When I was doing work experience in around 1995, I did mine at a local computer firm. A few days in, the doorbell rang. I looked over at the security camera. It was four lads in balaclavas.
I thought we were going to get robbed. The boss opened the door, put his hand over the camera, and returned a few seconds later with his hands full of SIMMs. Which he dropped on the table in front of me.
“Test these will you” he said, and that was it. That’s what memory theft was like. A bunch of lads breaking into offices, nicking the RAM from the PCs, and selling it local computer shops who would sell it right back to the offices they stole it from.
Not one guy having an expensive package stolen at random.
This whole article is a 5 minute write up about a PCMR post from Reddit where a user had their memory stolen. That’s it. Not even surprised this article is a nothingburger given it’s Toms Hardware.
I once wrote small post on reddit about running FSR4 on rdna3 (via driver emulation hack that devs on linux added, before INT8 version). That poor post was reused by multiple sites with bizarre titles, like “guy on reddit hacked FSR4!” and other similar crap. I’m not sure if it’s even humans writing/doing that, probably some server with llm continuously scrapes google for new posts, rewrite them and post on own sites for engagement.
The future that awaits us sure looks fun
I want to kill myself with articles like this, I mean, how the fuck they convert some random user post into a news article, and want to monetize with that? Like the user from Reddit who win in Battlefield RedSec by hiding in tube, and then the media make articles about it, what the actual fuck? Is just a fucking 2 minutes video
Its always manufactured scarcity with RAM. Seriously how many times have we been through this?
Yes and no. It’s more that there is a lag time between demand and supply. So the scarcity is “manufactured” but simply because the manufacturer rolled the dice on the demand and lost.
Keep in mind, many manufacturers aren’t selling for more to stores when this happens, they typically have a contract setting a price.
Now, can the manufacturer back out of this contract and demand a higher price? It really depends on the contract wording. You can’t really be forced to sell things unless a specific number of items was part of the contract.
Scarcity manufactured by the AI “boom”. When the AI bubble pops, expect a huge slump in hardware prices as companies try to offload huge stockpiles of worthless RAM, CPUs and GPUs.
That’s what I am saving up for, actually. The numbers of surplussed high-end compute just in my sparsely populated region could probably let me open my own datacentre.
Your house will be underwater, but damn the gaming will be good
I hear native water cooling.
Reminds me of when students used to pull the 5¼" floppy drive blanking plates off PC’s, reach inside and steal the RAM.
Well. Memory was like $100 per megabyte, and the computers in the university lab had 8. But would run fine on 4.
I remember there being a spate of robberies targeting memory chips in the 90s when prices were high then.
History repeating itself again I guess.
