, they are rock solid, they shine especially in dedicated servers area - often better than all the cloud fad for many, many applications that does not need to scale crazily.
Having said that...
They expanded to a certain level and... just stopped. They do not have services that are making AWS/Azure attractive (all this identity/security stuff, MS Exchange like functionality), they are not even providing any viable messaging service, etc. Basic stuff.
As a result, companies who would even like to use them because they are solid, reliable, etc. simply can't, as Hetzner is missing basic services from business perspective.
So, they are not able to jump to the first league, have big customers, make big money, be able to invest into custom chips/infra, they are 100% dependent on US and Chinese providers. When something happens, like certain hardware shortage they are on the mercy of others and stop being able to compete.
Frankly, I don't fully get what the problem is. Luck of founders with vision, all those Jobs, Wozs, Zukerbergs, Elons, Bezosses? Luck of boring but effective CEOs (people like Eric Schmidt or Satya Nadella)?
Do you want hetzner identity management? Why? Xkcd standards situation? They host servers, that is what they do, I buy groceries from Walmart and I don't complain Walmart doesn't support Azure Entra ID.
They are reliable because they do one thing.
Hetzner presumably have been making use of this for years already.
It's far more likely they simply began raising prices and realized the market would tolerate it.
Doubtful. With proper support, you get reports/counts per bitflip. Most people will swap out ram that has any detected bitflips or with a small number anyway. And if you have a significant number, the machine check interupts really kill perf anyway.
If you have one product line where error will go undetected and another where it will be visible to the user (and result in returns) the manufacturer incentive is in the opposite direction as what you describe
Indeed, never buy equipment unless all other choices were explored.
Note, we may be waiting till 2029 for GPU/ddr7/flash prices to fully normalize. =3
They'll probably wait for summer, the world cup finals, or whatever's last big US government thing is so it flies under the radar.
If not then it is only a matter of time before other providers are forced into similar price hikes.
I mean don't get me wrong, this for sure is a factor but like others said, other services don't see such drastic price hikes.
None of OVH, GCP, AWS, Azure wanted so much data about me, and I run my services in all of them successfully. Not in Hetzner.
Sorry Hetzner, you're too data-hungry. Nothing you say justifies that.
big sigh of relief
So glad I got all I needed recently.
i'm currently using their hillsboro instances.
i'm not going to pay 3-4x more.
But just like a low-interest rate mortgage, I'm going to be stuck with this thing for a long time, it seems.
Edit: just noticed this is not retroactive. Still concerning looking forward.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48307959
For example, their 'Regular Performance' cloud server tier has seen a 173% price increase.
We are still around, enjoying fairly decent lifestyles for the most part, if you take away effect of politics, governance etc.
What's the next best option now?
But when Hetzner is priced like everyone else, it makes it harder to pick them over the giant AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean etc.
Laying off people also doesn't reduce cost as much as it might look like. There is a lot of hidden cost shared by everyone (also the companies that did the lay offs are hit by them). Unemployed people still have to eat and pay rent, and someone is paying for that. They spend less money on services and goods, which affects every company in the end.
AI is great, but I think it got too big.
Just my thoughts, not backed by any data. I'm not even sure I'm right.
Outside of HN, this is all people are seeing. Gamers in particular aren't seeing a benefit. They are being priced out of their hobby. The recent DDLS 5 meme is what people think of when they hear AI.
Poor companies missing out on consumer money.
It’s funny to think about. One might lose their apartment because they can’t pay rent. Then they’re homeless. What does that mean? As long as they are eating, at least some moeny is circulating. Maybe not as much because of dumpster diving and things like that. Meanwhile what was lost? One less family to pay for rent. Which means that an apartment is vacant. And rent is mostly not productive. It is mostly rent on estate ownership.
The first level of destituness (for renters at least) might not lead to less productive money circulating. But less rent money. Then when that happens to enough people you simply have more vacant apartments. Okay, a little loss of productive circulation since no one is wearing out the floors etc.
Because the consumers won't upgrade to new hardware as fast as before. People who buy their first gaming PC in 2027 might even get a lower spec in average than people who bought in 2025. So new games might require even lower hardware specs than before, to sell enough copies.
It's pretty clear by now that coding productivity increases by 10-15% with AI. Given coding is only a small part of the developer's job, there's just nothing new to consume.
The only change I have noticed in software since LLMs have hit the mass market is degradation of software quality, not increase in feature releases.
Prices have increased for literally nothing.
Not fully true. AI is now often used to fix a lot of bugs in old and badly maintained software.
The quality of big and popular software probably decreased a bit, but the quality of niche products probably improved.
Completely offtopic for this thread but I can't be the only one that would find this hilarious if it wasn't being said in earnest in every thread.
The only thing that is clear is that measuring programming is just as impossible as it has always been. In all my years of projects they've either been resounding successes or gone down in flames. The difference between good and bad is a difference in kind. Most of the bad ones didn't even know what the hell they were building and built the wrong thing.
Like, the entire idea that some omniscient manager is looking at a thousand timelines and pondering over whether to pick the $11.5M successful one or the $9.5M successful one is literally laughable. Half of them are going to make the Hindenburg look like a bit of a whoopsie and the other half you would lock in sight unseen without a second thought.
A company like Hetzner probably replaces hardware on a 5 year cycle. Maybe shorter. Maybe they could try to stretch that out but they can't avoid the cost of new hardware for very long.
Those aren't the only metrics, quality and efficiency is also important. AIslop is of higher quality than devslop on average.
Is it? If by higher quality, you mean commenting properly, sticking to naming conventions etc. I can agree. But to me, AIslop looks like it lacks "intentionality" of code written by devs, no matter how bad they are at naming things and sticking to conventions.
i.e. people who are adequately good at their jobs usually do things for a reason, and they can explain it. Even if you don't find it agreeable, it usually is consistent.
How did you come to that conclusion? That goes against everything I've heard from people who understand development. Every resource I can find about AI vs non-AI development comes to the exact opposite conclusion you did.
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
One of these two things can be true.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
> In China you have clean streets and low crime
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
Are you getting paid more or are you just doing more for fun.
And then you’re fired.
This will never happen in the USA. Together with UBI.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
I was able to borrow the audio book from my library... absolutely worth the listen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress:_Ten_Reasons_to_Look_...
(edit: formatting)
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
Look again in 1000-10000 years.
Or perhaps they're somewhere in West Virginia.
I mean for God's sake, people have been saying this shit for 3 years now, but nobody can fathom what those jobs may be.
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is: Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier. Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
They move to smaller houses or multiple families share a house. => landlords and real estate companies make less money. CEOs might not be able to upgrade ther yacht => more layoffs in the yachting industry
Parents, spouses or relatives will often chip in for rent and food. => less money spent on consumer goods and services. It's easy to cut cost for things like hairdresser, eating out, gardeners, smartphones. Instead of redoing the kitchen, the old one can be DIY fixed.
It's just a downward spiral in all parts of the economy. And in the end a lot of businesses have to cut their AI spending as a result.
I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.
It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.
One specific upside from ai?
I no longer have to write systemd unit files.
That alone may be worth the cost.
People does still believe this shit?
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Sorry, I meant 10-15% at most.
If it was by more than that then we'd see the effects in an obvious way. Since we don't those 15% are already generous.
/s
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
Tell that to Intel and how TSMC manage to outpace Intel. It was because Smartphone had a much bigger scale. The TAM of custom foundry went up by 10x.
Only when the product is being given away for free or sold way below cost. It's still unclear how large the actual market is.
The last Hetzner box I leased I had to poll for availability as if I was Ebay auction sniping. It took me 2 days to acquire it.
But even pure software companies are hit by higher hardware prices. Their customers need to buy expensive hardware and have less budget left to spend on software.
I suspect this will soon follow and no fixed subscription model, which will enforce companies/developers to be moderate and thoughtful when using AI. Also I think Microsoft will do the same for copilot
Deep Learning Super-Sampling
Not that I disagree otherwise though.
https://matthewbutterick.com/extinction-level-capitalism.htm...
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
[1]https://steamcommunity.com/app/1757300/discussions/0/5917831...
None of that is possible with the LLM flavour of slop. I can ask, but I will just get more brainless slop to describe the original slop in other words. It's a soliloquy that I find neither helpful nor interesting.
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
It is not about getting machines to run faster, it is about buying new machines setting up a whole new line. And the ROI will never make sense until the scale and price reach certain point.
>Please show sources.
You can literally apply the same theory across all commodity industry. The problem is supply Chain was never understood by wider audience.
