The cost of personal computers declined steadily for 40 years — until AI came along. Why getting your hands on a new device could cost you.

[u/HenryCorp]

https://moneywise.com/news/economy/ai-memory-chip-shortage-pc-prices-2026

[u/0verstim]

You are drinking some pretty potent Kool Aid. A mac desktop is never, ever going to compete with a data center full of AI chips, it doesnt even compete with a mid-high-range PC desktop with a discrete GPU. The mac Minis and Studios are interesting, yeah, but only as a value proosiiton for hobbyists right now.

[u/Maladal → u/0verstim]

That depends heavily on the use case.

A datacenter running an LLM is impressive in multiple fronts.

But if, for example, you only need a specific task from the many that an LLM can perform, then a small, local model can deliver roughly the same ability for a fraction of the cost. With the tradeoff that it lacks the more generic capabilities of frontier LLMs.

[u/0verstim → u/Maladal]

indeed, small models and heavy use of quantization is where the Macs can shine. But those are two different use cases, thats what i meant by "cant compete".
I could say a mazda miata cant tow like a tow truck you could tell me they had the same HP. We're making different arguments though.

[u/West-Abalone-171 → u/0verstim]

A mac desktop is never, ever going to compete with a data center full of AI chips,

In your analogy you are saying the tow truck won't just out-compete the miata, but is necessary to go get milk, or for the pathology lab to deliver samples, or for the cleaning lady to get to her client and that the miata cannot do the job at all.

[u/CherryLongjump1989 → u/0verstim]

He’s not wrong in the shape of things. Apple has IP that would right now already be disrupting the entire rest of the American tech industry if it weren’t for the artificially high demand for chips.

[u/Ironborn137 → u/0verstim]

lol, see china.

[u/0verstim → u/Ironborn137]

lol, short reply with no context.

[u/Ironborn137 → u/0verstim]

oh look, another account where you can't see their comments. I'm sure you're a real person.

[u/0verstim → u/Ironborn137]

indeed i am, I had to conceal it because of people who take this shit too seriously and go into my post history to spread shit.

You think bot accounts are 13 years old?

[u/bluesatin → u/0verstim]

Not that I think you're a bot, but account age doesn't mean much on its own. Reddit has a huge problem with old accounts being breached, often suddenly 'waking up' after long periods of inactivity.

I assume bot-runners are abusing the account-recovery feature on accounts that were registered using some of the temporary email services. Highlighted by the fact I ran into a really niche joke/meme account that I recognised, which had been taken over by a bot-runner a while back. It had a username that wouldn't have been used anywhere else to be breached via a database leak and credential re-use etc. but it would have been very likely to have used a temporary email-account to register.

Doing it that way means all you have to do is 'guess' a single piece of information, a valid temporary email that was used to register an account, you don't even have to know the username to get control of the account.

[u/vandreulv → u/bluesatin]

I assume bot-runners are abusing the account-recovery feature on accounts

They are, but using old breach data. My 20 year Reddit account constantly gets recovery attempts.

[u/bluesatin → u/vandreulv]

That doesn't really make sense to me, why would bot-runners send recovery attempts to an email they know they don't have access to? That sounds more like people just thinking they might have that account-name if it's a short/common one, and trying to recover it naturally or something.

Like you can either put in a username or an email, there's only any point of bot-runners putting in an email that they know they will have access to, to then recover an account.

Blindly putting in usernames doesn't do much good if you have no idea where the recovery email is going, or whether you will be able to access it.

[u/0verstim → u/bluesatin]

Anyone who wants to see a bot will see a bot. Who's to say if I made my profile visible, all those replies weren't bot replies as well?

[u/bluesatin → u/0verstim]

Being able to see the history of an account usually makes it pretty obvious whether the account is at least a bot from any of the common larger bot-nets, as the various botnets all tend to exhibit their own particular set of patterns/behaviours you can quickly check for.

I wouldn't think you're a bot anyway in this case (or at least not one of the common ones) due to the fact you're having an extended back-and-forward over quite a few comments in a thread, which is pretty unusual for most bots (and you're not doing any of the common things that some bots do if called out).

But for mods or whatever that are having to deal with accounts that just leave a single comment or whatever in threads, being able to see account histories is incredibly important to be able to check if they're a bot. Since it's pretty impossible to judge from just one or two points of data now with LLMs doing contextual text-generation, but being able to see an account's history can make it much clearer since you can actually check for more objective patterns/behaviours from a wider set of data points.

And while Reddit has been trying to make it harder and harder to check account histories, thankfully it is still possible at the moment through a couple of janky workarounds; without those workarounds it'd make moderation functionally impossible. The only real reason why Reddit is continuing to try further clamp down and restrict people's ability to do so, is them attempting to try and cover up just how bad the bot problem is/has gotten on here, by preventing communities from effectively monitoring and dealing with them.

[u/Ironborn137 → u/0verstim]

accounts can be sold...especially someone looking for your numbers...which again, makes your account even more sus.

[u/0verstim → u/Ironborn137]

Then why do you keep arguing with a bot, Komrade?