Marc Gilbert

AI stole my hobby

I've been playing on computers since I was four or so, and building them since around twelve or so. PC building has always been one of my favourite hobbies: something about the need to deeply research the parts and their compatibilities, thinking about your needs as a user and then navigating the stratum of components to optimise for those needs, then, once you've got that bill of materials, trying to again optimise on price from the many vendors on offer, all while staying ahead of the news so that you don't miss a new release that would negate all your planning; is something of a thrill that I've not found from many other things I've tried.

It's exciting stuff, all this preparation (never mind the actual using of said device), but as you may know by now, it's seemingly coming to a head; entering into an abyss that I'm not very certain it's going to come back from.

Have you heard about AI? Of course you have. I've been milling over what to say about AI and its impact on me, but truth be told, there's so much already said that I agree with in terms of what it's taking from us (autonomy, ideation, creativity), yet I'm actually a pretty avid user of it.

I've vibed up a bunch of apps (this one is possibly going to be public) for myself for various uses in my life and it's honestly superb. Every idea I've been milling over for a long time is coming to fruition and it's liberating. Probably the code sucks, but it's better than I could've ever done alone unless I'd dedicated all my free time to it, and even then I'm fairly certain it would be garbage.

roasting_inventory A screenshot from my coffee roasting inventory app that integrates with Artisan (coffee roasting software).

But something sinister is happening and that is that AI is robbing me (and probably many of you!) of the wonderful hobby of PC building.

I think the first PC I built that really felt like my own had, from memory, an Athlon XP 1800+ as the CPU and I think a GeForce MX440 or MX420. It's been so long I really cannot remember. I'm fairly certain mum and dad helped pay for all of it too, so thanks, you two, I wouldn't be here complaining about this if it weren't for you both!

After that I vaguely remember having something that would play Warcraft and Counterstrike ok, but god knows I have no clue what it was, but what I do remember is that I had an ATI Radeon 9600 XT that I got Half-Life 2 for free with and I miss it dearly.

Then, fast forward a few years to 2009 and I built up something like this, which I found from an email I sent to a local pc part vendor in Sydney, asking if they had the following in stock (prices in AUD):

I did end up with those parts, all housed inside a Coolermaster CM-690 case, which was pretty peak in those days. To boot, I had a custom watercooling loop for my CPU which was, naturally, cool as shit (both in style and temperature). God, I loved that build so much.

watercooled_pc My watercooled beast PC. It's so pretty!

I remember spending hours "uhm"-ing and "ahh"-ing between the i7 860 and the i7 920 at the time. The 860 being a bit more efficient, but the 920 being the absolute beast for overclocking, but much more power hungry. It was such an internal dilemma that I remember agonising over, yet for the end user experience, I truly wouldn't have felt a difference at all. Battlefield 3 would run just fine on both.

But what mattered was that I wanted to research the ins-and-outs of both CPUs completely as that was part of the fun. There were options, even from the same manufacturer, that required hours of devouring information to ensure what I went for met my use-case. And damnit, it's fun to learn these things. Those who consume Gamers Nexus as an outlet get what I'm saying with regards to PC hardware, as do those of you with hobbies that require you to go deep; joyously spending time comparing, assessing, analysing, fulfilling and feeding our brains that love deep research mode.

But hobbies are not free and that 2009 build hit my wallet hard. The GPU was AUD$377 at the time, which was about $570 in 2025. This was the second best GPU that AMD offered at the time, sitting just below the 5870 of theirs. I remember it feeling like so much money, but for what we were getting, it was a great price. It was a great price because it was an entertainment item for a very select group of nerds. These days AUD$570 gets you in the door with an entry level unit, such as the 9060 XT. The top of the range AMD 9070 XT will set you back around AUD$1300. Yikes.

GPUs are complex pieces of technology, with a range of uses that has evolved over time: gaming, folding, cryptocurrency mining, and now the monster: AI. This change has seen GPUs become central to value generation, really kicking off with cryptocurrencies.

When the crypto market rode the wave of euphoria back in 2022, the GPU market exploded and it quickly became almost impossible to find a GPU that didn't cost all of your children's kidneys, your house, and your favourite dog. This was because everyone wanted to mine cryptocurrencies using GPUs so they could essentially get free money. It's rather perverse that it made sense, but we're a simple group of opportunistic apes that it's no surprise.

