A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
At the same time I’m seeing a bunch of ads for “hardware is getting too expensive, use Akamai cloud for your gaming etc instead, now with AI blah blah!”
Bitch, you’re the reason hardware is so expensive!
Step 1: Raise sales prices artificially
Step 2: Create affordable alternatives to rent.
Step 3: Wait until enough people claim that its cheaper and more comfortable to just rent.
Step 4: Wait until maket is destroyed.
Step 6: Raise prices.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy”
- Blackstone
Citrix called, they still hold the patent
Since the ubiquity of smartphones, PC relevancy has been on the decline, and now with the pricing out of regular people, I imagine they will eventually become a completely niche and rare thing, to the point where even renting them out won’t be common or necessary. What’s more concerning to me is where the internet is going. In a few decades I think it will be mainly used for banking, medical an other administrative things, with the social aspect heavily regulated and monitored, and will only be used by businesses. We’ve lived through a very unique time, and things are bound to change massively, so enjoy it while you can.
There is no cloud, just someone else computer.
Everything a subscription. You’ll own nothing and like it!
And, people, I can’t stress this enough, FUCK JEFF BEZOS!
Murica is a deranged shithole. Linux is our only way out of this. To all hardware manifacturers: Build your goddamn drivers for it and free us!
~cry in the capitalist vacuum…
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
How about fuck you Jeff.
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
Could is just a fancy word for giving up your freedoms. You rely on some greedy corporation and for what? What would the benefit even be?
What a fucking joke that would be on US American networks.
We are ranked like 30th in the world for bandwidth. No fiber dropped to the curb but the billionaires. And shit slow 20th century wireless speeds with technical acumen that we see today in Verizon’s ongoing 8 hour outage.
Bezos is so out of touch it is clown-like and stupid.
They want a data center heavy world but have no fucking pipeline to get data in and out for the rest of us.
What a human dildo.
Bezos is so out of touch it is stupid.
Is he out of touch or has he just recognized that 50% of the economic activity is already from the top 10% of the population?
I get the feeling the wealthy have just written off the bottom 90% of society and don’t actually give a flying fuck if anything works for us or not. He knows his core sales will go to people who do have fiber at their doorstep.
Maybe we’re the ones out of touch thinking they plan on having a place for us in this world at all.
Thats the plan, organize yourselves now before they do it for you
Even Ford, piece of utter feculence he was, understood that if you gave people money and time to spend it they’ll give it right back to you and everyone gets to come up together.
That was a PR stunt. Wages were being raised anyway, he just preempted what he knew was coming to make himself look good
Next you’re gonna tell me that Ford didn’t actually invent the weekend, but was pressured by unions.
Or that tipped wages aren’t meant to let the employees get a higher wage than they could at a fixed wage, but instead only benefit the business.
You and your crazy conspiracy theories. Now, if you’re done being wrong, I have a bridge to purchase.
plus they get to control and censor information much more tightly
Censoring parts of gameplay as you play would be very impressive, btw. Not in a good way, but impressive, like when I first found out about ISP replacing/adding ads on http pages
once computers are completely in their hands, they can control and censor much much more than just games.
CONNECT TO CENTRAL REDDIT
[YES] [NO]
That’s clear, this is just a weird image
Also, I believe they don’t really need to have complete control for that, too
they do when the computers are hosted on their own cloud
Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.
Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.
The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.
Having tried to play games over a gigabit connection, no. You really can’t. Latency is not something you can just handwaved away.
I don’t know what to say. Plenty of folk, myself included, have had no issues with the majority or games. And stuff like geforce now is quite successful
As someone who remotes home frequently, no, the experience is not quite right. Packet drop and latency cause lots of input errors and misclicks. Sometimes the local internet decides not to carry your packets, and sometimes even connecting over vpn doesn’t.
You do not want a cloud desktop. You want a physical desktop and supplement with cloud services you can’t run locally.
Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.
Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft
People will surrender all ownership if you can provide more content more cheaper and conveniently, ownership is much lower on most people’s priority than convenience
And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.
Then people still flock up on centralised systems.
Don’t even dare to do P2P 😅!
Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.
Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.
The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.
And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.
I had to sign up for DSL this week in Frankfurt, DE as my neighborhood didn’t have cable or fiber internet. Don’t think that we’re gonna be cloud-ready any time in the next 50 years. DSL. Frankfurt. Major city.
Satellite TV was much more popular compared to cable generally in European countries, so phone lines make up the bulk of wired networking in a lot of places, making DSL a pretty practical option without having to lay a whole network. I get the feeling in countries where cable is much more common, DSL is reserved for the last resort level of service, whereas in Europe many of the telecoms make sure to deploy the latest standards.
I finally swapped to 1gbps fibre a year or two ago, but before that I was on about 250mbps with G.Fast DSL that honestly wasn’t bad at all. I believe the theoretical limits go much higher than that too
It’s DSL, so the speed depends on line length. To reliably get 250M you’re probably doing fibre to the footpath outside the building.
In the UK, where I believe VDSL and G.Fast both are achieved by putting the equipment in your local “green cabinet” which is the sub distribution between you and your local telephone exchange.
My cabinet is about a 200m straight line from my house, so I was lucky enough that I always got pretty close to whatever speed the telco was selling me.
My parents’ place is about 500m or so from theirs and I think they typically got about 70-80% of the “up to” rate on VDSL before they switched to fibre. It used to be more like 50% on regular ADSL/2/2+
I think you have to be kinda rural before you’re much further than that from a green cabinet (which of course isn’t an insignificant number of people, but I believe per capita it’s not typical)
in my rural part of the u.s., the telco only sells dsl to a max of 10 mbps (and as slow as 384kbps if you’re at the end of the signal’s reach–at which point they also charge you more for the shit-tier speeds)… even if you’re literally next door to their central office… and even if they don’t have fiber down your street (which is their reasoning for the artificial limit–to push people towards fiber so they can pull the copper).
I got the first DSL in france, a fucking VCR sized box that fried after a couple of months too… The deal wasn’t the incredible 128Kb/s but that it was online all the time…
It quickly doubled up to .5Mb and then slowly up to 20Mb before I went with fiber some maybe 8-9 years ago. But I rarely felt hampered.
Frankfurt Oder or Frankfurt Main?
Frankfurt am Main, Nied
Yeah but Germany is well known in Europe for being technologically in the stone age.
I remember a time when Skype already existed and we would still pay for long distance phone minutes to call our German relatives because they hadn’t updated their internet since the Kaiser was in charge. :-P In the last few years, their speeds are much more comparable to ours.
Like with all tech, we will build the infrastructure with our tax’s, and Jeff will sell it back to us.
I feel like desktop as a service might work pretty well in a world where municipal fiber was commonplace but it’s the damnedest thing, the billionaire aligned politicians banned it in a bunch of places
To be clear, fiber is missing in many places, but it’s not just for billionaires. I have it and I live in a very small, very insignificant town.
I used to live in San Diego, in the middle of a very dense section of the city, though… And zero fiber options were there. I was paying $80 a month for 400 down and 15 up. So embarrassing…
I get 1gbit up and down now for $40 a month.
So, it’s bullshit, and I agree with you. But fiber does exist. I don’t have any idea why some areas get it, and others don’t, but in San Diego the issue was non-compete agreements between ISP’s.
Add to it that we all carry pocket computers nowadays with more than enough processing power to do basically any sane thing.
What a completely 1980 idea.
That’s just a business probrem for them, they’ll fix it with Amazon Fibre™ or something like that
They already have a Starlink-like program in the works. (Not that latency is important or anything with compute over internet.)
Yet another way to double-dip, I’m surprised they haven’t released it already
They want us more desperate for it so that we will accept a higher price.
Or they’ll bundle it directly with the compute they want to sell you so that you dont even have the option of using your own PC and all devices on the network are 100% validated and controlled by them.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!!!
…being a human dildo sounds quite fun!
They build the pipeline for themselves, we won’t know about it or have access
Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.
- piracy
- dis-enshittification
- jailbreaking devices
- opensource hardware
- decentralization
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. Then, they turn all that tensor compute against us to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when they control bare metal access to your rented corporate cloud hardware because consumer PC equipment is too astronomically expensive to afford for the average person?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to the level of religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…
First we need to trust-bust the government until we get a government that is actually representative of the people, not representative of the wealth.
It’s not that the government is not capable or as inefficient as they are so often portrayed. They are actually quite capable and frighteningly efficient. They’re just not working for us anymore.
more like if only enough people actually cared about what is going on in life. Most governments with this issue atm are facing massive apathy in regards to actually voting on what they want. They either don’t vote at all, or blind vote not bothing to research anything. I wish I could say this was strictly a US issue as well but, I believe most democratic governments are having this issue. I know for sure Canada is.
Ok. One more time for everyone in the back. Ready?
Tax.
The.
Wealthy.
I couldn’t agree more, but they’ve said no, and the politicians are being bought, so as a citizen, besides not buying their shit slurry, what is there to actually do about it more actively. I guess it’s just local politics, ultimately I don’t know in the aggregate how much it helps with these guys who have so much money they just wield it like a hammer. Not that that should be a good enough reason to do nothing
Keeping the issues in the conversation is good, but ideas and words only work so well, eventually someone has to enable mechanisms to do these things in reality, otherwise its just corps sucking each other off at the common person’s expense all the way to hell
so as a citizen, besides not buying their shit slurry, what is there to actually do about it more actively
Well there’s a vast landscape between ‘citizen’ and ‘not buying’!
As a participant in state and local politics, you do what you can. I learned during years of NGO work that the longest lever for the non-owner class is policy.
That means working on specific issues by directing persuasion to policy makers, and often you catch those flies with honey. Appeal to the cooperative side of politicians and bureaucrats, make them feel like leaders and other ego things. Also, usually, pressuring with risks, like looming financial or political losses. This seems like very unsatisfying work because it is far from the front lines and providing direct relief, but systemic change is easier when protests aren’t necessary.
Meanwhile it’s also possible to start the Transition to a new economy, without fuss. Cooperatives are all around you, join them. Find every little opportunity for mutual aid, and take them when you can. Make non-commercial transactions normal. Participate in repair cafés, and develop thrift economy, like clothing exchanges and toolshares and small buying clubs. Electrify and find more efficiency. Group study. Build small organizations and ventures.
And crucially, participate in a little Direct Action, for your sanity and honour. What that means, whether it’s food charity or illicit art, is unique to you.
Exceptionally robust suggestions for the average person, the next step is to act on one of these for the sake of your neighbours
It’s not going to get resolved overnight, and it’s not going to be a smooth and direct road without any violence or suffering, we’ve seen plenty of the violence and suffering already. There will be more. But pay careful attention to the resistance that is forming, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to resist, and until those opportunities present themselves, do what you can to make yourself and your families, loved ones, and communities more resilient and better supported. Give as much as you can, until it is time to take what we are owed.
There are protests happening. There will be more. There is active resistance. There will be more. There is civil disobedience. There will be more. There are people forming labor unions. There will be more. Labor strikes are planned. There will be more.
Don’t despair, prepare. It’s almost certainly going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better… but it will get better. Even if it takes years of effort, and maybe even a lot of violence and suffering to get there. The USA is the country that threw a tea party to overthrow a king. They will do so again, sooner or later. And keep in mind that historic event, also, did not happen overnight, it was the culmination of years of public anger, organization and preparation. It doesn’t even have to be a single definitive event. The stuff that is happening in Minneapolis right now, is changing the balance point on the scale. It may not be what tips it over, but it doesn’t have to be. The undercurrent of change is always moving even when it’s not visible. When it becomes visible, it usually gets pretty dramatic pretty quickly.
honestly, I think it would be a stretch to say this could be resolved in the next decade barring a super hostile action government wise such as a strict wealth tax (including offshore bank accounts). but even i think that would likely do more harm than good at first and would be neigh impossible to actually track logistically without accommodation from external countries.
