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Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
(www.windowscentral.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I worked with someone that defend this isea to the letter, just not contemplating companies.
The argument stemmed from an alledge visit he had done to Japan, where he had seen terminals connected to mainframes, and people used those from their house.
I was only able to raise one argument: that is not my computer.
Mind that this man was extremely tech savvy, an experienced and proficient programmer and played the roles of IT solutions an security implementer and supervisor at the company we worked at. And we handled sensitive information.
To him, relegating everything to an outside server was a dream, as removed the hassle and responsability of having to maintain, repair, replace and upgrade hardware. Everything needed should be a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse or trackball.
Yeah beyond the obvious problems with latency it mostly comes down to trust: trusting them with your data, trusting them to have enough capacity and trusting to not enshittify in the future. I reserve that level of trust for close friends, certainly not companies and absolutely not bezos.
There are plenty of smart tech workers without the first clue about morality or human rights. Outside of tech these people are ignorant and naive. That's why so many techbros become libertarians and stumble into fascism. It's cluelessness and a basic lack of curiosity to discover the world outside of tech.
tech is the field furthest away working with humans hence why they are more conservative in some case, biotech is somewhere in between(used to be only well off people who can afford scientist level schooling and cost, still kinda is)
This is already a thing called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and it's pretty great from an admin perspective. It has the potential to be great for consumers, but it never will be because big tech never does what's good for consumers.
But VDI home computers, on paper, are a good thing. Less e-waste, your computer is never obsolete, you don't have to worry about maintaining hardware, etc. Obviously not great for a power user, but for the general population it would be a good thing (if it's provided by a consumer-centric company).
Yeah, in theory in a decent world with benevolent actors this probably wouldn't be so bad. But we do not live in a decent world, and benevolent actors are far and few between.