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.
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…
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.
stop funding their bullshit
A men
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]
Me: sits on 7 different low budget but sturdy PCs 😎
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…
Fantastic alternative insight, thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yeah you know what i always thought hey this PC cost me a lot, i wish I could keep paying for it indefinitely.
I’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy?
I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.
With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.
When you think about it, there’s really only one option.
From an IT operations perspective this makes so much sense they’ve already tried it before. They were called “thin clients” and just had enough compute and network to connect to run remote desktop software.
This greatly reduces the amount of spending you need to build out a large corporate network, and centralizes management just like they already do for servers with stuff like VMWare.
I’m assuming privacy isn’t an issue and they don’t mind Amazon picking the winners in business.
Privacy doesn’t exist on corporate networks, so they don’t. However, the early thin clients had local servers. I don’t know how the very largest companies would feel about giving Amazon that much power.
Eh, depends. The price for something like VMware horizon was already damn expensive and that’s before you got to citrix prices (and this is pre broadcom takeover.)
For some places the costs are able to be recouped but it really depends. You still need plenty of scale to have that be viable IME.
My main point being there are a millions of small businesses and medium size ones that are still always going to be far better off with normal physical hardware.
I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn’t go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that’s more easily watched and controlled.
The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.
I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.
I was thinking more that they’d like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.
But if you’re right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.
ooh no, everything but china
the only real question is who will do the hosting.
Who? Me! Self hosting is a thing.
i will never in my life get any subscription to anything, that doesnt have to be a subscription.
so far i’m fine with:
internet connection and my phone number
Yeah… actually how the fuck are we still paying a subscription for our phone number? That’s frick’n bull-crap!
utilities?
Thats not a subscription IMO
Neither is rent or food
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated
People should be more aware that appeal to making you feel old or antiquated is one of the main strategies from corporations to push their products into you.
No, you’re not antiquated. Just be yourself and do things the way you like to do, not the way corporations want to force you into. No one should judge you, and if they do, they’re wrong for judging others for their way to do things. Don’t fall for that trap
Fuck you Jeff.
Every 5 years someone invests a bunch of money into thin clients, and then we’re right back where we started.
I’ll believe it’s possible when America’s networking infrastructure isn’t covered in holes.
Nothing is ever enough for these greedy fucks
Of course they want that. So they can control and see everything that people can do on their devices. With Moore’s law there is absolutely no reason why centralizing computers should make sense. This is pure corporate greed and nothing else.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Everything a subscription. You’ll own nothing and like it!
And, people, I can’t stress this enough, FUCK JEFF BEZOS!
edit: louder
Yeah bud, maybe if you get just a little more money, you’ll finally be complete. Just a little more money…
Fuck that shit. Switch to Linux.
So wait is the idea that computers would just be like a monitor that connects directly to Amazon
Yes, they’d become a thin client.
The concept isn’t new and happens in the corporate world connecting to the corporate servers to run the software, but he wants that to become the norm.
A chromebook is somewhere between the middle of a regular computer, and what Bezos wants.
Yeah, in college around 2012, they dropped the education of software optimization, claiming that the “cloud will make it obsolete”. Hell, they even demoed us a DAW concept, that in the future, was supposed to run in the cloud, but only if we enable very low-latency internet.
Dude, we literally just killed X11. Fuck off.
Yep. Back to dumb terminals. I’m not having any of it.
we’re going back to “Terminals”, just like in the 70s and 80s
