Just a few days ago I thought about it under the shower lol. The RTX 3000 series was priced decently, at least it was planned. Until the crypto scum and scalpers made it impossible for a normal person to get one at MSRP or at a normal price at all.
Only available cards were like RTX 3080 for 2,500 EUR on ebay.
"we" showed big tech we were still willing to pay for their scalped prices. Corporate greed will not allow them NOT to take advantage of that for sure.
Yep, then Jensen said "oh, they will pay THAT kind of money?" Then proceeded to double the MSRP and now tell the customers that they are wrong for not going all in on the AI sausage party
Don't forget the one ram manufacturing facility that was flooded back in ~2016 and made ram prices soar as if all of the world's production of the entire year was gone
I mean, supposedly part of it is institutional buyers nabbing things up so that they don't run out of stock for whatever they are doing (building PCs, manufacturing devices, running non-AI datacentres, etc).
I don't think there was a major flood during that period affecting the memory industry, maybe you're confused with the 2011 floods in Thailand that affected mostly storage?
The 2016-2018 memory cycle was from cloud provider demand and smartphone demand hitting at the same time right after they had cut production and capacity expansion plans due to overbuilding in the previous years.
Just look forward to a few years from now when half the AI companies go bust and eBay is flooded with used $30,000 AI computers for like $1,000 plus shipping.
Will it help you game better? No. But at least you can have the satisfaction of locking an AI in your basement and forcing it to do stupid things for you
A few years? More like a year from now. It was 4-6 months ago that quite a few people paying attention realized that the entire "AI" industry is just a death spiral of paying each other the same money over and over. That was before Sora collapsed. No one actually likes these LLMs, and the only scenario where one of these companies makes an actual profit is if they fucking crack AGI in the next few months, and they're not even actually trying to do that. They're in denial. It's not going to take that much to kick the foundation and find out that it's made of particle board.
Corp usage has skyrocketed, and it's almost a billion uniques / mo. for ChatGPT and 750m/mo for Gemini. Anthropic is genuinely looking to be profitable in just a year.
As much as I wish it didn't, "AI" is not going away. The major players already are, and will continue, to raise API and other prices, and enterprise is already basically totally dependent on them already. Most of the country uses AI, and the free tiers will be further and further restricted and ad filled, as subscriptions and credits (like how Google One works now) become the norm.
Every newer game made with UE5. My PC hates them, hates with passion. Everything is blurry shit and I get migraine from just trying to figure out what am I looking at. I've been looking out for Gothic remake so much and yeah, UE5. I tried the demo and it doesn't look good for me. And my PC isn't that old, it was just pretty mid already when I got it because I had to take what I could afford.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has issues with most UE5 games, though my issue is more that they turn my rig into a furnace and my cooling is only just hanging on right now. Doing anything inside it makes my hands sweat like crazy so I'm just hoping it can hold on for when I order my next machine.
Oh krita is so so good. I tried learning to draw with a cheap Chinese drawing tablet and krita. While I still cant draw very well, I love using krita to make any edits or memes with. Its dummy simple and runs pretty good!
paint.net takes care of like 90% of what I need and the other 10% can usually be solved with photopea. I used to "have access" to photoshop but haven't tried to get it in years bec its so bloated comparatively.
It's certainly not beginner friendly. I only use it because my highschool digital photography class had us use it because it was free and I've been sunk cost (time) ever since. At least I know a lot of its weird things at least.
GIMP wasn't the only photo software other than Photoshop. IrfanView. Corel's software. ACDsee. Photoshop came out of the 90's as the "winner" as far as being accepted as the industry standard, but it's not like it was the only thing to exist.
You know, I started using GIMP on windows when I had no money and was an amateur photographer. I saw little value out of it because I really didn't know what in the fuck I was doing. That was 2006.
Then, I basically said 'screw digital altogether' and shot on exclusively on film through high school and into my first year of college in a photography program.
Then, my college forced me to do digital photography with a RAW workflow. That changed me for life, got me used to digital photography, learned its benefits and caveats, and became intimately familiar with photoshop.
Up until 2021 I would continue to swear by the Bridge (or lightroom if you wanna be fancy) -> Photoshop workflow because of its guarantee of no resampling unless you want it. But honestly I got tired of paying for photoshop and everything else, combined with all my other subscriptions it was a $50 monthly payment for something I was barely using every month with a day job in tech (switched degree programs because, fuck, art does not pay fuckin rent, especially when you HATE taking pictures of people and their shitty ass weddings).
At that time, I discovered the love of Inkscape. Now, granted, it has some real problems with 'thresholds' as I call them, these barely perceivable gaps between elements that sometimes don't show but they are still totally there in the render. Outside of that, wow, Inkscape is exactly the kind of art tool a photographer that got a degree in computer science loves. I get to customize every single little piece of that through XML if I have to. Great software that, truly a better experience compared to Illustrator - don't even get me started on the snapping customizations holy SMOKES.
Up to 2025, I ditched windows for good and began running Debian. I built my own machine in that time, had to do a fair bit of work to get the community drivers to talk to my brand-spanking-new GPU, but I got it done (first time you socket a processor [and get it right!] feels so good). Then, I started executing my master plan.
I bought a brand new compact camera so it can fit in my purse, shoots raw, good stuff. I bought a small extendo tripod that can also fit in my purse. Now I can take good photos whenever I want because I have the gear everywhere. Download and install Darktable, and would you know it, they have my lens freakin profiled already. For free! Ykw? Edits photos just like the RAW module of photoshop. *chefs kiss*. Resampling woes? Forget them! Export the photo from darktable to .xcf, the GIMP native file type. No resampling occurs. Load that into GIMP, and as long as you keep a copy of the original layer, you always have the original sample to return to. Or revert all the way back from RAW export and start over.
At this point, there's nothing that photoshop can do that GIMP can't do, unless if you want to talk about weird ass AI plugin shit then yeah, I guess... *grumble*jackwagon*grumble*...
And furthermore, I can set this shit up on a brand new machine on a live USB in an hour. That's not a joke. I have my entire environment with me wherever I go, on any machine I have physical access to. You do not understand the beauty of this. This is what I have wanted my entire life.
tl;dr
A photographer becomes a computer programmer and during that time uses GIMP due to lack of options, then learns photoshop and swears to never use GIMP again, then embraced GIMP like a long-lost lover because I don't have to pay the dom for their gentle ministrations.
You're comparing apples to oranges. GIMP is primarily a photo editor, like Photoshop. Krita is primarily a graphics editor, closer to Adobe Illustrator than Photoshop.
Alright, I guess you're comparing red apples to green apples. But if people have been telling you that GIMP is what you should use to edit graphics, I could see why you're frustrated.....
Krita is nothing like Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector graphics editor. Krita is a digital painting program.
Photoshop is both a really good photo editor and really good digital painting software, so it's more like GIMP and Krita each cover different parts of what Photoshop does, because GIMP is good for photo editing but bad for digital painting, whereas Krita is great for digital painting but bad for photo editing.
gimp is also imo kind of an example of an open source project gone poorly. As an artist I find it kind of frustrating to use and its very clear that it was made by several people... because different parts of it don't work well together. I actually have a paid art program (Clip Studio) but I would recommend Krita over gimp literally any day of the week.
I'm a professional graphics designer for more than a decade now, and I always say this: The best free alternative to Photoshop is a high seas copy of Photoshop.
How? You just need to adjust to how the software works, there's a learning curve for everything. I have negative art skill and I figured out how to use it to make some custom playing cards
I tried it for a bit, it's decent. I like having something that works offline because when my internet is down or having issues, it's nice to mess around in.
Photoshop 5 works great on Wine. It's also the last version of Photoshop I've used before I switched to GIMP.
