That does make me interested as to whether any of that reduction in intended spending would involve reduced spending on memory in the next, say, three years.

without spamming the actual communities, like I’m doing now.

I don’t think that asking on here constitutes spam. Why not just ask and see what happens? If the moderators don’t like it, they’ll let you know.

If you’ve got questions about Lemmy or the Threadiverse in general, it’s probably good odds that someone else has the same ones too.

If these other avenues for enforcing tariffs are better why not just start there?

So, I haven’t read deeply into what other routes would be used, just read that they exist. Thus, I’m not the best source for this, and I’m sure that there are people who are and will have more-informed commentary who will be getting interviewed on the news a lot in the aftermath of this. However, if I had to take a guess, my understanding is that Congress has extended the President the authority to block trade with a country entirely, and that that’s on firmer ground. Trump might be able to say “I’m now entirely blocking trade, but if you agree to functionally accept tariffs, I’ll unblock you” or something like that. From the Trump administration’s standpoint, that’s more hassle and difficulty, but he might avoid the ruling here.

But don’t take that as authoritative, please — as I said, I haven’t spent time on it, and a lot of people who are better-equipped to answer will be answering the same question on the news and such. I just want to raise the prospect that we may still be looking at tariffs, to make people aware of it, before everyone starts throwing a party and saying that everything will be as it was pre-Trump.

The Slate Truck has them, so assuming that that goes into production, it’ll be an example.

The Slate Truck’s base configuration, called the “Blank Slate”, does not include an infotainment system, speakers, or power windows.

My understanding is that it was generally expected that SCOTUS would rule against it, but also expected that the administration would then fall back to other authorities to achieve a similar goal, so it’s not clear whether we’re going to be functioning without tariffs.

That doesn’t meant that it isn’t impactful — it’s important from a legal technical standpoint, in terms of defining powers of Congress and of the President.

I also expect that it will likely result in importers getting reimbursements, which is going to create a lot of financial and political issues, since the tax cuts for the wealthy were functionally in part paid for by tariffs, and all that money just evaporated. I have wondered whether the Trump administration will try to push the tax increases down the road to the next (potentially-Democratic) administration, then blame them for having to cover the costs that the Trump administration incurred.

EDIT: Probably be a lot of news coverage and analysis of this from experts coming up, not to mention responses from the administration and maybe more legal challenges, so I imagine that it’ll become clearer over time.

Our last, best hope for the subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously rakes in money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could have legitimately competed with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.

But Valve has all but dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, raising the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to the memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock specifically because of the memory crisis.

I was pretty confident that Valve was not going to subsidize the Steam Machine from the start, even before Valve said that it would be priced comparably to a PC and even before it said that it was delaying determining pricing (which was a good sign that it hadn’t locked in a contract price on components). I commented along those lines here.

Consoles can do the razor-and-blades model because they are a closed platform. If you buy a Playstation, it doesn’t do you much good unless you use it to buy Playstation games. So each Playstation purchase is very, very probably going to be used to purchase Playstation games. Sony can crank up prices on those and make their initial loss back.

But the Steam Machine is open. I can go run whatever on it. I can just take the thing and, say, make it a media server or whatever. And if Valve subsidizes it, people will just buy it instead of a comparable PC and then run whatever they want on it. Doesn’t make much sense for Valve, just because of the nature of the machine.

Interesting. I wonder if it’d be practical to containerize them by default.

I guess that’d make open-source firmware illegal.

My bank requires a phone for its device token (2fa).

In most cases (at least in the US…I suppose that there might be places that require use of a state bank or something) one can pick their bank. None of the banks I bank with require this, and I have never installed a banking app (though I think that they all have an app as an option). One may need a phone of some sort to respond to a voice call or an SMS to validate oneself, but not an app. I believe that Bank of America has the most customers in the US, and they’ll even do YubiKeys via a browser.

The food and cab ordering platform is also exclusively on mobile only.

