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I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.

I remember hearing somewhere on this site that medical imaging got pretty good at building systems that recycle helium. Does chip manufacturing not do this or are the losses at their scale are still large enough that you need a substantial constant supply?

This is, according to Hegseth, just something they planned for, since they knew what was going to happen.

So the RAM prices are going to skyrocket again?

Aren’t there huge stockpiles of helium in the US? I can buy party sized tanks at Target or big tanks at the usual places like welding supply places.

Great timing that the US recently sold its strategic helium supply.

It's almost like war is a bad thing.

Iran will make AI go pop.

Somewhat tangential question - for the "Just Stop Oil" folks - is it the extraction of oil that is the problem, or the burning of it? If the former, then we have an opportunity to investigate more renewable sources.

Lindsay Graham has an easy solution to this unnecessary conflict: send your sons and daughters.

This whole administration is such a fiasco.

Remember all the e/acc people telling us to vote for Trump? Some mea-culpas are in order.

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Do you remember this quote from wheel of time?

"Let the lord of chaos rule" ...

Qatar is probably intentionally shutting down production of gas and oil in order to pressure the US to stop, independently of Iranian attacks.

In that respect they may be bombed by Iran but they have the same interests

Helium shortages affecting chip fabs is a good reminder of how fragile the whole compute supply chain is. GPU availability, fab capacity, and now raw materials. The infrastructure behind AI is more precarious than most people realize.