It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle.
Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung, etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate desire to play the latest video games (lol).
Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude".
The free market and personal liberty aren't magical tools that when combined produce a functional system. From the outside the GPU market is probably unfixably broken. Capacity to manufacture is an extremely expensive investment that will be wasted if cryptomining on GPUs becomes merely somewhat less effective. Meanwhile GPUs are being driven out of the price range where their natural market can actually afford them.
Imagine if it were so profitable to haul small trailers of goods around for amazon that basic passenger cars went from 20k to 70k and nobody was interested in expanding car manufacturing to meet the new demand because the capacity might well go to waste next year. It would be untenable.
If car manufacturers started selling cars that were deliberately shitty at towing but still worked great for moving people from A to B I think they can be forgiven.
We want freedom to use our hardware but we need to have a functional market as well and this one has been broken for years with no sure end date.
No principle exists in a vacuum. In practice, all are balanced against other principles.
Let's run with your "software should be free" as an example. Licenses like the GPL family apparently work against that, in that they add restrictions. But so-called "viral" licenses aim to maximize a different kind of freedom for a larger number of less powerful players. Some call this hypocritical, but it's just balancing principles while taking into account outcomes.
Another way to put it is that principles for most aren't religious commandments; they're mental tools to push the world toward a set of preferred results.
I think it's hard to take the principled approach when you see that the result of sticking to principles results in large organizations enriching themselves while ignoring the myriad externalities.
At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles.
What, externalities like energy waste? If that's the case, why target ETH, isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?[1] I admit I don't really know if what Nvidia is targeting applies to both pre-merge and post-merge ETH
Without price discrimination, everyday users end up paying more for a given product while for-profit entities would pay less.
When a company releases a product, they price it according to how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it.
Where I take issue with this practice is when manufacturers start suing users who modify their own hardware to enable features that they didn't pay the manufacturer for. Tesla selling heated seats as a software upgrade is a good example. It's fine if they want to build the hardware into every Tesla and only enable it for users that pay for it, but suing customers who modify their vehicle to turn on the heated seats on their own is way out of line.
I don't think Nvidia is going too far here, unless they start suing customers who try to write custom drivers that bypass the limitation.
Because those price-sensitive buyers (PC gamers) are far more likely to be loyal customers down the road than crypto miners, who will immediately stop buying GPUs as soon as mining stops being profitable again.
Nvidia wants to give PC gamers a reason to stay on "Team Green" by making it easier for them to get a card at a reasonable price during this perfect storm of limited silicon availability and insane crypto mining demand.
I actually think that this particular move is more about rate limiting purchases intended for crypto mining than it is about putting miners in a different market segment.
> I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle.
I cannot think of any principle that would cause me to object to this.
Blind fealty to general purpose computing here conflicts with the very real world impact on non-crypto consumers. If we're being utilitarian, it seems to me that it would be obvious that this is a good move.
I mean, why are non-crypto consumers better than crypto ones from a utilitarian POV? (I play video games and dislike crypto - I'm just asking). I suppose that people do things other than gaming with 3080s, because I would be hard pressed to make a convincing argument that gaming is somehow so much more valuable of a hobby than mining crypto that it's worth the hit to general purpose computing to specifically ban crypto
I think the missing factor here is that mining groups are sort of like neo-feudalists.
If crypto ends up becoming the de facto world currency, then mining groups that are already wealthy purchasing all available stock of GPUs to mine and further enrich themselves is sort of like if 70% of land was owned by wealthy nobles, and they used the profits from their land ownership to purchase all new land-producing/discovering capital and therefore become the owners of all new land coming onto the market. It's like the worst nightmare of those worried about income inequality. And it just so happens to affect retail consumers who just want "land" for other purposes than becoming richer.
> 70% of land was owned by wealthy nobles, and they used the profits from their land ownership to purchase all new land-producing/discovering capital and therefore become the owners of all new land coming onto the market
So, basically, like REITs? It's funny that graphics card feature sets are what generate moral outrage when a feudal regression happening in real time before our very eyes in regards to the basic necessities of life.
I use my GPU to render visualizations for my work and for educational YouTube videos. It's not just gaming, but even then, belittling gaming is kind of silly. Entertainment has value too, and that entertainment supports lots of actual people doing actual work.
And crypto itself is the biggest hit to general purpose computing outside of the walled garden world of phones. What computing can be done if crypto speculation consumes all available computing power?
I think you're reading too much into people's reactions. I think this is a good move for Nvidia in the medium and long run. Gaming is the stated purpose of these cards; hashing is an unexpected and temporary phenomenon for them. Ethereum is moving away from PoW, and more regulation is undoubtedly coming to crypto, with its environmental cost likely a compelling bullet point. Why wouldn't they try to get back to their core business of selling GPUs to gamers?
It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move.
Unfortunately, I'm not surprised. Support for general purpose computing and user freedom has fallen substantially in the last several years. Look at iOS, where many geeks are happy to have a megacorporation tell you what you're allowed to run on "your" hardware.
And I'm not surprised support for it has fallen. The people who support general purpose computing never explain why it's important. They just state the principle as if it's self-evident, but clearly it isn't to a lot of people.
But to be fair to them, maybe they are not stating the reasons because they worry that voicing their fears would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"Hardware should be available" seems like the kind of axiom that FOSS people would support, especially when the reason for lack of availability is a crypto mining profit motive.
It's been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well-known and frequented by the general public, the opinions start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the principles from which the forum was borne.
Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massive law to regulate the way you can process data that internet browsers voluntarily send to your server, there would be principled outrage. But, speak ill of GDPR on today's HN, and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with anti-tech talking points.
Principles are borne of small communities because small communities can afford to be principles.
Before software ate the world, the impact that damaging actors had was much more limited. A few computers would get a few viruses here and there but that was it.
We live a world where computers have been integrated into the fabric of society, and where system risks do not have easy, principled answers.
And if principles don't adapt and negotiate with reality, its defenders will just be isolated from the rest of society which can't afford to lose a lot of other things, which include other, possibly more important, principles.
What changed with regards to GDPR was that 15 years ago there weren't Facebooks, Amazons, and other megacorps that had the personal data of 30% of the world's population available for their use. Tech monopolies encroached different product areas.
What changed in 15 years is that we grew up, we acquired power, we became more integrated into society and as such the risk profiles change. You either do, or you become irrelevant like many of the Free Software activists who were a vanguard back then and whose opinion nowadays matters little.
> Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massive law to regulate the way you can process data that internet browsers voluntarily send to your server, there would be principled outrage. But, speak ill of GDPR on today's HN, and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with anti-tech talking points.
GDPR is an actual improvement. Silicon Valley overstepped their boundaries and got punished accordingly. Perhaps insufficiently punished, even.
> It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle.
Sounds like free speech. People were all for unrestricted free speech... until the right wing started using it.
Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung, etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate desire to play the latest video games (lol).
Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude".