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.
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.
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.
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
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.
stop funding their bullshit
A men
Ok. One more time for everyone in the back. Ready?
Tax.
The.
Wealthy.
I couldn’t agree more with this either, 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
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
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
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?
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…
[redacted]
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
The largest companies already host everything on the cloud.
The largest companies are the cloud.
the only real question is who will do the hosting.
Who? Me! Self hosting is a thing.
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
Well chucklefuck you need a basic PC to act as the client. You know what kind of computer most people have? A shitty PC good enough to be the fuckin client. Why would they want to pay for a shitty pc to rent another one when they can just use the fucking shitty PC they bought at walmart for 300 for 8 fuckin years like they do now? That is $3 a month amortized beat that bitch.
Imagine the unparalleled censorship when the far-right tech elites decide what you can do on “your” computer.
So wait is the idea that computers would just be like a monitor that connects directly to Amazon
we’re going back to “Terminals”, just like in the 70s and 80s
Dude, we literally just killed X11. Fuck off.
That idea is very old. There was such a company as Sun Microsystems.
Yep. Back to dumb terminals. I’m not having any of it.
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.
Yeah thats gonna be a no from me
Isn’t this what Google did with chrome os and chromebooks?
In a sense he’s late. A lot of people already have - phones and tablets and chromebooks.
Millions of people simply do not own a traditional computer.
The rest of us, well, cold dead hands and all that.
I already sort of do this with my gaming machine. It lives on a cloud host and I connect with a client.
It’s cheaper and more convenient than buying a new PC - especially since I’ve got three gamers in my house - and offloading graphics means I can get better battery life when playing on my laptop in my hammock.
However, if you’re more than a couple hundred miles from the data center or there’s network problems you won’t be having much fun. That’s the only reason I’d want an actual gaming machine, and even then I’d play via remote desktop from my hammock.
The latency from using steam link or moonlight in my house drives me insane. I don’t know how anybody doesn’t hate cloud gaming solutions
I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Even on WiFi with other peoples streaming it’s good enough to play games like Minecraft and Subnautica, but since I mainly play boring stuff like KSP or Civ latency isn’t much of an issue.
What I won’t do is tell you who my provider is because they’re already having problems at peak times and I don’t want to make it worse.
How he thinks he can make more billions by forcing yet another subscription model that takes ownership away from individuals.
so everyone owning their own pc is “antiquated” but everyone owning their own car is super cool and awesome. got it.
Nah, they want everybody to only use their robotaxi too.
Wait so you’re saying we can have these cars that can come pick up a bunch of people and it’ll be more efficient than everyone having their own car? What if we put the car on some kind of pre defined path, like a fixed one that can’t move. Would that make it more efficient?
Internet and access to servers is the first thing that govts turn off when they get uppity.
Seems like a fatal risk to have online only services.
I don’t buy computers from wax figures.
Bezos isn’t a visionary, he’s a recationary. His opinions are worth less than the toilet paper I use to wipe my asshole with. Ya’ll need to get off Lex Luthor’s nutbag.
As they say in my county: “go and die far from here, so I can’t smell you”.