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?
Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.
Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.
I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.
And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
Just remember we are comparing slops. If you care about your code it really doesn't matter if you write it manually or with the help of a glorified typewriter.
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.
But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.
It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).
I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?
Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.
As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
Still a win but not as big as many are selling it.
Compared to 50 years ago, the middle class is getting poorer.
You just don't want that.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
And even then people prefer blaming the prediction machine instead of recognizing their situation as the logical conclusion of capitalism.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.
Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Si...
I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.
I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.
Yes you absolutely can there are landlords that will rent you a crappy cheaper place that you can use to establish some identity chain within a month
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week
(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)
Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
What's the point of all that, to me?
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Isn't that basically just an IPSec VPN?
I… don't know. If anyone knew exactly how GFW worked (and it adapts over time), and made something that would bypass whatever blocking or throttling happens when it does, they'd make a lot of money selling their solution.
I had difficulty using non-XRay VPNs even back to my home network, so for the most part I just used data roaming even with my laptop.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965
...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.
For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.
---
rate-limited, so:
> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
Like maybe step outside yourself for a second. We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore, but also at the same time we want to argue that its not easy, and you better know XYZ about it, and actually its not a magic bullet.
How can it be both? Where else do you allow this kind of dissonance in something you think?
And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it, and we're still putting food on the table! I am happy I am not in your reality I guess.
I do not know who "we" is but I sure as hell am not arguing this -- that's demonstrably false for like 95% of all tasks I threw even at frontier/SOTA models.
I am on the side of "not as easy as many easily-hyped-up people make it out to be". Some things Opus one-shots in 10 minutes much better than I could in a full day. Most of them though, I have to keep pointing out mistakes and it missing the forest for the trees... constantly.
> And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it
I can only roll my eyes here. How dramatic.
Like its nice to be in agreement if we are but surely you got something better to be doing if you don't actually have some counter argument to my framing here? this forum is getting quite odd I must say.
And yes was being cheeky at the end there but I guess you're a little too used to being on the defense with this stuff? Or not? Still not sure. But I think your agent just finished another task, better go check!
Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.
But PP checks do happen in both cases.
The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.
Based on the far lower bar to get a product out the door.
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
Your theory does not match reality.
No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.
How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts
What’s your data source?
Keep in mind that the modern, mass middle class was created in the mid-20th century through government policies and post-WWII economic growth.
https://spp.ucalgary.ca/sites/default/files/teams/1/Publicat...
All the growth in our economy since the 70s has been captured by the richest. If purchasing power is a finite ressource, we're getting squeezed out by the 10%.
For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?
In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.
And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/real-estate-...
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
Actually good quality stuff is more affordable than ever. People just don't want to pay for quality and things that last.
It's hard to know whether moving up in pricing just buys unnecessary features in a checklist, higher quality veneer, brand name, or actual quality.
So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.
Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.
Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.
Finding the right compromises is hard work.
There, fixed that for you.
You might want to read *A Market for Lemons".
Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.
And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.
RE marketing, highly recommend ublock origin and SponsorBlock if you don't have both yet.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
Where is the horse buggy -> automobile transition of this AI age? Where is the industrialization that made clothes 10x cheaper to make? Show me examples.
This isn't the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the textile loom, or the internet. The way people are doing work has changed a bit, but from the consumer end, all I see is shit like 'your health insurance will be 30% more expensive next year' and $11 for a gallon of milk and another rent increase and when I ask Google a question the results are sometimes a bit better and sometimes a bit worse.
But yeah we don't disagree. I don't mind investing time and effort into becoming an informed consumer. But I just wish I did not have to.
But wishful thinking is nearly done wasting my years and money. If it has to be done then it does get done.
Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).
>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.
I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.
Translated from German via Claude:
"For better understanding, I would like to provide some additional notes: Hetzner Online's pricing strategy has remained unchanged for many years. Our prices are based on the respective purchasing conditions as well as internal operating costs. The key pricing factors — for example, depreciation periods and profit margins — have remained constant over many years and will continue to do so. The past nine months were an exception. During this period, we have increasingly subsidized new server hardware and passed on the increased purchasing costs to our customers only with significant delay. We are currently observing a similar development at numerous other data center operators as well. The increased purchasing prices will likely lead to a new market level. However, our established price-performance ratio will change as a result only temporarily — if at all — until the market has adjusted to the new conditions. Hetzner Online has always stood for an outstanding price-performance ratio, and that will not change in the future either. I am convinced that the current hardware crisis will neither sustainably improve nor worsen our competitive position. Rather, I expect that our relative position in the market will hardly change even within the new pricing structure. In the short term, shifts may indeed occur, since the individual market participants make their price adjustments at different points in time. In the medium and long term, however, I do not expect any significant changes to the competitive landscape."
