this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
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The AI push is really about buying up all the compute components to make independent, individual ownership impractical.
Then we all have to buy walled garden dumb terminal tablets that rely on cloud services to function.
They can watch, censor, and block anything they want. And we pay them for the privilege.
I think a large part is that if you have enough compute you can now log and analyze proactively every person's online speech and activities.
the funny part about their plan is that everything will be centralized.
I wonder what the weakness of that strategy is? 🤔
Lets not pretend the "strategy" goes beyond making as much money as possible.
Centralized systems are a failure point. Ask the Visagoths how well it worked.
Or ask Amazon about US-EAST-2 going down several years ago. Or how about when Cloudflare goes down?
Those two, it's just that the Visagoths are the first to come to mind when thinking of over centralized structures. Fuckers fell like wet cardboard to the Muslims as soon as their king died, the only hold out being the more autonomous mountainous regions in the North of Iberia.
So you are telling me they gobble up everything to build data centers not because of AI hype (like the next industrial revolution) but... to make it more expensive for us? Do I understand this correct?
It's a big factor but not the only one.
Oh the dumb terminals will be cheap... it's leaving the walled gardens that'll become (even more) expensive.
For business decisions, always do things for more than one reason
Oh god no
I don't believe this. I see no plans by Nvidia to burn down their production lines once the datacenters finish. They'll want to keep selling boards, and eventually either production catches up (making PC boards is hard) or demand slows down (only so many cities will let themselves be ripped off), and the home PC returns. Datacenters will also be upgrading hardware before it all breaks down, and so there'll be cheap server boards flooding the market in a couple years.
PCs ain't comin' back. Search "pc purchasing over time", pick a graph, any graph. Sale volume peaked 2010-2012 and never really recovered, all while the population increased. Outside of business, seems few are using laptops either. Can't understand why the hell people internet on their phones, but it do be like that.
BTW, stupid cheap servers have been available for some time. Check out "savemyserver" on eBay. They're great!
I agree on a cultural level; but this feels like a choice? An older PC isn't that far away from phones on price. We're not so far from folks moving to services at home, tech barriers have dropped considerably, prices are likely to do the same, and big tech just keeps giving people good reasons to do so.
Frankly, you can self-host most of these services on an old phone. Setting it up is getting easier than ever with cheap agents flying around.
You can host a small LLM model with a phone, or a whisper or a TTS, maybe some light diffusion.
You cannot do tool use, reasonable coding, get non-hallucination answers on even moderate questions. That stuff starts to get viable around 24G and really needs closer to 200G to be able to do most of that they're doing.
the reason they bought up all the ram is to keep someone from buying 200G of vram and diying cards putting them out of business.
I read this as about general social media, not LLMs.
LLMs, I agree the at-home hardware is pricey and not super competitive right now. Plenty of frontier models that are kept from the public, with VC-discounted rates because the IPO hasn't dropped yet. (If you're expecting a market crash, this is going to get much better fairly soon. In the mean-time, subscriptions are probably more cost effective than just buying the hardware at old prices would have been.)
I think this is a happy side effect to them.