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Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!

  • 19 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I didn’t compare the board to the full price of a mini PC, I was giving the information for context.

    Further the raw power of a Pi 5 with 16gb of RAM is genuinely equivalent to a lot of thin client desktops with a lot more extensibility. I think you’re getting what you pay for, honestly.

    I’m not going to say they shouldn’t be a little cheaper, but the Pi 5 is kind of a powerhouse compared to older Pis and you have to push for the 16gb of RAM version to make it actually expensive.

    Once again the 4gb kit is $140 and with a lightweight Linux distro that’s honestly more than enough for basic desktop life of web browsing and email.



  • Probably because $250 is wildy misleading. This is an all inclusive kit which includes case, heat sinks, fan, micro-hdmi cables, power supply and you have to go for the 16gb rpi 5 to reach $230. All the things I want to do with a Pi I would really only need 4gb of RAM max, which the kit is $140.

    The 16gb rpi 5 on its own with no extras is $145 and the 4gb on its own with no extras is $70.

    Sure that’s still a lot more than the original goal of $35 computing but you can still get a basic kit for the rpi Zero 2 W for $40. They also still sell rpi 3, 3A+, 3B+, and 4 kits for reasonable prices. I don’t necessarily need the full power of an rpi 5 either.


    EDIT: Dug up some historical info. Raspberry Pi 4 released in 2019 and was $75 for the 8gb model board on it’s own. Right now just a board for a Pi 4 model B 8gb is $85. The 16gb Raspberry Pi 5 originally released at $120 and is now $145. I think people are really overblowing these price increases.

    https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/raspberry_pi_5_1gb/

    The increases hit the entire Pi 5 range: the 2GB model jumps $5 to $55, while the 16GB version rises $25 from $120 to $145. Select Raspberry Pi 4 models are also affected, with the 4GB version increasing to $60 (up $5) and the 8GB to $85 (up $10). The 16GB Compute Module 5 saw a $20 hike.

    Lower-density Pi 4 models, the Pi 3 Model B+, and earlier boards remain unchanged, as does the Pi Zero.

    The new Raspberry Pi 5 has just 1 GB of RAM and slips in at $45. In October 2025, Pi supremo Eben Upton noted that lower RAM densities weren’t suffering as much as others. The company, therefore, has some wiggle room at the 1 GB mark.

    Considering the massive leap in RAM prices, these don’t seem like obscene increases to me. People are getting their fucking panties in a twist because they want the model with more RAM and seem to have forgotten that the Pi 3 maxed out at 4gb of RAM and the Pi 4 maxed out at 8gb of RAM. The Pi 5 is the first model to sport 16gb and it was $120 on release and has risen $25 due to RAM price increases, which is far less than consumer price for RAM has spiked. If anything the RPi company is doing a damn fine job of keeping prices down despite the RAM shortage. Considering that an 8gb stick of DDR4 is $60 and a 16gb stick of DDR4 is $125 yet you’re pissing your pants over a $10 increase in 8gb models and a $25 increase in the 16gb models which is fucking stupid.

    Anyway, fucking cry more, god damned babies. It’s not like the Raspberry Pi company is the group at fault for the fucking high prices of RAM, get over it!



  • We don’t have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that’s not how it is now)

    Uhhh, it’s pretty trivial to set them up. I have a local Ollama instance set up on my PC with several different open source models available right now. Just because not everyone is doing it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I don’t even have an especially fancy computer, either. Ryzen 7 3700X, 32gb RAM, Radeon 6600XT 8gb video RAM, not exactly top of the line. I struggle with programming logic sometimes, so I use it to help me figure out if I’m doing something right or not when I can’t find an answer online, an activity I wouldn’t exactly classify as “evil.”

    I also wouldn’t consider a shrapnel bomb a tool, it’s strictly a weapon just like a gun is strictly a weapon.






  • It always horrifies me a little bit how much open source has been exploited by large corporations for profit while much of the open source tech they rely on they do not invest in. Meaning by and large it often feels like open source has been unintentionally the largest transfer of the wealth created by labor to the corporate class in human history because labor had lofty ideals and capitalists are happy to exploit that.

    Linux has the majority share of corporate servers and has for a long time, and yet is barely cracking 3% of the desktop (consumer, laborer) market. Corporations profit wildly from open source while the general public has not.


  • I mean really they despise anyone with skills because the reality is they have hardly any themselves as they’ve spent their lives paying for everyone else to do everything for them. They can’t make a meal, they can’t drive a car, they can’t do basic appliance repair, they don’t know how to actually use a computer other than social media, they can’t wash their own clothes, they can’t do anything for themselves. They despise every skilled person because it betrays their egotistical view that they are simply born better than everyone else and deserve to never have to know how to do anything at all. It reveals they know nothing and are useless to society at large, just a drain on the rest of us.

    Secondly, I did say “knowledge workers” and I personally think authors and artists are a type of “knowledge work” as they require knowledge coupled with skill to do the work, just as people managing servers and databases also require a combination of knowledge and skill. Poetaetoe pohtahtoh.

    Thus it’s also why they are all pushing hard for humanoid robots because they want to automate the human body after they have automated the human mind.


  • I mean… it seems painfully obvious and doesn’t need much of a thesis behind it.

    The wealthy want their slaves back, but they want slaves that don’t push back, never ask for more, never need a day off, don’t need sleep, don’t need breaks, and are needlessly sycophantic to stroke the egos of the wealthy. It’s no more complex than that: the promise of LLMs was that they could have deeply exploitable knowledge workers without any of the fuss or mess of humans who want a life outside of their fucking jobs.

    Like what else has this ever been? It’s been transparent since day one that this is why every business pushes AI adoption so hard, for them it has to work, they’re willing to bet the future on it because they think their sheer belief in it and throwing money at it will eventually “make it work.”

    On the plus side, anyone who understands LLMs understands their limitations and the problems that are baked in to how they work and how those issues can’t be “fixed.” So this dipshit ass all-in plan that the wealthy have is doomed to crumble because it’s never going to work the way they want it to. So we’ve got that going for us.

    Anyway I hate tools being described as “tools of the ruling class” because it often misses the point of how such tools can be useful to the proletariat as well. Class solidarity is a tool of the ruling class, but class solidarity would be golden in the hands of the proletariat, who vastly outnumber the wealthy class and ruling class. All tools are useful, what makes a tool dangerous is who wields it and what they choose to use it for. A hammer can be used to build and it can also be used to smash in someone’s skull. Tools aren’t the problem: specific dangerous humans are. I don’t actually have huge problems with AI LLMs providing they are open source and rolled out small scale on home PCs, I just have an issue with their industrial applications at scale and the attempt to use them to consolidate power and control. They don’t have to be used that way.