The Guinness, the laptop, and the great AI memory grab…

Oh I do wonder what I could write about this week? Anything going on in the world? No? Nothing of note? Ok that’s grand. Keep it that way please. More of the same calm, soothing global atmosphere we all know and love.

Talking of calm and soothing, I might as well mull over my recent family gathering. It deserves to be immortalised on the page in one way or another.

Such soirées are funny things. You’ll know the sort if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on your family)…

There are too many people in the kitchen. Someone’s looking for something and shouting across the house to someone else who doesn’t know where it is either. People are breaking out into small pockets to play games. It’s sort of like Christmas but without the fairy lights. Any which way… you’ve got the general sense the afternoon is slowly but surely drifting toward chaos.

We try to have these gatherings semi-regularly in my family. They’re wonderful, noisy, mildly unpredictable get-togethers. At some point someone always tells a story that begins with “remember that time when…”

Well, I’ll certainly be remembering this time around. And not for all the right, heartwarming reasons you might expect from a family shindig.

At some point during the evening, someone decided we needed to watch something. Quite what it was I’m not entirely sure – but a laptop was required. A phone simply wouldn’t cut it.

Naturally, a quick scan of the room revealed a MacBook sitting on the table.

“That’ll do nicely.”

Only certain families operate with that level of confidence when it comes to other people’s devices. No asking, no ceremony… just open the lid and crack on.

Which, to be fair, is mostly fine.

Until the moment my aunt’s boyfriend’s son’s wife (you getting a clearer picture of this family gathering now?) accidentally tipped her entire pint of Guinness across the keyboard.

I know what you’re thinking: a beautiful, respectable pint of Guinness. Gone. Heartbreaking stuff, truly.

The laptop was equally disappointed.

There were immediate histrionics and a bit of crying, which I found slightly confusing – was she mourning the lost pint or my work laptop?

Anyway, fortunately all my work is backed up so the damage was mostly logistical rather than catastrophic. But it did leave me suddenly without a functioning laptop. How thrilling. A 10/10 situation to be in when you run a business and your job involves… using a laptop. A lot.

So for a few weeks now I’ve been holding calls from a sort of improvised boardroom setup, waiting patiently for my replacement Mac to arrive. It turns out we’re living through a global memory shortage, which has meant perpetual delays and issues getting my new device in front of me.

A global memory shortage? Eh? Yeah, well, turns out the culprit is, of course, our favourite modern buzzword: AI.

As AI infrastructure booms, it soaks up enormous amounts of computer memory, particularly the high-bandwidth RAM used in AI servers. Chipmakers prioritise producing these components for data centres (spoiler: because it’s crazy lucrative for them to do so), leaving less supply for ordinary consumer devices like laptops and PCs.

I did some reading into it. Lo and behold, the shift isn’t just creating memory shortages in the electronics industry but pushing memory prices up.

Costly spill of Guinness then, eh?

It struck me as ever-so-slightly poetic that the technology designed to make life more ‘convenient’ is, right now, making my life slightly less convenient.

Which left me thinking about inconvenience more generally.

Modern life is engineered to remove inconvenience entirely. Faster deliveries. Information at your fingertips. Smoother software, smarter systems, yada yada. Stuff is basically designed to anticipate what we want before we even want it.

But every now and then something spills – literally or metaphorically – and the gears grind to a halt for a bit. You work from a different room. You borrow someone else’s screen. You improvise. In the grand scheme of things (i.e. the world and what’s happening in it), these are tiny problems. Mild inconveniences.

In the security world we spend a lot of time trying to introduce inconvenience deliberately – for criminals, at least. Good security systems rarely eliminate crime entirely; they make it awkward, unpredictable, or risky enough that people think twice.

Sometimes that’s all you need: a little friction in the system.

Anyway.

By the time you read this I’ll hopefully be in Portimão, sitting somewhere sunny with a plate of seafood and not thinking about laptops or RAM shortages at all.

Balance, as they say.