Several random anti-Hetzner hate threads have popped up on social media and to me it shows that Hetzner is doing something right.
Nobody wants Hetzner to be bought by Oracle or Amazon.
People love to say how great it is for these alt clouds to have lower prices, until they're exposed to market forces with a company unable or unwilling to eat their profit margins.
There is no price stability to be found with MS.
Hardware costs are insane, no doubting it but it's more important than ever to be looking at the servers you're buying. For example a stick of 32GB DDR5 6400 ECC is about 1050 vs 16GB DDR5 6400 ECC is only 280 (pounds in this case), so if you can cope with say 192GB of ram in a 12 slot server, it's almost cheaper to buy two 192GB RAM servers than one 384GB one.
I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
(However, Hetzner did an earlier price increase 38 days ago. HN's submission logic sends posting the url to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066)
Old prices: https://web.archive.org/web/20260513201413/https://docs.hetz...
The least expensive one seems to be CPX11, old price $6.99, new price $20.49. That's 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD. RAM and SSD are now much more expensive, fair enough, but maybe I don't need all that for my mostly-idle VM, so then where's the plan with ~0.67GB RAM and ~13GB SSD for the old price?
https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#ram_from=256
Yeah mostly old CPUs, but considering RAM shortages gonna be much cheaper than colocation.
PS: link contains 256GB RAM filter since I guess OP need RAM.
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation hardware ... but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
(Still really like them, just wish they had dedicated servers in the US as well)
EDIT: maybe what I use in hardware is uncommon, but have been wanting an update to their AX102 line
Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...
Advertised prices for my setup are now roughly 2x what I'm currently paying.
That's why for example gasoline prices react almost immediately after something affects (or even threatens to affect) the price of crude oil, even at gas stations that have just filled their storage tanks and will be selling that already purchases gas for quite a while.
Most of us don't usually thing of computer hardware as a consumable but to a hosting business it effectively is.
I would hypothesize that there's a lot more customer churn at the lower price points than there is in the higher tiers and when you get into dedicated servers. You're dealing with people who spin up a cheap VPS, mess around with it for a while and then delete it. Or maybe the kinds of customers whose payment card expires and they don't bother to update it because they're not using that $7 VPS for that little pet project they forgot about. Payments fail and then the VPS runs for a few more weeks before they finally have to delete it due to non-payment.
Higher prices filter out the unserious people who are a higher risk for churn. What they're left with is bigger customers with bigger footprints who lock in long term rates.
Of course, this is pure speculation on my part.
For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
A couple of naive questions:
1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?
2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.
2. Eventually more plants will come on line. Most of the main manufacturers have announced expansions but these can take O(years) to come online.
If the bubble bursts and RAM demand drops, then they'll have big losses. And that's not an impossible scenario over the few X years that it takes to build a plant
They sold their allocations to people who don't have a clear path to profitability, and were paid with massive amounts of money that don't exist in reality.
I have a few more or less idle VMs running at different providers, and keeping an eye on the european VPS market it seems that many struggled, while contabo is relatively stable. E.g. ovh at times limited the buying process to 1 instance (now it is at 5, not sure what was the default before) and also available locations were limited at one point a few weeks back.
I have 5 app nodes, 2 background workers, 1 DB replica, and 4 dev/staging instances.
On new Hetzner US pricing:
5 x CCX23 (app nodes): $514.95/mo 2 x CCX13 (workers): $101.98/mo 1 x CCX23 (DB replica): $102.99/mo 4 x CX33 (dev/staging): $39.96/mo Total: ~$759/mo or $9,108/year
On 3HCloud with equivalent specs:
5 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $160/mo 2 x 8 GB 2 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 1 x 16 GB 4 vCPU dedicated: $32/mo 4 x 4 GB 2 vCPU shared: $24/mo Storage ~250 GB total (SSD smart): ~$7.50/mo Total: ~$255/mo or $3,066/year
I will let you do the math.
