There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burst

Hard to believe it’s been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways

I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don’t want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.

Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we’re not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn’t caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn’t very widespread. We’re again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance

Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It’s so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they’re just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that’s copyrighted, but claim it’s for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn’t make any sense and just looks like they’re going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty…

It just seems like there’s a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don’t see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?

BananaTrifleViolin ,

As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

VR

Yeah, I think it’s ripe for an explosion, provided it gets more accessible. Right now, your options are:

  • pay out the nose for a great experience
  • buy into Meta’s ecosystem for a mediocre experience

I’m unwilling to do either, so I’m sitting on the sidelines. If I can get a headset for <$500 that works well on my platform (Linux), I’ll get VR. In fact, I might buy 4 so I can play with my SO and kids. However, I’m not going to spend $2k just for myself. I’m guessing a lot of other people are the same way. If Microsoft or Sony makes VR accessible for console, we’ll probably see more interest on PC as well.

People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need

Exactly. I have a Ryzen 5600 and an RX 6650, and it basically plays anything I want to play. I also have a Steam Deck, and that’s still doing a great job. Yeah, I could upgrade things and get a little better everything, but I can play basically everything I care about (hint: not many recent AAA games in there) on reasonable settings on my 1440p display. My SO has basically the same setup, but with an RX 6700 XT.

I’ll upgrade when either the hardware fails or I want to play a game that needs better hardware. But I don’t see that happening until the next round of consoles comes out.

lvxferre , (edited )
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.

j4k3 ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. … IMO.

Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don’t care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone’s legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.

sunzu2 ,

I do not make compromises in ownership.

preach!

At the end of the day though proper change will only come once the critical mass aligns on this issues along few others.

Political process is too captured for peasant to affect any change, we have more power voting with our money as customers, at least for now.

Chocrates ,

Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

I’m a die hard open source fan but that still feels like a stretch. I remember 10 years ago we were theorizing that windows would get out of the os business and just be a shell over a unix kernel, and that never made it anywhere.

rbos ,
@rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

I don’t think that is necessarily out of the running yet. OS development is expensive and low profit. Commodification may be inevitable. Control of the shell and GUI, where they can push advertisements and shovelware and telemetry on you, that is profitable.

So in 20 years, 50? I predict proprietary OSes will die out eventually, balance of probability.

sturlabragason ,

Hell yeah!

tias ,

AI still needs a lot of parallelism but has low latency requirements. That makes it ideal for a large expansion card instead of putting it directly on the CPU die.

j4k3 ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Multi threading is parallelism and is poised to scale to a similar factor, the primary issue is simply getting tensors in and out of the ALU. Good enough is the engineering game. Having massive chunks of silicon laying around without use are a mach more serious problem. At the present, the choke point is not the parallelism of the math but actually the L2 to L1 bus width and cycle timing. The ALU can handle the issue. The AVX instruction set is capable of loading 512 bit wide words in a single instruction, the problem is just getting these in and out in larger volume.

I speculate that the only reason this has not been done already is because pretty much because of the marketability of single thread speeds. Present thread speeds are insane and well into the radio realm of black magic bearded nude virgins wizardry. I don’t think it is possible to make these bus widths wider and maintain the thread speeds because it has too many LCR consequences. I mean, at around 5 GHz the concept of wire connections and gaps as insulators is a fallacy when capacitive coupling can make connections across all small gaps.

Personally, I think this is a problem that will take on a whole new architectural solution. It is anyone’s game unlike any other time since the late 1970’s. It will likely be the beginning of the real RISC-V age and the death of x86. We are presently at the age of the 20+ thread CPU. If a redesign can make a 50-500 logical core CPU slower for single thread speeds but capable of all workloads, I think it will dominate easily. Choosing the appropriate CPU model will become much more relevant.

asdfasdfasdf ,

I agree. But also add in the movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now. Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.

My take is we’ve already left the golden ages of movies, music, and books and probably won’t get another for an extremely long time.

Video games are going through the same downfall which streaming services brought. Physical media left the movie scene as a standard while ago, but video games took longer. Now it’s going to be all streaming and subscriptions where you can never own anything.

Once that happens, enshittification will peak, companies won’t be incentivized to make the games good anymore, standards tank, and people will forget how good things once were.

hedgehog ,

Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.

Are you talking quality or popularity? Because there are many, many books that are just as good or better than Harry Potter.

asdfasdfasdf ,

Anything you’d recommend in particular?

GustavoFring ,

As with video games, the real gems imo for movies and music are from the indie scenes.

sukotai ,
@sukotai@lemmy.world avatar

it’s time for you to play PACMAN, as i did when i was young 😂
no AI, no GPU, no shitcoin: you just have to eat ghost, which is very strange in fact when you think about it 🤪

emax_gomax ,

Correction the ghosts are AI and based on how many times they killed me clearly a step above anything mainstream today (º ﾛ º๑).

Telorand ,

I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space.

I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

Overall, I don’t see things the way you see them. I recommend taking a break from social media, go for a walk, play games you like, and fuck the trajectory of tech companies.

Live your life, and take a break from the doomsaying.

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

Amen.

Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.

Telorand ,

And I’ll add on to that, even if every GPU company stops innovating, we’ll still have older cards and hardware to choose from, and the games industry isn’t going to target hardware nobody is buying (effectively pricing themselves out of the market). Indie devs especially tend to have lower hardware requirements for their games, so it’s not like anyone will run out of games to play.

rbos ,
@rbos@lemmy.ca avatar

They also tend to have linux support. Where the AAA companies want to eat the entire mammoth and scorn the scraps, small companies can thrive off of small prey and the offal. :)

9point6 ,

Equating Linux enthusiasts to offal is a bold move on this site

lvxferre ,
@lvxferre@mander.xyz avatar

It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.

*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.

EnderMB , (edited )

My only fear with the indie gaming industry is that many of them are starting to embrace the churn culture that has led AAA gaming down a dark path.

I would love an app like Blind that allows developers on a game to anonymously call out the grinding culture of game development, alongside practices like firing before launch and removing credits from workers. Review games solely on how the dev treated the workers, and we might see some cool corrections between good games and good culture.

Telorand ,

There’s certainly room to grow with regard to workers’ rights. I think you could probably solve at least a few of them if they were covered by a union, and publishers who hire them would have to bargain for good development contract terms.

GBU_28 , (edited )

Hello indie gamer, it’s me, you, from the future.

I’d like to introduce you to PATIENT indie gaming.

The only games I play are small team, longer running, well documented, developers are passionate, mods exist, can play on a potato or a steam deck, etc

Because I’m patient, I don’t ever get preorder, Kickstarter, prealpha disappointed.

I know exactly what I’m getting, I pay once, and boom, I own a great game for ever. (You can more often fully DL indie games)

Telorand ,

Bruh, what do you mean “future?” That’s me right now!

GBU_28 ,

Bro I’m from the future you can’t ask me stuff like that, be patient, you’ll figure it out

dinckelman ,

Genuinely wish more people understood this. I’ve mostly only been playing indie games for the past few years. By far the best fun i’ve had in gaming. A ton of unbelievably creative, unique games out there. Not to mention that 99% of them are a single-purchase experience, instead of a cash treadmill

Telorand ,

cash treadmill

Borrowing this turn of phrase

burgersc12 , (edited )

It’s a societal bubble, soon we all go pop. c/collapse

Toes , (edited )

Wait till the Y2K38 event occurs.

https://ani.social/pictrs/image/6808f964-20e5-43ac-ad71-fadcc7d4088f.gif

Telorand ,

If only we had some way of working with a bigger integer…maybe we’d call it something like BigInteger…

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •