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Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due to SSD Shortage (petapixel.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 28 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Except that it seems a lot of these trades are on-paper, and not involving the actual transfer of goods. The data centres aren't getting built. The servers aren't going in them. The power isn't being supplied. The tokens are not being generated. At least... It's only a fraction of what they are all saying.

Some auditor is going to have a field day.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Yes but who actually cares? If society tolerates no actual real physical transfer of goods and leaves it all speculative, it doesn't matter. The deals are made, financial institutions accept this, realistically it doesn't matter that none of this is "real". If society decides that it's real, it's real. Just like how paper money has zero real tangible worth. It's all an agreed upon concept. The same is happening here.

    The economy we had for the last handful of decades is gone. Speculative economy where only the top percentage trades with itself is where we are at and where we will stay.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    It can't be completely circular. There is an end customer that will expect something for their money eventually. Right now it's driven by huge amounts of debt, but you can't be on that forever. At some point it unwinds

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    It seems that end point is government bailing out banks using taxes, and people are paying more for the same due to inflation, while their salaries do not catch up with the cost of living.

    This seemingly happens in US right now.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    The rationale for bail out the banks previously was that the retail arms (what you and I use) were so intertwined with the commercial arms that allowing the commercial part to fail caused the loss of everyone's money. Regulation was introduced (at least in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere) that ring fenced the two from each other, making future bailouts unnecessary. The commercial arm would shoulder the risk of its own investments.

    Doesn't stop corrupt politicians bailing them out though.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    What you're describing is not a structural change. What you're describing has happened before. You're describing a bubble.

    I do think there is a structural change, similar to how there has been for the arrival of computers, the arrival of the internet, the arrival of covid and WFH etc. LLMs have changed how many people will work. However. They aren't able to replace workers.

    The onlystructural concern I have currently is that the models and processing power become out of reach for all but giant corporations and data centres. As there are open models and much of the changes are happening across many companies and individual programmers, I don't see that happening. Perhaps the best models and training data will be out of reach but there are enough people vested in open source and proficient, that should things start to get out of reach and computing become less available, I'd expect that to change. Similar to how windows led to Linux which is now better.

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