Posted on 11/02/2026 5:21:24 PM PST by Jonty30
When Altman said that you dont need a computer, he's giving you the talking point of the global order. They may not ban computers outright, but it probably wont be long before you cant buy one or get parts to upgrade yours.
All that will be available is a 2026 version of the dummy work station, if anything at all.
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Great point. I think he also said that owning your own software was ridiculous.
All of the ones I have picked up are good condition older Dells.
I knew they were working before they were decommissioned. The drives had to be turned in for destruction. Even if they had their drives, they were mostly old Seagate drives were ancient and needed to be replaced anyway.
They are all colluding. Sony jumped the gun on this point, but they are all following suit.
I have - ok let me count - four. One primary. Three backups. Not worried. But for most people that is good advice.
I grabbed two of the OMEN 45L machines 10 weeks ago..
At the time they were 6000.00USD including tax, shipping and 3 year extended warranty..
Now they are 8099.99USD and that does not include the 3yr extended warranty (369.99) or state sales tax.. so about 8500.00 now .... the price is really going up!
I suppose this is really still the cheapest way to grab a 5090 GPU...
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/omen-max-45l-gaming-dt-gt23-0990m-pc
Yeah.... I’ve heard some rumblings of that.... hope its within the next few months.
In April I pulled the trigger and bought a tower with an 8-core CPU, 64GB RAM and a 16GB NVIDIA GPU. Can’t touch one for twice what I paid now. It can run qwen3-coder-next:80b on Ollama locally, and it is about 90% as good as Claude.ai for coding. Glad I got it then.
Yeah. I kind of collected them for a bit when money was better. I have three working PCs now. And an Apple thingy or two. An Android sitting around here somewhere. Yeah I’m a tech nerd.
They also tried to get Hillary into the White House.
They never thought she would lose.
And it sealed their fate.
Yep.... saw the same and not going to pay 5K for a GPU. There are other places to find them for a reasonable price. Just gotta dig around. Scrounging is a good skill to have and I’m an expert at that.
Bookmark
I looked at all of the boards before I took them home.
Any swollen caps or other bad electronics, I pass.
I looked at all of the boards before I took them home.
Any swollen caps or other bad electronics, I pass.
Just the other day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that from a “global allocation perspective,” it is “quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer”.
The price of fast DDR5 has gone up approximately seven times from what it was a year ago. I bought a laptop at Costco several months ago because it came with 32GB of fast DDR5 and a 2TB fast NVME on sale for $799. Just the RAM and NVME were worth more than what I had paid for the computer. As expected, they sold out almost immediately. You can’t even purchase a laptop with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB NVME at Costco currently.
But fear not! After the massive reality check that is going to be hitting the Nasdaq over the next few months. The demand for DDR5 is likely to be subsiding somewhat. Poor Sammy is likely to be singing a different tune.
Intel lost 28.6% on Friday and another 8.8% today because the high price of components has ripped the heart out of the PC industry. Less computers being built and investors abandoning data center construction is going to bring the price of memory and storage down significantly.
So no, it is not very a good time to build your own PC. The correction will come as soon as in the next few months. But ongoing projects and commitments could drag the correction out for a longer period of time. When prices drop, I will be jumping on a capable Pc with at least 128GB of unified memory so that LLMs capable of doing everything that I need AI for will likely be half the price that they are now, and the price of AI will likely increase massively when the bills start to come due. Although currently it is typically cheaper to get a subscription to an AI service.
Watch this guy’s video on recent breakthroughs using local hardware:
Video: https://youtu.be/d4EWA6yd5cE?list=LL
Summary: https://share.gemini.google/MCQtfE8CEkra
I looked at all of the boards before I took them home.
Any swollen caps or other bad electronics, I pass.
The first is large standalone data centers processing cloud based systems where end users use terminals to communicate with the AI data processing center
This works now because high performance AI is proprietary to a few major players and computational overheads are high
As AI evolves, there will be a potential migration path for commodization of AI analysis tools facilitated by AI assisted coding tools with a corresponding increase in computing horsepower for stand alone systems to allow stand alone computers to run powerful AI algorithms on non cloud based systems where end users control their AI systems and computational overheads assets
This second path is death to AI monopoly that Altman wants build and control
Altman is also ideologically motivated to develop AI systems in a direction that facilitates social control along the lines of the high tech, neo Marxist Chinese Social Credit system and his cloud based system enables facilitates that collectivist goal
Computing horsepower has outpaced the needs of most users but AI systems are going to put a lot more pressure on hardware designers . With the current pace of technology, AI systems and very high computational power standards alone. Systems will quickly emerge
I purchased an HP Elite 7900 Desktop PC Package refurbished from Amazon in February, 2020,
***************************************************
Bought a Dell 790 refurb from Amazon back in 2017. It’s been running 24/7 since then, except for about a month down time during retirement / move. Linux Mint on it right now, had FreeBSD in the past.
I threw the Windows OS out.
This computer which with its 128GB of fast unified memory and a Ryzen AMD Strix Halo Al Max+ 395 was selling for $2000 last November. It is very capable of running very capable AI LLMs. It is currently available on Amazon for $3650. But my guess is that the price will be dropping significantly in the not-too-distant future.
https://www.amazon.com/GMKtec-Computers-LPDDR5X-8000MHz-EVO-X2/dp/B0F53XL9DP?crid=2V728GRP43QC
Here is a video that describes recent breakthroughs using this hardware:
https://youtu.be/d4EWA6yd5cE?list=LL
summary: https://share.gemini.google/MCQtfE8CEkra
The millennial/gen-z set seems to do everything on an iFag phone, no need for a real computer.
I use only laptops and primarily this desktop.
Problem I run into with older computers is operating system and driver options.
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