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The law of unintended consequences....

 
Well & Truly Off The Grid
Last Post by Toodles 1 day ago
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Majordennisbloodnok
 Majordennisbloodnok
(@majordennisbloodnok)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 1693
Topic starter 13/03/2026 2:20 pm  

I am in the fortunate position of having been able to take from work some mini PCs that were no longer good enough for the company's needs, and all that was done was to remove the hard drives to avoid any personal or sensitive data accidentally being passed on. My current Home Assistant box at home is one such repurposed mini PC and all I needed to do was buy a new hard drive before downloading and installing HA onto it. That cost me the princely sum of £26.99 at the end of May last year.

A family member has recently bought a house and is now interested in getting Home Assistant installed there. No problem, I thought; I've still got a repurposed mini PC available; I'll just get a new hard drive. The only problem is that exactly the same hard drive (a 512Gb NVMe module) from exactly the same vendor now has a price tag of £74.99; almost 3 times the price. The last time I remember seeing something like this was after the 2011 earthquake in Japan when a key semiconductor factory was damaged. I'm also well aware there was another global shortage of semiconductors in 2020 as a result of the Covid pandemic. Both of those instances could reasonably have been called "acts of God" and therefore not reasonable to foresee.

Not so this time, though. There is indeed a global chip shortage but the reasons are more prosaic. It's AI. The rapid expansion of AI services offered to us all has triggered a huge need for more data centres and more servers to go in them, meaning a voracious appetite for chips. At the same time, the demand for electronics in other consumer goods hasn't dropped off so the AI industry - where the money seems to be at the moment - is paying top dollar for the pick of the manufacturers' production. As a result, the cost of computers and computer components has rocketed, some products (for example the Sony Playstation 6) have had their launch date delayed by months or even years because of supply issues and several tech manufacturers have suffered a hit on their profitability with consequent dips in their share prices.

I'm not going to argue that AI doesn't have benefits. However, I find it hard to believe the majority of AI processing isn't expended on document summarising that we could do ourselves, photo editing to make absurd pictures of friends and family, manipulating videos to create compellingly believable "fake news" and even creating posts on forums to sidestep the author having to do it themselves. And the cost of this benefit? We've already got another thread or two looking at the ecological effect of all the heat produced by these data centres, but now we all have to pay dramatically more to buy the electronic kit we need to access the AI that's pushing the prices up.

Can we PLEASE all step back from AI for a moment and make a conscious decision to use it only when it actually adds real value, not just when it's convenient?

**Steps back down off soapbox, takes a big deep breath.**


This topic was modified 1 day ago by Majordennisbloodnok

105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"


   
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Toodles
 Toodles
(@toodles)
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Joined: 3 years ago
Posts: 2636
13/03/2026 2:56 pm  

Oh Thank you Major, I was just beginning to wonder where my soap box had gorne! 😉 Toodles.


Toodles, heats his home with cold draughts and cooks food with magnets.


   
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