Starting to see the real motive behind the “AI hardware” hoarding.
Yeah, nope. No matter what OS, no matter what specs, I’m going to keep my PC.
I’ll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he’ll, I’d go to text based MUDs first.
We need to get MUDs more popular again. But that would require getting Telnet popular again.
Can you fill me in on what that means? Searching for mud doesn’t give me useful results.
People were playing text-based multiplayer, effectively mmos with PvP well before Tim-Berners Lee invented the Web Browser.
http://mud.arctic.org/ this one is still around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon
For a list of still-active MUDs:
It means Multi User Dungeon. It’s a networked multiplayer game, usually focused on dungeon-crawling as the name suggests. Early ones were based heavily on BD&D and AD&D, but others got more creative.
But why? You don’t need telnet to transfer text.
Because a MUD that isn’t part of a BBS feels wrong to me.
Way more even. Just look at emulation on Android, you can play good damn Sekiro on it by now.
Even if they manage to take away our desktops, Smartphones become beautifully powerful and can be docked to TVs and all via USB-C easily.
Technofeudalism. Great book by Yanis Varoufakis. He called it and it’s actually happening.
I still think it’s funny that he went from working at Valve as their Economist in residence studying digital markets to being the finance minister of Greece. I think the Valve job was more prestigious, especially since the rest of the EU was committed to fucking over Greece at the time.
Varoufakis explaining how Eurobonds and IMF were fucking over every European taxpayer in order to bail out banks that made risky bets with Greece was quite based.
I just wish he’d stick to economics, his geopolitics takes are quite bad
I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
I just don’t trust bezos to not be greedy.
Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client
Amazing how we’re come full circle
Right! I had no idea Bezos used Lemmy either!
I mean, of course Bezos wants to rent you a cloud PC. Bezos would sell your shit back to you if he thought there was a market. Hell, I’d sell your shit back to you if I thought you’d buy it. When I see headlines like these I think ‘Well…duh’.
deleted by creator
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
Desktop streaming isn’t the same as web apps.
Its the same idea of putting compute in datacenters
If only “greedy” was his only problem!
what a bunch of bullshit. Act like the individuals are responsible and ignore the massive data centers that would be required using water and power. And most people just use their phone for most stuff like scrolling ticktok YouTube and Reddit.
- This assumes latency between one’s current location and the remote location is almost non-existent. It isn’t.
- This assumes we have fast and available internet all the time. I sure don’t.
- This assumes we can use the remote computer in every way we use our current computers. No way.
- This assumes, as you point out, they won’t be greedy once they control everyone’s machines. They will be.
- This assumes they won’t censor ‘dangerous’ sites on these machines. They will.
I will happily pay more for freedom from the corporation.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
Modern desktop streaming is quite impressive. 100ms, 5% loss is no problem for most tasks. You don’t even notice it, and as a result your experience can sometimes be better.
Additionally you can offload some tasks to the local machine where appropriate.
You dont need to fit every users needs into a thin client setup, but you could fit probably 50% of all users onto one and they wouldn’t know any different. Think of the energy savings. Think of all that plastic that goes into a desktop or laptop that isn’t needed in a virtualized blade chassis. Think of the rolling performance upgrades. Think of never having your hardware go End of Support. Think of the old equipment that ends up properly e-wasted instead of shoved into a dump. Think of the batteries that no longer need to get produced.
I might play around with this idea and host my own non-profit Desktop as a Service.
I will build my own in a garage…use wood for the case…
Oh god. In the future we’ll need open source resistance-like computer part manufacturing.
This is increasingly possible, I’ve seen people fab their own chips at home
Now that’s what I call “owning nothing, and renting everything”. This is one of the stupidest things you’ll do to people. This is why we Linux.
They bought so many GPUs and RAM that will be worthless after the big bubble pop that they now need an alternative plan for that hardware. Brace yourselves to be sold virtual computers.
The funny part will be when citrix takes 70% of their profits for using stuff it’s had patented for decades
It doesn’t take 3nm/2nm chips to make a great computer. The Switch 2 is has a Samsung 8nm SoC. Steam Deck is TSMC 7nm. A Steam Deck has a better processor than my Intel N150 NAS. We don’t need the strongest hardware for self hosting. Don’t need it for a good gaming experience. Someday we’ll get second hand server parts salvaged into home equipment. The PS5 had that jailbreak. That can someday be a useful Linux machine. Someday the Xbox Series. Someday there’ll be a wave of RISC-V SBC’s that are better than the most recent raspberry pi
And when we don’t he’ll just use AWS to make our PCs worse on the net than his cloud services?
I’m not so sure how ‘quiet’ it was. We’ve been putting desktops in the cloud for quite a while now.
I thought he just bought shit for a dollar and sold it for two. That’s pretty common even though he took a big bite of the customer base due to right place/right time dynamics. Why does falling into a shit load of money all of a sudden make you think that you know best on how society should proceed. It’s not just Bezos. Every single billionaire thinks that. Fuck 'em all.
Not quite, he doesn’t demean himself by ‘buying’ anything, he just built a place where other people can buy stuff for a dollar and sell it for two, and Jeff takes a cut.
Even worse, a middle-man.
We all keep hoping he’ll stop being a greedy asshole and he hasn’t tried to do that so i guess we’ll all have to live with the disappointment.
Little Lex Luthor should climb into one of his dick rockets and aim for Venus.
youll have to pry my 4 thinkpads from my cold dead hands you slimy sack of shit
I think that the problem will be if software comes out that’s doesn’t target home PCs. That’s not impossible. I mean, that happens today with Web services. Closed-weight AI models aren’t going to be released to run on your home computer. I don’t use Office 365, but I understand that at least some of that is a cloud service.
Like, say the developer of Video Game X says “I don’t want to target a ton of different pieces of hardware. I want to tune for a single one. I don’t want to target multiple OSes. I’m tired of people pirating my software. I can reduce cheating. I’m just going to release for a single cloud platform.”
Nobody is going to take your hardware away. And you can probably keep running Linux or whatever. But…not all the new software you want to use may be something that you can run locally, if it isn’t released for your platform. Maybe you’ll use some kind of thin-client software — think telnet, ssh, RDP, VNC, etc for past iterations of this — to use that software remotely on your Thinkpad. But…can’t run it yourself.
If it happens, I think that that’s what you’d see. More and more software would just be available only to run remotely. Phones and PCs would still exist, but they’d increasingly run a thin client, not run software locally. Same way a lot of software migrated to web services that we use with a Web browser, but with a protocol and software more aimed at low-latency, high-bandwidth use. Nobody would ban existing local software, but a lot of it would stagnate. A lot of new and exciting stuff would only be available as an online service. More and more people would buy computers that are only really suitable for use as a thin client — fewer resources, closer to a smartphone than what we conventionally think of as a computer.
EDIT: I’d add that this is basically the scenario that the AGPL is aimed at dealing with. The concern was that people would just run open-source software as a service. They could build on that base, make their own improvements. They’d never release binaries to end users, so they wouldn’t hit the traditional GPL’s obligation to release source to anyone who gets the binary. The AGPL requires source distribution to people who even just use the software.
i will simply not use new software for my personal cases then, if it comes down to it ill make my own. im a simple girl, ill manage my media and play my 20 year old games till i die