Hetzner is great because you can build from dedicated servers your own infra and not suffer the multi tenant issues on virtualized servers. (IOPS exhaustion for example)
And does the standardization mean that I can no longer buy extra hardware?
https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/dedicated-se...
Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas. As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).
Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.
Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.
Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.
I've been using Hetzner for many years, both personally and for business use, and I've not seen any noticeable issues regarding the latency.
Granted, my use cases are webapps/backends that are not particularly latency sensitive, and are primarily used from a few European countries.
For what's worth, I've seen cases where download speeds from Hetzner are considerably higher than from AWS eu-central-1.
The machine itself is basically useless for any type of realtime inference, no matter what the marketing page states, but I still use it for prototyping LLM integrations and running comparisons across MoE models.
If only the alternatives to framework desktop wouldn't be so poorly built, I might swap it out for a local machine which has more ram but comparable performance for stuff like gpt-oss-20b (around 70tok/s)
Along with the increase in monthly prices they've dropped setup fees back to more approachable levels, though not as low as they were a year ago. For the GEX44 it was €79 a year ago, now €114. Monthly price was €184 a year ago, now €234.
I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
This.
People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
The vast majority of personal projects are not built by those receiving FAANG salaries.
So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability.
The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.
The peering announcement or did I miss something?
I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering).
Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.
Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes.
Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized.
> The price adjustment applies to new orders and cloud instance rescales starting from 15 June 2026; 8 AM CEST.
> For orders placed before 15 June 2026, but delivered after 15 June 2026, the previous prices will apply.
I am surely/definitely happy that the price doesn't increase for me. If it increased for everyone, I'd expect a much smaller jump. Also I'm not sure how much flexibility they have to increase the price for everyone without notice, given that they are in EU.
It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this...
AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro.
Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner.
This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware.
The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers.
They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already.
Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers.
If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise.
There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao
It's very simple to move when you're just using AWS as a source for VPS capacity, but when you've got lambda functions, S3, SQS, RDS and other nice acronyms in the mix the ditching becomes a lot harder to justify.
Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware.
This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase.
But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too
If I can get a same-spec EC2 instance at AWS for just 2x the price of a Hetzner box, I would never consider Hetzner. It had to be a "10x savings".
We have some VMs on Azure and some on Hetzner, and the latter have much better performance (especially since they give you basically infinite IOPS, which matters a lot for your database) and connectivity (especially lower latency).
The large hyperscalers were ever only worth it if you need/want all the additional PaaS infrastructure they provide, like Lambda, SQS and so on.
For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.
It's important to understand how the auctions work though - the price of each server starts high and drops every couple of hours. That's why were are lots of the same spec at different prices. So, when demand is suddenly high (e.g. when the regular prices increase) the lowest prices will increase as the cheaper ones usually sell first.
These kinds of choices are kind of pricing range as engineering decisions in the end.
So that's over 7.5x what it was when I (sadly) did not buy it. Totally not kicking myself for dragging my heels on that purchase...
Cheapest 2x48GB kit I can find here now is $1500, yay. That's 5200MHz CL48 stuff.
Unlike previous boom/bust cycles, I do not believe that demand that's driving the capacity bring-up that's underway right now is going to level off in the near future.
I am personally witnessing teams at my employer that were previously unable to produce software - non-Eng teams - that are now empowered to do so, and some of them are building some cool stuff. I think this is happening at every company everywhere, and I think when we and everyone else solve the "how do we deliver and govern this stuff?" problem there's going to be an even bigger unlock.
Wild times.
[1] https://blog.ovhcloud.com/pricing-evolution-of-public-cloud-...
Dedicated servers
Looking for bare metal? See all available configurations here. and "here" is linked to
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
Yeah, sure. They even MITM your TLS for extra privacy I suppose.
It's lowered the threshold for homelab style projects dramatically. It's not doing anything I couldn't have, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze before compared to, say, Pikapods. Now there basically is no squeeze, just juice.
VPSes are usually compared to full-service cloud hosting and especially to serverless offerings, with proponents usually claiming that the costs of self-management of a VPS are vastly less than the premium AWS or Google charge for providing managed compute.