I bought my first PC here in Germany in 2018. It wasn't much and didn't have a GPU, but it did the trick as a base and I bought it from a dude who had happily upgraded to an HP prebuilt, which honestly, confused the ever-loving shit out of me because what he sold me was far more powerful than what he changed to, but I was happy, he was happy, and I plugged in an Nvidia GPU: a GTX 1060; a few weeks later that I found on the second-hand market here for like 100€.

I acquired my second PC here in Germany around the end 2020 for a great price from a fellow gamer with a similar GPU in it (AMD RX 580) to what I had already, but it was with the AMD4 platform which was giving me some room to upgrade things like CPUs a bit later.

A few months later I was ready to start upgrading my GPU and found I had mistakenly waited for a bit too long, essentially missing the last chance to acquire something reasonably priced and instead having to hold on to my underpowered unit a bit longer. That "bit longer" was two years until the market shit the bed in July, 2022.

Elated that my cryptocurrency investments had completely shit themselves but that the GPU market had come back to earth, I picked up an AMD 6700XT which I still have today, and sold both GPUs I had been holding onto. I made a small profit selling the GTX 1060, which after 4 years, had gone up in price on the second-hand market, which looking back, shows that I was part of the problem.

When crypto crashed, it seemed we might have a chance at PC part normalcy, and that there may be some way to get back into the hobby that I and many others had been enjoying for decades. In early 2023 I started upgrading again, grabbing some more memory, a new CPU, and some solid-state drives for storage, and all was well. The GPU market was still a bit inflated, but we were on the right path.

ChatGPT releases GPT-3.5 in late 2022 and it rocks. Everyone's job gets easier, my code quality goes through the roof, productivity up, everyone spamming stupid AI messages that make us laugh: truly a glorious time.

What we didn't realise, or perhaps conveniently pushed to the back of our minds, was that asking ChatGPT anything meant that some processor somewhere is sweating its balls off trying to figure out what to say back to you. The technological capacity to do this is generally referred to as "compute" and all compute is, is stacks of said processors in various shapes and sizes of buildings (you might've heard the term "data-centre" recently) doing fuckloads of calculations at full bore (which costs astronomical amounts of energy, but I'm going to skip over that here), in order to help me with measurements for a recipe, or to tell you that you're some god that has discovered new physics or some shit.

Since 2022, the GPU market has gone nutty with costs again going up like crazy and becoming the new norm, but when you look at what a company can produce in terms of capacity, it makes sense from their perspective to shift their focus onto as much data-centre related output as possible. Furthermore, companies like AMD expect gaming revenues to drop: "Similar to the PC market, we believe that second half [declining] demand in gaming will be impacted by higher memory and component costs, and we are planning the business accordingly," - Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.

Let's unpack this a bit because I've glossed over some parts:

This isn't just for GPUs: we are seeing all parts go up wildly in price. Data-centers need storage, so solid-state drives and hard-drives prices are up like 75%. Memory is obviously up (about 300%). CPUs are on the way up as AI needs more help figuring out what the fuck to do and where to send its information it churns out.

Then, because hobbyists like me can't be bothered playing in this market anymore, we're going to stop buying peripherals like cases, cooling fans, all the small niche things that help make the hobby the fun that it is. Wonder how long it takes for those manufacturers to close up shop.

I'm being a bit doomer-core here, I know, but I think it's just coming from a place of sadness, like seeing an old friend deciding to start dating someone who really isn't good for them and realising you don't want to see them anymore. But you can't help but think of all the fun you had together, and that that's being taken from you, just so we can have a demented picture of Franklin the turtle shooting an RPG at civilians in boats to own the libs or some dumbass shit.

For her birthday back in 2021, I gifted my partner the parts for her own PC, as a way to share my hobby with her. She built it, I observed and lent some guidance, and what we ended up with was a way to bond over this part of my life that has been present for decades. We still game together and it's incredibly special to be able to share this. Gaming is so varied: it can be alone, as a group, scary, funny, hard, cozy; it's something that can really let the creativity of the developers shine and bring people together. Add to that this physical nature of building the tool to let you embark on this digital adventure and its a very compelling time sink. However, I wonder if we simply have to let it go eventually 'cause stonks, bro.

I can't do ChatGPT in cooperative mode and I don't want to. I want to build computers, I want to play all the games, I want to learn about new technologies that I can one day hold in my hand that won't cost me my leg, and I want to do it with my friends; not just the ones who haven't yet been priced out.

So what does this mean for my hobby of gaming and PC building? I'm not sure. All I do know is that my friend's SSD has recently shit the bed and they can't afford a new one right now. Guess I'll have to suggest we go for a bike ride instead.

#2026 #life #technology