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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Frankfurt Oder or Frankfurt Main?
Frankfurt am Main, Nied
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
Like with all tech, we will build the infrastructure with our tax’s, and Jeff will sell it back to us.
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.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!!!
…being a human dildo sounds quite fun!
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.
They build the pipeline for themselves, we won’t know about it or have access
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
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.
Me: sits on 7 different low budget but sturdy PCs 😎
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…
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.
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.
Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.
- piracy
- dis-enshittification
- jailbreaking devices
- opensource hardware
- decentralization
I’m doing my part by replacing the aging PCs of my close family with Mini PCs running Linux.
I stocked up on rk3566/rk3588 boards during the pandemic. They make excellent little network appliances or light-duty workstations. Mainline kernel support is now solid for both chipsets.
But they’re businesses and they need to make money!
Won’t someone think of the people taking us for a ride?
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
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?
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
If building from wood is not antiquated, then surely local hardware isn’t.
But their power is built on function fulfilled, and unless there is an alternative, they are the future.
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?
That’s more a bill for what you used.
fair. though I’ve seen electricity flatrates before.
Thats not a subscription IMO
Neither is rent or food
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
When AWS had the major outage recently, my self-hosted services kept on running. The programs on my Linux machines and other devices I own were also not impacted. Thanks, Jeff, but I’ll stick with my “antiques”. Also, fuck you.
Friends of mine complained they couldn’t watch stuff and I replied “huh, my Plex is working fine.”
Yep, I’ve had one power supply fail in like 15 years. That and power outages was it for downtime on my own equipment. Can’t say that about other services I’ve used.
Fuck you Jeff.
“Hopes”, more like will be doing a bunch of anti-competitive bullshit to ensure that this is your only option.
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.
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.
the only real question is who will do the hosting.
Who? Me! Self hosting is a thing.
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Everything a subscription. You’ll own nothing and like it!
And, people, I can’t stress this enough, FUCK JEFF BEZOS!
edit: louder
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
Blackstone* They’re the ones doing this to the single family home market. They get far less attention than BlackRock, but pull far shadier shit.
Corrected.