Slow and Steady will eventually win the race, but it’s going to be a long hard process and will need actual participants.
I think that’s a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a “long hard process” of hardworking participants that takes decades.
I’m concerned it’s going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it’s sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don’t necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we’re on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don’t see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it’s never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it’s just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it’s so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it’s been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don’t have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there’s no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming “now”.
This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that’s commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don’t think we’re prepared for how bad it’s going to be. For how bad we can be.
Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am. I hope there’s some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that’s realistic.
For sure, anything of that caliber, be it a monetary violence such as a massive financial shift from wealthy to either the government structures or the people, to a physical violence such as a revolt, to a virtual violence such as banning products/companies that are not following the established mantra, I do think the end result would be the same, I doubt it would lead to the collapse of civilization but, I do have to say that it won’t be pretty and in best case scenarios the penalty is increased pricing for awhile while things stabilize, worst case scenario is dismantlement of known authorities/governments due to violent protests.
For some food for thought btw on the economic scale? You could take half of amazons annual net income(income after taxes, liabilities, deductions etc) for 2024, distribute it evenly across all known people in the US (Amazons primary market) and be able to give each person $80-90. every person and that’s still allowing the company to keep 30B. It blows my mind. The same can be said about Microsoft. They made 88B in 2024, so half of that is 44B across every person would be 130ish per person. Nvidia would be ~18, apple would be ~144. It’s really sickening when you think of it the amount of money those companies have.
I guess we all hope the price is small, but humanity has this way of not really learning its lessons, I hope I’m wrong on that too. I make sure to have gratitude for the things in my life that are good and wholesome, because who knows anything really, it is good to be able to see your flowers bloom, so to speak.
But humanity has witnessed the end of every other empire and made it out the other side, so yes, hold out hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and enjoy the moment
Sorry, best I can do is a 40% tax break for those making 1m or more annual revenue.
It’ll trickle down this time for sure… right?
stop funding their bullshit
A men
Me: sits on 7 different low budget but sturdy PCs 😎
Stay aware. Keep up with happenings. :3
You know, I feel that’s causing a lot of distress, and not just for myself. I think maybe they also want desperate people, which might be why they’ve built their bunkers
E: shit, I don’t want to be more of a downer than I have to be, been there for too long, not helpful. There’s no way to win a war other than keep up the morale, thanks for the cat face, it did make me smile for what it’s worth lol ˄_~
And to be helpful this was something I came by last week in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, it’s about as optimistic a thing that’s come about recently. And I’ll add it took me a hot minute to find it on my phone, despite knowing exactly which video I was looking for…
Foe me its make your own.
If the big companies wont make the things we want, im going to make it myself. Kinda already am with my bespoke laptop I built…
I’m happy to ask about your bespoke laptop if you wanna nerd out, what is the deal with it, I looked into it very briefly years ago, but it didn’t feel like the tech was there at the time, not for what I was looking for anyway
I second this sentiment. I would love to know more!
Can’t make a useful computer yourself if you can’t get parts anymore.
[redacted]
At this pace they will make owning a compyter illegal. Being everything a remote service governments doesnt need to preoccupy by cryptography and business will not have to worry about addblockers and user profiling will be easier.
This is essentially market manipulation via speculation. The artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and price. They do it with food, they do it with housing, and they do it with healthcare. The basic things we need to survive are being held by fewer and fewer owners; then held hostage by those owners via monopolization; just to squeeze more from us. The earth is a fucking resort for the 3000 billionaires in this world, and the rest of us are allowed to work here at the pleasure of our overlords.
Everything seems to eventually link back to class war.