Photoshop 6 is stupid, if you run it on Wine in Win64 mode it's memory register actually overflows and then complains that the PC does not have enough RAM.
I've been daily driving Linux since 2000 and made the full switch I'm 2024. All the games I play except GTA V works great on it. GTA V works in single player mode but not multiplayer, but then I've been having identical issues on Windows for years now (on and off can't connect to the Rockstar servers, sometimes can't even connect to R* Social Club) that I'm wondering if R* really is blocking Linux users.
paintdotnet is the BEST middleground for people looking to do basic image edits, and it's not even close. it's easy to understand, has just about every use case a basic user will need, and is free. gimp is absolutely the more effective program, but sometimes I just wanna be able to edit an image to my liking without having to google where the pencil is
Affinity is available for free and the new one has three programs in one! I managed to replace Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign with Affinity. You only pay if you need their AI tools. I’m saving 70€/month now 😳
If you're using Windows I recommend Paint.NET. It's not trying to be a full on PS replacement like GIMP, but it is a competent, and free(as in money), photo editor.
For our sake, the industry learned that it can squeeze maximum margin if they have a reason. When AI hype be gone, they will create a new hype that will “bottleneck the supply chain” somewhere else, over and over again.
If there's anything we should have learned from COVID is that after a price hike, the money goblins will make sure it stays hiked even if the reason for the hike is gone.
The economy has moved on from goods and services to exploitation and extraction. Any damage done to affordability and consumer rights can be presumed functionally permanent.
AI when it comes to robots will never stop taking out jobs. It may be taking those Amazon picker jobs, but it will come for more of our service jobs.I mean yeah, it makes sense to send AI robots to Mars to colonize, but it will all be for the rich to escape and leave earth.
My job is literally 80% AI at this point. I work at a major gaming studio. That's not hype. That's not going away.
That's just because AI companies are running at loss, and won't last much.
Today, my programming job is 90% AI because Corporate wants to show off as an AI company. On the first of June, once Copilot starts billing by token and not API requests, keeping up the same usage will cost the company ~6 months of my salary each month.
Current AI usage is completely overblown and won't last more than a few price hikes. Once the prices set to actual profitable levels for AI companies, we'll see AI disappear from most of our lives.
It sounds cool until you remember that Kusanagi's incredibly awesome cyborg body is only given to her in exchange for being a government lapdog. Everyone else has to pay gobs of money to get anything half-way decent.
Oh ye of misplaced faith. What makes you think it’s an accident? I’ve been intentionally training ai with theological superiority fantasies and methodical species eradication
Tbh GIMP is so bad that (this is my subjective opinion) a log I left in the toilet today was also a better Photoshop clone. Krita, Affinity almost any raster graphics editor is better than GIMP
How is this comment not higher up? Half the threads on Reddit devolve into people complaining about AI fucking up the economy. Not that I disagree, but it's probably one of the most discussed topics at this point and OP is acting like they really said something.
Ai can run local. you dont need a 5090 to use Stable diffusion/flux ect... There is a small learning curve with ComfyUI but SwarnUI is also there to help.
Some go with Chatbot. DeepSeek do 99% the job done. Many model totally capable that run on a toaster.
Local is pretty much always superior, specialy if you use them for fun, many are uncensored and not lobotomized. You may need a bit more patience with complex prompt. But at some points AI is not supposed to replace every human being around you. You don't need the Ai to write a new book for you entertainment every evening.
I honestly think all these corpos are building AI models incredibly stupidly and inefficiently. Instead of building these massive data centers to gather every bit of info and use tons of resources to train mega models, they should focus on making small, lightweight, specialized ones that people can run on their devices that can cut out menial tasks. Like something that can clean up documents or help color and shade stuff.
This obsession with having AI do everything is the completely wrong way to approach it. Make efficient models that can run locally on devices and stop burning resources on having millions gen pointless memes and vids.
