scavenging sources have dried up completely

Last I looked — which was, admittedly, a few days ago — Google Shopping still has some retailers that have stock and haven’t yet jacked their price up. Mostly dinky little companies.

searches

https://hssl.us/silicon-power-64gb-ddr5-5600-mhz-udimm-desktop-memory-kit-2-x-32gb-5600-mhz-clock-speed-sp064gblvu560fd2ad/

Never heard of these guys, can’t vouch for their reputability, but they have 2x32GB of DDR5 for $159.99 listed as being in stock.

EDIT: I would advise, though, that if you plan to get memory in the near future, that you’re probably better-off getting it ASAP, since I’m sure that there are going to be scalpers combing over all those small retailers before too long if they haven’t gotten to someone yet.

4chan’s position is that they aren’t doing business in the UK, which is why they’re disregarding the UK regulator’s fines. The UK regulator might be able to block them in the UK if the UK rolls out a Great Firewall of the UK, say, a la China, but probably not get the US to enforce rulings against them. And, I’d add, such a Great British Firewall is going to have limited impact unless the Brits also ban VPNs in the UK that don’t also do such blocking internal to the VPN and additionally block external VPNs, a la Russia.

In the same way, lemmy.today is doing business in the EU.

Very unlikely, in the eyes of the US court system. They have no EU physical presence, and aren’t advertising targeting EU people.

Facebook

Yeah, now they might be affected, but they’re in the EU.

EDIT: For context, last year, this happened:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-fines-google-20-decillion-world-gdp-youtube-kremlin-war-ukraine-rcna178172

Russia fines Google more than the world’s entire GDP

Russian courts can hand down whatever rulings they want, but they don’t really have an effect elsewhere unless other legal systems view them as having jurisdiction.

Iran has the death penalty for blasphemy. But the US isn’t going to enforce rulings on blasphemy unless it views Iran as having jurisdiction over the person posting said content.

Note that the issue only affects websites in the EU legal jurisdiction. From the US legal standpoint, that means doing business in the EU. The body text has the qualification, but the headline does not.

The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content.

“in the entirety of the EU”

That’s kinda clickbaity. This isn’t going to apply to, say, lemmy.today.

Micron is one of the “Big Three” DRAM manufacturers.

Crucial is their “sell directly to consumers” brand.

https://netvaluator.com/en/top-10-ram-manufacturers-by-market-share/

Micron Technology stands as the third giant, with a market share close to 20%, or about 23 billion USD in DRAM revenue. Unlike Samsung and SK Hynix, Micron is headquartered in the United States, making it a critical supplier for Western markets. Its product portfolio covers both DRAM and NAND, giving it broader exposure to the memory industry.

The company’s consumer-facing Crucial brand is well recognized among PC builders and gamers worldwide. Micron also plays a vital role in supplying DRAM for servers and AI, competing directly in the HBM space. Its strategy focuses on quality, diversification, and maintaining a stable supply chain for North America and Europe. As the only American giant, Micron is strategically important in the geopolitical landscape of semiconductors.

for example dell, hp and lenovo run a large business laptop leasing business if they do not get their ram, it will sour their relationships with memory manufacturers

Lenovo is stockpiling memory to try to make it through the RAM winter.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/lenovo-stockpiles-ram-as-prices-skyrocket-reportedly-has-enough-inventory-to-last-through-2026-memory-stock-claimed-to-be-50-percent-higher-than-usual-to-fight-pricing-shock

Lenovo stockpiles RAM as prices skyrocket, reportedly has enough inventory to last through 2026 — memory stock claimed to be 50% higher than usual to fight pricing shock

Lenovo is playing it smart and buying up as much memory inventory as it can

I don’t think that Lenovo is getting special deals with memory makers either, or they wouldn’t need to stockpile.

Serial compute isn’t doing the double-every-18-months-in-speed since something like the early 2000s.

Unlike with serial compute, not all problems can be solved, run faster, with parallel compute. But at some point, unless we figure out some sort of new way to play with physics, we pretty much have to move to parallel compute where we can if we want much more performance.

Damn, that was the only brand of RAM without LEDs and racing stripes on it

hits Google Shopping

https://www.gamestop.com/pc-gaming/pc-components/memory/products/pny-performance-16gb-ddr5-4800mhz-desktop-memory-md16gsd54800-tb/333745.html

Aside from being a black circuit board rather than green, that PNY DIMM doesn’t look especially blinged up.

The Brits are still doing a penny!

Also, I can’t wait to buy up used RAM for pennys when the bubble pops.

The memory that manufacturers are producing is HBM; they’re transitioning facilities that had been producing memory for DIMMs to producing HBM. HBM won’t be in DIMM form factor — you can’t just stick it into the slots on a PC motherboard.

I read an article yesterday that Samsung’s memory division wasn’t even willing to let Samsung’s own cell phone division lock in any long-term memory buying agreement with them, which the cell phone division hsd been trying to do. Too much money in selling HBM memory for parallel compute to datacenters.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/ai-frenzy-is-driving-new-global-supply-chain-crisis-2025-12-03/

Some 6,000 miles away in California, Paul Coronado said monthly sales at his company, Caramon, which sells recycled low-end memory chips pulled from decommissioned data-center servers, have surged since September. Almost all its products are now bought by Hong Kong-based intermediaries who resell them to Chinese clients, he said.

“We were doing about $500,000 a month,” he said. “Now it’s $800,000 to $900,000.”

I threw away a bunch of large-capacity DDR4 DIMMs last year, figured that they’d be useless in the future. Kind of wish I hadn’t, now. Reusing old DIMMs is probably the only source of supply that can be ramped up in the near term.

In October, SK Hynix said all its chips are sold out for 2026, while Samsung said it had secured customers for its HBM chips to be produced next year. Both firms are expanding capacity to meet AI demand, but new factories for conventional chips won’t come online until 2027 or 2028.

Two or three years until manufacturing capacity will be ramped up.

Why? I mean, they aren’t compelled to manufacture DIMMs.

Right now, there is a window in time where there are companies willing to pay tons of money for HBM, more than most people and companies are for DIMMs. It’d be crazy for memory manufacturers not to make HBM if they have the capacity to do so, if they’re doing way better by doing so.

Will these even be useful on the second hand market, or are these chips gonna be on specialized PCBs for these machines?

If I understand aright, it’s going to be HBM, so it won’t be in DIMM form. Like, can’t just go stick it in a PC.

Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.

Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.

TECO’s kinda-sorta emacs’s parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi’s parent.

I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.

It’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.

Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name “compcache” (“compressed cache”). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]

Open-source RAM is better.

Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.

been the case for decades

One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you’re using the vlf package or similar.

TECO and ed might not. Dunno.

Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900.

If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven’t jacked up prices yet.

https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28

My first hit for “2x16gb 32gb ddr5” sorted by price is this:

https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram

Kingston Fury DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL40 RAM KF556C40BBK2-32

$100.00

These guys are next lowest:

https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm

Price: $103.06

I mean, they did make a lot of money, but they also had an extremely high valuation.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/pe-ratio

NVIDIA PE ratio as of November 20, 2025 is 48.45.

Something like 20 is typical for a mature company. Tech companies have, in the past, often had higher ratios, but that’s based on their expectation to grow a lot rapidly, and expecting NVidia to dramatically grow from their current — already very high — valuation is asking a lot.

If NVidia were a small tech company that was doing well and clearly had a lot of market to expand into rapidly, that would be one thing.

I think that in general, the market has been pretty good to NVidia. Their share price is up 31.22% since the start of the year. 1,247% over the past five years.