I think that GrubHub and Uber Eats are the most-common food delivery options where I am. It looks like both permit ordering from the Web (though I’ve never used their services).

Waymo, which in the US is, I think, the most-advanced robotaxi service (and probably currently the only really practical one where I am), does require an app, so I don’t know if there’s a good Web-based robotaxi option. Lyft looks to me like it requires use of an app. Uber looks like it permits Web-based ordering. I’ve never used anything but traditional cab companies (not that I especially object to the newer services, just never bothered to use them), and I’ve never run into one of those that requires an app — I just call up a human.

This isn’t to say that the same situation is true of where you are. But just pointing out that for many people, there are options…though it may require using an alternative service. Those services will be aware of how many people are ordering in what way, so if people are using different methods of ordering, that will cause them (and others) to tend to provide that route.

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They aren’t competitive with Android or iOS phones presently — don’t have the scale of userbase — but there’s only one way that that’s going to change, and that’s people starting to use them.

(“Linux” here as in “GNU/Linux”, as opposed to “the Linux kernel”, which Android phones also use.)

EDIT: Another option is to try to shift software use off of mobile devices as far as is practical, if you’re willing to carry a second, larger device like a laptop. Just use the smartphone as a phone and as a modem for Internet access via tethering. I’ve generally been aiming to do that myself. I realize that that’s not practical for everyone.

That approach does have some perks — you can get your audio jack, because the space constraints of a phone go away. You aren’t dependent upon your hardware manufacturer for N years of updates before your hardware is forced to become out-of-date software-wise. The devices are generally a lot more capable and upgradeable. The hardware is more modular, and there are considerably more options. You can run whatever software you want.

But…it’s bigger, the software library isn’t generally optimized for small touchscreen use, so one-handed use while waiting in line isn’t generally ideal, and it consumes more power. You can run some Android software via stuff like Waydroid, but I’m sure that software that requires a trusted hardware stack won’t accept that.

Covid produced inflation, where the strength of the currency dropped. The Federal Reserve wouldn’t permit deflation, because you’d risk seeing a deflationary spiral. Instead, it’ll just see wages increase more quickly than prices for a period afterwards to restore buying power. This is a specific product that’s seeing a shortage — you can list plenty of points in the past where a good was in short supply and prices rose and then fell.

EDIT: Just in computer hardware, to pick an example, hard drive prices went up when we had that flooding in southeast Asia fifteen years back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods#Damages_to_industrial_estates_and_global_supply_shortages

Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives…As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.

On hardware costs, if it produces a large, sustained amount of demand, and if there are fixed costs (e.g. R&D) that can be shared between hardware used for it and other things, it may substantially reduce hardware prices in the long run for other users.

Suppose, to take an example, that there is demand for, oh, completely pulling a number out of the air, 4 times the amount of high bandwidth memory for AI that there is for 3D video cards and video game consoles. That’s on a sustained basis, not just our initial AI buildout. There is going to be some amount of fixed costs that have to be done at Micron and Samsung and the like to figure out how to design the product and optimize production.

That’s going to mean that AI users likely pay something like 80% of the fixed costs for HBM, which may very well lower costs for other users of HBM.

In late 2025 and 2026 there is a huge surge in demand for hardware. There’s a shortage of hardware, and factories don’t get built out overnight. So prices skyrocket, pricing out many users to the point where demand at the new price point matches the available supply. But as production capacity increases, that will also ease.

I do get that it’s frustrating if someone wants to build a system right now.

But scale matters a lot, and this may enable a lot more scale.

The reason I can have a cheap Linux desktop at home isn’t because there are masses of people buying Linux desktops, but because there are huge numbers of businesses out there buying Windows desktops and many of the fixed hardware development costs are shared. If those businesses running Windows desktops suddenly disappeared tomorrow, I probably couldn’t afford my home Linux desktop, because suddenly I’d need to be paying a lot more of the fixed costs.