To be honest I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about. It’s value is only derived from its ability to identify + track me, either for my convenience or for the highest bidder’s. Computational liberty is only an issue because we’ve made everything digital by default and that mindset has leaked into critical social functions (taxes, law, logistics, healthcare, etc…).
Software and data bloat is more astronomical than most people realize. Only about 10% of persisted data is ever touched again (don’t look up the ecological implications). Amazon could capture 90% of all compute hardware and the entire human race could get by just fine on 10%. We wouldn’t have access to niceties like app stores full of niche apps, 24MP phone cameras, 4k movies, 10 sluggish layers of software abstraction, 15 years of photos you never look at, etc…
But you could run a simple message server on basically any scrap of IoT e-waste. A highly available static website can be hosted with an old phone and a solar panel. Any device (fridge/watch/calculator/pregnancy test) can run Doom. All of Apollo 11’s source code is a fraction of the size of most web pages.
We’re continously expanding our hardware usage for infinitesimally small gains. We should demand that our governments legislate digital austerity for dozens of reasons, just pick what resonates best for you. Personal privacy, energy usage, ecological damage, corporate capture, information rot, brittle supply chains, national security, etc…
Yes, and also - if something was normal in 80s, it won’t stop being possible in 2030s. In some sense our civilization now is just reveling in the sea of computational power used wastefully.
There was a moment when I moved from an old PC with 512 MB RAM which seemed nice, but was becoming a bit weak for games and all, to a newer C2D PC with 2 GB RAM. I felt it can do anything I’ll ever need. And web aside, it still can do most.
And that old PC, if we compare it to a machine good for year 1999, was very powerful. And 1999 is around Matrix and Phantom Menace, and the X-Wing: Alliance game, and ICQ popularity growing.
More and more resources spent for the same or less social satisfaction. People like talking in money and graphs and industry slang, but honestly social satisfaction is a far better optimized mechanism than these.
Adopting a kitten seems still more satisfying than computing, but the gap in year 1999 was subjectively less than now.
The old technologies that we used to use for websites never really went away. They’re still around, and you can use them to make websites again if you want.
It’s just that it won’t be as fancy looking as a newer web-site, but you don’t lose too much on functionality.
Fantastic alternative insight, thank you.
I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about
Genuin question. How do you classify your photo’s ? (That’s the data I care about most. almost everything else can be reproduced or is just a pitty if lost)
Photos are the same as most other data, you can store them pretty easily long-term in a physical medium. Of course, capturing an image is much easier and more convenient with a digital device, but that doesn’t mean it has to live digitally indefinitely. It’s simple enough to have an instant digital camera with a built in printer and access to a high quality scanner.
If you held a gun to my head, I could pick out a few dozen personal photos that I own that are worth saving physically. If you allowed me a modern flash drive’s worth of storage (64-128GB, ~5000 good quality images), I could pretty easily store every picture worth a second look from my entire lifetime.
Apple’s marketing driven perception that every single person needs a cinema quality camera (and cinema sized storage) in their pocket is ludicrous. Only a tiny fraction of people actually truly need that. Let them borrow that gear from a library if we want to preserve fair access.
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
We made physical toys and games into something expensive for adults and kicked kids out of the equation.
Now all they have are videogames and the most affordable ones (the ones on PC) are soon to disappear.
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
ok, zoomer
Oh, even I create maps with my cousin still. Playing though…
Good luck killing off older games, though.
Or indie games.
Older games will play via emulation on a damn phone. They’ll practically play on a potato.
Might be playing Balatro and such rather than the latest iteration of AAA whatever, but I mostly play games closer to the former than the latter already.
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT
I’ve been screaming this since Crucial closed up
People have been screaming this since right to repair, since FOSS, since Microsoft in the 90s, since stallman. Consumers consistently lose because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit and politicians that could regulate our way out of this are easily purchased.
Imagine the unparalleled censorship when the far-right tech elites decide what you can do on “your” computer.
