Comment on Prepare for HDD availability trouble as they're getting sold out too

• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yes and no.

  Let’s focus solely on pricing first. www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&… is a good resource for that (dot gov so… grain of salt). In 1998, the “retail gasoline price” was 1.072 $/gallon. That is approximately $2.11 in 2025 dollars according to a random website. But whatever metric that site is using says 3.224 $/gallon.

  Because, yes, under pure microeconomics, it is all about supply and demand. But that just isn’t reality. Instead we have prices skyrocket because of economic/geopolitical turmoil… and then The Companies use that to experiment to figure out what the new price floor should be. Prices go down, but not that much.

  Now let’s talk about bubbles. Two of the biggest bubbles in the past 30 or so years have been the Dot Com Bubble and The Housing Bubble. Both were quite brutal on the economy and working professionals and that is why houses are worth jack all now and nobody has a website.

  Wait… That isn’t right?

  Because take the dot com bubble in particular. Yes, a LOT of web based companies were deeply stupid. But the fundamental concept of “order it online” is a very good one that, ironically, benefits more rural people more than anything else. Yes, it continues to ravage brick and mortar and contributed a lot to the destruction of “Mom and Pop” stores. But also… how often do you actually need to touch a product before you buy it? Incredibly valuable when you do, but you are likely to get MUCH better data from a youtube review than from trying to feel how clicky a button is while the sales associate keeps telling you that you need a gold plated HDMI cable to go with that stereo.

  And… Amazon and Google essentially became the megacorps they are because of it.

  Which is what we are expecting for The AI Bubble. Most of those “AI Assistants” are going to crash and burn because they are insanely expensive frontends to the same voice assistants we have had for closer to twenty years than not. Search engines may or may not stay in their current form. Generative AI is anyone’s guess (and mostly about legislature) but you can bet there will still be a cottage industry for sex pests.

  But much of what is driving the data center boom… isn’t that. It is the kind of machine learning we were doing 10-20 years ago and is mostly about pattern matching. AKA “Big Data”. Companies will realize that they can’t fire their entire fraud investigation and cybersecurity teams. But they can very much only hire a fraction of their previous workforce and have them interpret/validate the “AI” results. Same with coding.

  And, regardless, if there is an economy/world there is going to be social media and ecommerce and media. All of which benefit from lots of servers.

  So I do disagree that this is the cheapest they will ever be again. But I also suspect we are looking at a baseline closer to late 2025 than 2023/2024.

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