I’m mostly pointing to the irony of eliminating the ‘advantage’ of a VPS (that you can self-manage it like a grown-up, you don’t need a cloud provider to babysit you) by outsourcing management to a stochastic sysadmin who charges by the keypress.
Hetzner keeps running the old machines as long as they can find customers for them, which means they have entire buildings of 10+ year old machines still running.
Yes? How else do you think it works? At scale, hardware breaks all the time and must therefore be replaced all the time.
This is true even at Hetzner's scale.
How long do you want to run something that uses 3x the electricity for the same level of performance when you're buying power by the megawatt? How about the even older ones that use 10x as much?
But at some point hardware does break and if you're going to keep the datacenter open for business you'll need to address turnover of inventory on an ongoing basis, and if you haven't locked in long-term deals for hardware then you'll have to bear current market prices when you do that.
How's that possible?
The principle works for stable regular businesses where invoices do get paid, not for bubbles.
Stable, regular businesses generally don't take on massive amounts of debt as a matter of accomplishing their value proposition. Maybe they take on the debt as a part of an expansion into a new geographic market or on developing a new product, but they typically have cash reserves to help fund those things. Accordingly the debts are relatively small and there's at least some collateral to secure them.
Any kind of bubble, on the other hand, is, by definition, financially massive. People taking on debts take on huge debts with the hopes of huge rewards. The problem is, the debts are so huge that neither the debtor nor creditor can allow them to go unpaid.
When you reach the scale of debt that you see for AI - literally trillions of dollars - the creditor isn't just a bank or a few investors, they're entire segments of the economy. The debtors can use that as leverage to get what they want. The Great Recession is a prime example of this. You had the US government print out or borrow $700 billion-ish dollars to absolve financial institutions of the toxic mortgage-backed securities on their balance sheets. Now, could they have simply declared bankruptcy and had the assets on their balance sheets claimed by other parties? Maybe, but that would have taken too long for most people's comfort and, moreover, would have been embarrassing for the country's monied elite. There had to be a bailout to keep a bunch of things solvent in the near-term, and they got one.
You could see this here: AI companies have everyone on the hook for their bets, and if it doesn't work, you can't simply write off the value of shares of everyone who has backed the bet.
They're too big to fail. If you owe the bank $1 million, you have a problem. If you owe the economy $1 trillion, the economy has a problem.
Personal computing in the sense of actually controlling our hardware and software will be killed (or rather degraded) by government regulation and platform oligopolies.
I feel the same. But at the same time the generalization of laptops (with custom motherboard, and soldered parts) and smartphones (custom SoC) means this is already a niche thing. Gamers were the last mass market for upgradeable modular deskops, but a sufficiently long hardware drought would most likely make game editors way more resource conscious, which may kill this niche entirely.
Monthly costs have gone up as well. Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, construction has exploded far beyond inflation and, most importantly, electricity prices are still ridiculous due to merit-order and the refusal of splitting up Germany into multiple power pricing regions.
Guess what? I am paying as a consumer about the same price as before 2022. Did Hetzner change their price down? Remember, the industrial price also dropped (and they also build out a large solar plant). No ...
Ok, inflation? But those price increases already covered part of that... Just saying, its not been the first price increase that happened. There have been multiple ones that Hetzner did over the years. Some flew under people radars.
> Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany,
Yea, we have seen nothing of that increase... O, wait, they reduce our income because the social security increase their costs. Yay ..
Running on bare metal VPS is only viable if you're:
a) a startup with a true shoestring budget, you can get massive use out of a single mid-tier server auction server with everything on it web, backend and database AND you have someone in-house with the skills to do that.
b) you're so big you can afford to hire a full rotation of SREs to manage your crap AND your devs / SREs are able to maintain Rabbit MQ, Postgres and whatever object storage you're using themselves - and someone Does The Math and calculates it's cheaper and the risks are manageable.
In the middle there's AWS. You can run millions of revenue through AWS with maybe 2-3 people managing the backend infra. 99% of times when something breaks suddenly, it's up to Amazon to fix it.
You talk about competent SRE being hard to find and manage but then you describe needing several AWS backend specialists.
I think I'd rather have a generalized SRE team with portable infrastructure.
Maybe that's just me. I watched an org get burned by Google App Engine. I find these proprietary stacks to be a giant trap.
I don't understand what you mean by "sustainable". The whole industry tripled their process AND is maxing out their production lines. They are cashing out as expected.
It matters nothing if this trend can't be kept up for years, because by then their output still meets demand AND they will be sitting on a huge bag of cash.
I think you are confusing "I don't want to pay this much" with "this isn't sustainable". The sellers are cleaning up stock at a huge markup and buyers are still buying like crazy.
Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?
And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.
that is a 20T market
they dont need you to afford a subscription, they need your boss to replace you with their service
Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.
Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.
They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.
Crazy stuff
For the exact same specs (CX23 vs VPS-1 2027), price is 6 vs 4.5 € and you can get a 15% discount on OVH if you order a full year.
Exceptions naturally if you for some reason had an abnormally high failure rate, e.g. capacitor plague.
They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the prices, lower demand and make even more money without additional risk.
That's what the post you're responding to was asking.
It is wrong to believe that a product's "correct" price is simply its cost plus a reasonable markup.
There's other factors that might limit how much a business can charge their customers. But an ideal business acts more like a monopoly and charges far far more than is 'fair'.
In theory competition keeps prices in check: in practice competition doesn't work as advertised.
That's very imprecise.
There are multiple optima on the price/demand elasticity curve.
At the two ends: Few expensive items and many inexpensive items, Hetzner has consistently operated at low margins and massive volume.
Which means they charge customers as little as they can to get as many customers as possible.
You'll see that evident on any price comparison chart prior to these adjustments.
They're probably still cheaper than everyone else in spite of 3x'ing the price of some products.
And well actually, "price/demand elasticity curve" appears to be ambiguous word-salad (although a human mistake;)
I do appreciate your response: it makes me think about what I should have written. You are correct that my comment was rather unclear. Most of us misunderstand how businesses maximize profits. I find economics hard.
Thanks for squinting and finding sense in how I said it. It's been 12 years since I took an econ course.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
Seems accurate though, I've already noticed no-name Chinese manufacturers stepping it up, throwing caution and capital to the wind and leaning in as hard they can. Following the typical Chinese model of how they get involved in markets, we're just a couple years away from memory being a market with skyrocketing prices and limited availability to a market where various nations are considering bailouts and tariffs to protect their local manufacturers from dirt-cheap Chinese exports to keep their memory producers from going through what domestic solar panel producers went through (a near extinction level event).
I specifically didn't say disk mfg as well only because I haven't yet noticed a new big spinning HDD Chinese brand. But they're definitely active in the lower end of the DDR5 market.
Keynes said that when somebody complained that his theories didn't work in the long run. And the true rebuke is, we're now in the long run and Keynes is dead
The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.
> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.
It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.
> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.
You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.
As others noted, only the Chinese sector has a chance to fill the space for consumers in this nightmare scenario.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
So for every ~4GB of memory that you can produce in normal DDR5, you can only make 1GB of HBM. But you make multiple times the revenue.
The demand for HBM memory is not going to go away. LLMs are memory bandwidth hungry, and we are going to see production going to AI. But also to "lower end" like B200's.
That means, they are producing multiple times less memory (if we look for the normal market demand), but still need to produce more for the memory bandwidth hungry market.
We are seeing more products entering the "prosumer/business" market that are also memory bandwidth hungry. This demand will not go away. It will actually increase as companies move to more localized workloads. There is is a issue with data privacy that a lot of companies legally deal with.
The lacking ramp up is not a sign of them being scared of over production, its a realization that 3 companies hold the market in a strangle hold, and "slow" scale. If everybody plays friendly, they can milk this for years.
China is a solution but China does not have the HBM production levels, and will take years to scale and put a dent in the market. And China is ... allocating a lot to domestic production of AI > HBM ...
The reality is, that unless competition ( as in China ) does not start scaling beyond the expected levels, the big 3 have no reason to scale too fast.
And money is not the issue ... have you seen their revenue (and net profit!! ) numbers. A few billions is peanuts for them at this point. They simply do not want to scale too fast because that means less milking ... Memory demand is not going to away. When people talk about the AI bubble popping, its more in terms of the stock market. The product is here and not going away.
The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly.
you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are:
A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity
B) raise prices by 100%
I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future.
Very sure that those new prices has put them out of the whole price/performance/quality bracket.
* Past: consumer level hardware for basic support, and low prices.
