The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.
I don't buy the analogy. The problem with Kessler syndrome is that low earth orbit is physically crowded, you run into collisions. I don't care about the garbage. I don't care about the AI era. I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years, every open source project I contribute to still looks the same because all these AI people, like the blockchain people do is just make new stuff up in their own incestuous tupperware salesmen ecosystems.
I do pity the bug bounty people who rely on goodwill in their programs given that everything with a financial incentive is vulnerable. But otherwise the great thing about digital spaces is that there is, for practical purposes, unlimited space.
Every day there's another "how do you deal with the AI-apocalypse" article, I don't just ignore it
I think by "internet" they mean search engine results pages. If you restrict yourself to short, common queries and only look at the top 10 results on the page, then the space really is very limited. If all those top 10s for common queries start to get crowded out with AI slop, then people are going to start abandoning search.
Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).
Minor correction: SQLite is not closed to contributions. It just has an unusually high bar to accepting contributions. The project does not commonly accept pull requests from random passers-by on the internet. But SQLite does accept outside contributed code from time to time. Key gates include that paperwork is in place to verify that the contributed code is in the public domain and that the code meets certain high quality standards.
Maybe, but that's hardly comforting (and definitely not in the spirit of open source) if you're forced to take that decision, knowing it will hurt your project, because the alternative is getting DDoSed.
If by the spirit, you only mean the bazaar model, then yes. But it's in the original spirit of free software. GNU preferred to keep the development somewhat contained, even so many years ago.
AI will not be able to eat up all chip manufacturing capabilities forever. At some point the market will be saturated and PCs will get affordable again.
And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws.
I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.
What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin, but if you want to use bitcoin to buy something it's about as easy/awkward as it ever was.
Food prices went up 15-20% more than they would have with 2% inflation. If PC prices do anything similar, it's not a big deal in the long run.
Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen? The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out. They wouldn't even want everything to be in the cloud, because a hundred rarely-idle cloud cores can replace a lot more than a hundred mostly-idle consumer cores, so they end up selling a lot less hardware.
> What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable?
That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
> By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.
By what reckoning? And not just games, 3D workload, compilation. Hell. Even browsing + some productivity eats 32G of RAM as if it were nothing.
> I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin
The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
> Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen?
For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
Why not make anything for PCs? Because individuals can't compete with the coffers of large corporations and governments.
> The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out.
You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
Say all but one/two manufacturers leave the consumer market. The monopoly/duopoly hikes up prices again and again until you have a few stragglers on 40k USD workstations, and everyone else is on an iOS-like platform.
Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
> That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.
Does it have to be DIY? Because a quick search says that if 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is enough then you can get a Zen 2 machine for $300 and a Zen 3 machine for $370.
But man, $400 in 2026 money is a really tight threshold for "affordable". It means PCs were almost never affordable. If I go back to 2017 when that was equivalent to $300, I don't think I can put together a viable build with even 8TB of RAM and 250GB of SSD. I think that standard is too demanding.
> The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.
Oh, that was generally other cryptocurrencies but okay I understand.
nVidia has been overcharging, and they've basically increased the prices by one tier. A 70 card costs as much as an 80 used to.
But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050 beats a 1080 for half the price, before even factoring in inflation.
> For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.
> You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.
That works when there's enough demand to buy all the chips. AI will stabilize one way or another, and then the remaining datacenter market doesn't need that many chips compared to the consumer market. Manufacturers will have extra supply, and not selling it to consumers would be stupid.
And even if they charged datacenter-level prices to consumers, people would still be able to get PCs. Even if the cheapest new CPU was $500, that's still nowhere near the options being "no PC" and "$40k workstation".
Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
> Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.
Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
Yes. Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired at will. Go laptop or corporate and those get increasingly hard to fix. Not to mention if DIY market is healthy the non-DIY market is even cheaper.
> But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050
If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.
> Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.
If governments want it, there is money to be made.
> Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.
Sure, but no one will be able to afford all the other amenities. Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.
> If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.
It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.
But that's not the point. As long as you can keep getting better performance for less money, things are getting more affordable.
> Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.
Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all. Coolers are dirt cheap and a quality thermalright is less than $20. Housing for a server is about the same as a desktop and not changing. Half this list is nonsense.
Memory is going up a lot. But that's the one we started on. And you can get a reasonable amount for a couple hundred dollars, and acceptable storage for less than one hundred. Power isn't going crazy either.
And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict.
> Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired
Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair. It's a real downside, but if the CPU and motherboard are soldered together and take each other out then it's like I doubled the risk they break within seven years. And after seven years I'd replace both anyway. So that's like a $50 penalty, not a disqualifier. And the mini PCs I was citing have detachable memory and storage.
> It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.
I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.
> Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all.
For now.
And for the record I bought a bargain bin Xeon. Only to realize later the only motherboard that accepts it costs $1000. And I needed another Xeon chip. This was around 2020
> And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict
Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.
> Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair.
If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.
Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.
> I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.
It sucks, but it's nowhere near being the kind of barrier you're describing.
> Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.
What I mean is such a standard says that 1990-2018 was all unaffordable. 2019 was basically the only year that qualifies.
> If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.
In terms of e-waste, if you look at an unfixable mini computer with core parts that on average die 2 years sooner than a full-size computer, it causes less e-waste because it's so much smaller.
> Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.
They can sell bigger chips that cost more money to power users, why would they not care?
But even if it was just phone chips, that would only set back the exponential speed increases by a few years. It wouldn't destroy the market. My brand new phone is way more powerful than my aging desktop. If I could let the desktop borrow its CPU I would do so instantly.
> What I mean is such a standard says that 1990-2018 was all unaffordable. 2019 was basically the only year that qualifies.
Nah, the period around 1080 was honestly the golden age, before the age of RTX ushered the pest that is AI.
> In terms of e-waste, if you look at an unfixable mini computer with core parts that on average die 2 years sooner than a full-size computer, it causes less e-waste because it's so much smaller.
I don't think any particular component in a PC has the same amount of waste as a Mac Mini. And replacing a component is part of 3R (Reuse, Reduce, Recycle).
> They can sell bigger chips that cost more money to power users, why would they not care?
Because power users have less money than large corporations and governments. By selling you an GPU for $1000 that could be sold for $10000, they are losing the $9000 on each sale.
> But even if it was just phone chips
Not just Phone chips, locked down sanitized spy garden. It's very hard to do anything remotely creative on a phone like programming or rendering. You want to use your phone as a Desktop? That's not allowed. It's called War on General Computing. Not war on Consumer Computers.
Can we accelerate it perhaps? You know, spending ALL our resources on making the snake more fat is not a good idea. Its only good idea when you have so much resources that you can easily suffocate the snake with negligible (for us) amount. If you try to suffocate several million snakes, that might backfire a little.
This is why I now check when I'm researching for a solution (that an LLM cannot figure out.) I go to github but often check if the project was created before 2022 due to AI slop concerns.
When I read if for the second time, trying to understand it - maybe even better match for the low orbit flying garbage would be "enshitification"? As the time goes on, more and more garbage is produced, and we have no clear way or specific motivated entity to start removing it so it just grows.
Enshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1].
…whereas I feel what you’re describing is another Tragedy-of-the-Commons.
The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.