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cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/152656
Aaand they got their video taken down, link to post on YT
Here's a mirror on internet archive.
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Technology
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Thanks! +1
I've added the link to the postπ
Sweet Tech Jesus! It's 3 and 1/2 hours long.
Itβs a really good watch. Iβve put it on while playing some Factorio, so time went by quite quickly
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yeah even I'm not that autistic and I watch videos of people soldering
I dunno, if it were Hbomberguy talking about YouTube plagiarism for four hours Iβd watch it.
I hope we get a new video from him this year.
I usually put it on when I'm playing Alan Wake 2 so I wouldn't shit my pants too hard.
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I really respect Gamers Nexus for actually doing the shit Linus Tech Tips just haws and haws over.
I don't think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?
They make entertainment videos that sometimes have mildly informative value.
I just got sick of there always being a new "controversy" with him and his inability to seem like he gives a shit about it. Each time he gets accused of something, whether he did it or not, he just goes on the WAN show to sigh as big as possible and say "Guys..."
I mean it's fair to avoid "drama" no matter who stirs it, but most of their controversies were fairly well handled and largely overblown.
I think my biggest issue was the whole "trust me bro" "warranty", but that was mostly a cultural clash and Linus still had some good points even originally when he talked about it, even if the way he did so was extremely tone deaf.
The tone deafness is it, you've put it better words that I could. It doesn't matter to me whether he was right or wrong about it, he still manages to come across as abrasive at best or smug and shitty at worst. Like, let Luke talk about it instead or something.
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LTT doesnt make deep investigative hours-long videos anyway
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But now that Nvidia agreed to pay a bribe to the government it's no longer black market
Good ol' orange market.
Orange is the new black.
I feel dumb for it but I just can't keep track of all the controversies and scandals right now:
Which scandal were they referring to the week of August 11 for why nobody in the US state department would respond?
We really need a spreadsheet to track all this shit.
My god, this is the LOTR Extended Edition of tech journalism videos
Funny thing is 'Local ML' tinkerers largely can't afford GPUs in the US either.
The 5090 is ludicrously expensive for its VRAM pool. So is the 4090, which is all but OOS. Nvidia will only sell you a decent-sized pool for $10K. Hence non-techbros here have either been building used RTX 3090 boxes (the last affordable compute GPU Nvidia ever sold), EPYC homelabs for CPU offloading, or have been trying to buy those modded 48GB 4090s back.
The insane supply chain is something like this:
-
Taiwan GPUs -> China
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China GPU boards -> US
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US GPU Boards -> Smuggled back into China
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Deneutered GPU Boards -> Sold back to US
All because Nvidia is playing VRAM cartel and AMD, inexplicably, is uninterested in competing with it when they could sell 48GB 7900s basically for free.
You could also buy the Apple Studio with its large amount of unified ram for a similar price of a 5090. Of course itβs not as fast but it could run a model that needs more ram.
The pricing for memory is still pretty bad. $4K for 96GB, $5.6K for 256GB, $10K for 512GB. One can get 128GB on the M4 Max for $3.5K, at the cost of a narrower bus so it's even slower, but generally, EPYC + a 3090 or 4090 makes a lot more sense.
SOTA quantization for these are mostly DIY. There aren't many MLX DWQs or trellis-quantized GGUFs floating around.
But if you want to finetune or tinker instead of just run, you're at an enormous disadvantage there. AMD's Strix Halo boards are way more compatible, but not standalone yet and kinda rare at this point.
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I live in Taiwan and the GPU is more expensive than America.
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Whaaaat. US protectionism is purely performative and ineffective? Iβm shocked! Surely this administration couldnβt be incompetent?
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Mr Burke is going to get black bagged.
That was a lot of CAPITAL LETTERS
Any TL;DR on this? Nvidia secretly ships sanctioned GPUs to China?
GPUs that are banned from export to China can be easily acquired in low numbers in the country due to individuals bringing in banned GPUs which get sold just like unbanned GPUs after passing through several people. Also possible that some banned cards are repaired QC failures from the Chinese factories that produce these cards (the cards are produced in China, but are supposed to be exported and banned from export back into China). The export restrictions present more of a barrier for building out large AI clusters with many, many GPUs.
Nvidia almost certainly knows about this but turns a blind eye because they want to sell more cards and China is a large market.
There are some repair shops in China that can not only repair the GPUs, but can also transfer the GPU die onto an aftermarket PCB and give it double the amount of VRAM to create a card that Nvidia doesn't even sell.
Individual banned GPUs are easier to get than the full systems that Nvidia also sells. AMD GPUs are much less popular, Intel GPUs are basically non-existent. The overall most popular card for smuggling into China seems to be the RTX 4090.
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I can't wait for this fucking bubble to burst.
Why did you link an image instead of the video?
Good question and thanks for asking!
As far as I'm currently aware, due to YouTube constantly changing things, YT thumbnails often will not load unless directly linked to the video's thumbnail (at least here on the Fediverse).
Because of this, it allows me to link to alternative sources within the post such as Invidious (YT alt ad-free frontend), Peertube, Bandcamp, etc.
Much easier black market than drugs, because it is legal to import it, and no one checks when you export it.
Nvidia has 18%-28% of its sales to Singapore. They defend this by saying only 2% of their product is shipped there, but they don't say which countries receive the bulk of shipments that are billed through Singapore.
some 5090 cards in Hong Kong (from OP) are the same price as the US, which makes it hard to understand why US people have been charged with smuggling, and shows complicity of entire supply chain to funnel to China. Premiums over MSRPs in US would be zero or lower if this was all above board. You also can't find a 5090 on Amazon, but you can in Hong Kong boutique?
Prohibition for the loss, as always.
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