* Now: consumer level hardware for basic support, and extreme high prices.
So the entire peg for their hardware choice vs pricing, has collapsed.
What sucks is that it might just be that hyperscalers have long term hw contracts and completely starve any competition.
What you do is you accept the risk and mitigate it. Watch the costs and figure out whether buying stuff like AI capacity (Bedrock, Vertex), queues, databases or block storage as a service is more cost-efficient (including maintenance costs) than self-hosting them.
I _know_ how to run all that shit locally, but I don't _want_ to.
Upgrading an Aurora Postgres server is like two clicks on the Web UI, not even that if you set the maintenance window. Adding new servers to the cluster is a single number change to the terraform file. I can even up or downscale the compute behind them depending on what's going on. A big release and we're expecting unusual traffic? Bump them up by changing one string in the .tf file or add more replicas temporarily.
With on-prem hardware I'd need to buy and provision the hardware, pick an OS, get it up and running, install the DB, fuck around with the DB configs and whatever networking the provider is using to get it connected with the other servers while still keeping it out of the larger internet. And there will be no downscaling or upscaling because it's actual hardware.
Also any half-decent full stack / backend engineer can learn AWS basics in a week or on a two day course provided by AWS with lunch and snacks included. Messing with actual physical hardware is a completely different skill set that's getting rare and expensive these days.
Probably still cheaper than AWS egress
So you just need to be present in one of their DCs.
For bigger orgs the bottlenecks are a bit more vague, but they still exist.
They might contract to AI companies to supply servers for their AI, but the total capacity of Hetzner is less than a single AI DC so it doesn't seem very useful.
For proper long term cold storage, you want tape.
There's a niche in between where hard drives are good on their technical merits, but it's not a huge niche.
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people ignore that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes:
> The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quantity if other variables return to their former values, but the short-term dynamics of this process have practical importance.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tract_on_Monetary_Reform#Leg...
The economic pain that Britain was experiencing in the 1920s due to its ill-conceived idea of sticking with the Gold Standard, especially at the wrong level, could have been solved through policy tools that the Bank of England had at the time rather than waiting for this to stabilize 'in the long-run'. I.e., he did not want to wait for eventual stabilization, he wanted to alleviate people's suffering now: it's no use to you if things stabilize when you're dead.
A longer extract:
> In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
This is the same guy who said it's better to give people jobs digging holes and filling them back in than to have them be unemployed, thereby giving every fool with a bad plan cover to ignore the false dichotomy and thereby the opportunity costs of doing something wasteful instead of something more efficient or productive.
And I tend to agree with /u/bayindirh that the original optimism of /u/Dylan16807 is baseless. We don't know have things will turn out, but it's absolutely not guaranteed that we'll ever return to “normal” (“normal” being what happened in a very narrow time period where computing power was so cheap it was available for the masses to own).
It isn't a misunderstanding. Even in the original context, the proposal is to be impatient with something that takes time even if it eventually works. (It's also not even the best critique of the gold standard, which has plenty of problems not solved no matter how long you wait.) Worse, the quip has memetic fitness (people think it sounds edgy) even though it expresses no limiting principle and can thereby be used in service of every incitement to do something stupid immediately because the smarter thing takes a minute.
It's sometimes true that acting quickly is the better option, but by giving no indication as to which times that is, it's an ambiguous statement masquerading as a conclusive determination and an invitation to do the wrong thing in the common case.
And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years. Including RAM going up multiple times. We would have to buck that entire trend on top of having a failure of supply and demand to end up with the current prices being permanent.
(And don't be dramatic. Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.)
The “personal computing for the mass” era hadn't even started when I was born, and I don't even consider myself old yet.
> And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years.
It's not because something happened before that it will necessarily happen again.
> Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.
Computers are still available, but for the first time they are significantly less affordable than just a year ago. And nobody's saying the personal computer era is over yet, we're arguing that it's a possibility in the near future, and you won't convince me otherwise by saying “but it has always been like that” because it's not how it works, and because I'm just old enough to know it hasn't.
The “personal computer” has already been mostly replaced by locked-in terminals in the general public, so it's not like this worry is coming out of nowhere.
And the manufacturing improvement and price drop ramp has been going for 65 years. It's not guaranteed but better lithography machines keep being built and it's still happening with CPUs and GPUs.
RAM at this level of profit is unstable.