this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024

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263

Feels like so many tech bubbles are about to burst (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ok . So first of all while NVIDIA is absoluetly a scumy company but the reason they are able to be this scummy is because they do generaly deliver unreasonable performance improvment ( at an unreasonable price tho ) and this time its unlikely to be any diffrent and 50xx series is expected to be monstrous as far as performance go. So far they didint do the same mistake intel did with cpus.

Second . You cant collapse something that hasnt risen. Virtual reality never gained enough traction for it to collapse. I personaly blame PlayStation for this. If there is anyone that could make a diffrence it would be them .

Third. If that's true thats actually fucked up. Alghtough to be fair openai is very strange company and very closed one for a supposedly openai. Also i dont think going from non profit to for profit comapny changes much since it requires a thing they dont have. Profit.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Meta isn't the only VR space. Resontite VR plays like VR chat meets Gary's mod, and supports most equipment you can hook up. It is not perfect but there are frequent updates trying to address the issues, same as any platform.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Meta is the only VR space for anyone not able/willing to spend as much on a VR headset as a mid range desktop (especially when that VR headset might not even function without the addition of a mid range desktop), and for people who want VR and a vague semblence of privacy there isn't really any affordable headset at all.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

We are sorry. So sorry indeed man! We are sorry that because of a pandemic many people in the industry had to move to safe locations and realize how much better those places were so they're not going back. We're sorry to have inconvenienced your game play. But we're working hard to get you to pay another salary's worth on the next tumb raider! We promised so much many more transistors that the boob wobble will be endless! Thru AI, anything is possible!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Also, the movie industry is struggling because of many reasons. Movies are getting too expensive, the safe formulas big studios relied on aren't working anymore, customer habits are changing with people going less to movie theaters.

At the same time, just like with video games, the indie world is in a golden age. You can get amazing cameras and equipment for quite a small budget. What free software like Blender can achieve is amazing. And learning is easier than ever, there are so many free educational resources online.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The entire entertainment industry is floundering. Wages lagging inflation in many sectors, people are paying significantly more to eat. They're going to cut back on the streaming services and they're going to cut back on going out to the movies. I'm right here at these crossroads where the only thing that makes sense is to give people a little more value for the money, instead we're going to pull every fast trick we can to make more in advertising and gambling.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I wouldn't say the movie industry is struggling, I would say that people that work for a living are struggling. Actors are still getting paid huge sums of money, so are directors and producers. They are getting their pound of flesh one way or another. They are just not producing anything that people want to watch. For example all this marvel post-infinity War bullshit, no one wants to see that. No one cares about marvel Disney anything right now, it's low quality drivel. But Beetlejuice, Barbie, oppenheimer... These are proof that people do still want to see movies, they just don't want to produce anything meaningful.

The people struggling that I'm talking about, however, are the supporting roles. People doing the filming, set dressing, makeup, special effects. Lots of these lower levels supporting roles get almost nothing compared to their cost of living in California, while some of the main actors can get tens of millions

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Just like AAA game studios, movie studios don't want to take risks, so they go with productions they consider "safe": aim for the lowest common denominator, play into nostalgia, don't make anyone upset by touching subjects like politics, religion. And you end up with the garbage they are making right now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I've just been watching older movies, there's this amazing sweet spot when CGI just became a thing where the visual effects are passable but not so prevelant that the entire plot gets replaced with pointless explosions.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

COVID also inflated a lot of tech stock massively, as everybody suddenly had to rely a lot more on it to get anything done, and the only thing you could do for entertainment was gaming, streaming movies, or industrial quantities of drugs.

Then that ended, and they all wanted to hold onto that "value".

It is a bubble, but whether it pops massively like in 2000, or just evens off to the point where everything else catches up, remains to be seen.

"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" are wise words for anyone thinking of shorting this kind of thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Shows that You are in the UK. Just want to clarify I'm talking specifically about the USA but I agree with everything you said. Tech stocks became so inflated! Don't know if people are seeing it in Europe, but here in the USA, there is this really toxic and very cringe behavior from these tech companies to get people back to office, they can force people to return to office across the country, basically you have to relocate and upend your entire life which could cost you $50,000 and they're not paying for that, if you don't do that you get fired. Easy way to start laying off people without having to pay them anything because you can call it insubordination, since they refuse to return to office. Now they supposedly have cause to get rid of people or deny them promotions for more money. IBM for example is doing this right now, Cisco was doing it as well. One of the most major networking software companies in the market. Scumbag behavior

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I had a similar feeling, the trapped part of Windows and the enshitifying erroding privacy and ownership tipped me. I stepped back to Linux and wow! Its so much better now, a friend nagged me into nix and I have been soo impressed at just how better Linux is now compared to Windows. It used to be the polar opposite with Windows being easy and shiny, now so many desktop environments are just so far ahead of Windows, its really impressive. Thats also let alone before I consider how novel nix is. As my friend would nag, I use nix btw ❤️

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago (2 children)

We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz.

And we really don't need that. Gameplay is still more important than game resolution. Most gamers don't even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Gameplay is still more important than game resolution

In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I'll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don't care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man's sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it's hard to get any of my friends to play it because it's so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it

Most gamers don't even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.

This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there's a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It's not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I remember when running counter strike at 30fps on a 480p monitor meant you had a good computer.

Modern graphics are amazing, but they're simply not required to have a good gaming experience.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What’s happening is that support from VC money is drying up. Tech companies have for a long time survived on the promise that they will eventually be much more profitable in the future. It doesn’t matter if it’s not profitable today. They will be in the future.

Now we’re in a period where there’s more pressure on tech companies to be profitable today. That’s why they’re going for such anti consumer behaviors. They want to make more with less.

I’m not sure if there’s a bubble bursting. It could just be a plateau.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I agree. Smartphones, for example, have hardly changed at all over the last ten years, but you don't see Apple and Samsung going out of business.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

you don't see Apple and Samsung going out of business.

Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

OP, when you say AI is really really fucking things up, what do you have in mind? Setting aside the ludicrous things people say about AI, do you see it directly fucking something up? I’m just curious what is on your mind when you say that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To me it's seeing the Nvidia stock price in the same sort of range as Cisco stock prices were in the dot com bubble- I don't have any confidence they're going to reach the promised land of profitability this time either.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nvidia is already profitable and has been for over a decade.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Pretty sure Cisco was too, the're supplying hardware to the bubble. I think you misunderstood my point- I don't think AI is going to be profitable in the long term, it's probably very profitable to sell the hardware for that to people with investor money- their stock price reflects that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”

I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

That's pretty much where I see the ending for a lot of this, there's a wide variety of useful applications, but hard to capitalize on especially for things that are self contained and not phoning home to some server you need to maintain access to for billing purposes

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.

You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.

For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.

Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.

Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.

China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.

The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.

Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.

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