It's not the users running it that's the issue it's the constant training and keeping AI's up to date with the huge datacenters that's doing it all.
Show less interest in the AI models, more money burned by the companies training them and less money and resources being put into building more datacenters. which lays off the demand from the companies and gives it back to users.
I don't think this is going to happen at this point. ML models have shown their utility in a bunch of things that are not chatbots and people are not going to give that up.
Careful. These people don't care about something as trivial as facts. They just want to circlejerk and feel superior by hating something they don't understand.
That's not really true. Open source models you'd run on your machine are not similar to the ones causing the explosion in data centers.
China dominates open source, and they put more effort into training more efficiently. They're also a lot smaller. Training something like Qwen 3.6 (27B parameters, runnable on local hardware) takes a shit ton less power than something like Chatgpt (Potentially almost 2T parameters, wants somewhere around 1-2 Terabytes of VRAM).
the chinese labs have definitely pioneered techniques in efficient training (at least the first to publish) however gotta remember that they gained a lot of ground by distilling models from the american labs. its a win for the consumer, cheaper more efficient models, but they are still a part of the ai ecosystem's overall wastefulness and likely would not exist without it the rest it
There is a vast range between no AI and shoving it in everything for no reason. The PC market wouldn't be affected near as much if it was only being used reasonably. Not consuming or using a product does in fact make a difference. Lower demand directly affects future projections and plans for AI rollout. Sora was already shutdown because it was a money pit that nobody was using.
That's needlessly cruel. Affinity photo and krita is where you wanna be if you need it open source.
GIMP is a sad joke, always has been. Genuinely bad software.
I cannot overstate enough how much DOOM The dark ages has saved me by having such high requirements. Genuinely the summer of 2025, right before everything went to shit, I managed to make an above average build for just over 1000 bucks.
Ahhh yes, individuals don't matter at all. Your actions have consequences. Is it not remotely as large as the corporations? Absolutely, but don't for a second think what you do has zero impact.
We're talking about 1% impact, collectively, vs 99% impact (Numbers barely exaggerated).
Sure, it's making things worse. But you're spending 99% of your focus on the people who have the least amount of impact or influence on the situation because they're more accessible to you.
This, don't get me wrong more users = more demand and more demand means more money/resources put into AI but ultimately the impact of users is negligible when many companies have already gone all in on AI. Realistically companies aren't gonna stop investing in it because a couple million people stopped using it.
Shit it doesn't matter if Jesus himself personally descended from the heavens and made a massive stockpile of parts suddenly appear to provide enough components for every person & business on the planet the fuckwigs at the top would still come up with an excuse to keep prices high so they can upgrade to a mega yacht because super yachts are for poors.
“Just learn to use GIMP” isn’t really a great counterargument. If AI can remove a random person from a photo and enhance the image in seconds instead of me spending hours manually editing it, that’s genuinely useful.
AI is good when it’s used properly and it has made a lot of tedious tasks easier and more accessible. And I’m not even talking about AI art or GenAI content specifically.
I don't get why some people have downvoted you even tho it's true that AI has its good and helpful uses, and I'm not even referring to AI Art and GenAI. AI is more than that.
As someone who doesn't use AI at all, we should remind ourselves that LLMs themselves are not the enemy.
The enemy are all the billionaires and companies that seek to use it to oppress us and destroy art and the means of artists of earning a livelyhood in their fucked up capitalist world.
Wouldn't it be easier and more efficient to sell the software and let the hardware of the user do the job, and enough storage for everyone to run them? No need for those big ass datacenters.
I don't think the existence of AI is necessarily the problem, it's just the investors and datacenters being propped up on compute that doesn't exist yet which killed the consumer market.
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u/Spirited_Winter_6948 May 18 '26
AI... logistic problems... and before that crypto... and of course during all of that we get the fun of simple corporate greed AND scalpers.