Technology

Sometimes renting from the cloud is a perfectly acceptable solution. However companies leap to using AWS and similar cloud solutions WAY more than necessary or advisable. It is easy to rack up thousands in bills outstripping the costs of buying some hardware and slapping the software onto it. The cloud can scale and do a bunch of cool things but much of the time companies don't need it, or the complexity it brings. There is also the small matter of data sovereignty - if I were a company using the cloud I would be extremely wary of one which is operating outside of my legal jurisdiction and for governments it just a flat out bad idea.

Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.

Reading the article, the analogy with an own generator and the power grid kind of makes sense at first... until you also make an analogy with broadcast and cable TV for example - you don't get to choose what's on, and in the latter case you're practically paying for ads and some programming in between. So... how about no.

My fear is that those shortages (artificial or not) might at one point really drive us in a different direction. My only option for now is to vote with my wallet and use my stuff for as long as practically feasible.

Fuck you Jeff.

Fuck that shit. Switch to Linux.

lol, no.

Sure, we've all seen how the de-centralized internet became centralized around a few big-tech and what that does for availability. When he turns off the cloud-pc I've got nothing, and all I can do about it is ...... also nothing. So if my data isn't on my hardware at a location I can access 24/7 it really isn't my data!!

This is actually terrifying. Switching to Linux will help us for a while, and the community can take us a long way, but eventually the hardware in physical PCs won't be able to perform basic functions. Maybe it's because cloud PCs use vastly more power and web designers inefficiently update to a web 4.0 that won't be accessible on older hardware -- this has happened before. Or it'll be because the cloud PCs have access to Wi-Fi cards or a new technology entirely to connect that physical hardware won't have access to -- already a standard practice with cell phones' arbitrary gsm phaseouts.

A phaseout of physical hardware would also entail a phaseout of physical accessories, so you can't data-horde your way out of this one unless, maybe, you invested in the now-rare M-Disc format and the drives that make them work. You can buy external offline storage for a while, but eventually it'll all get bought up on the used market or otherwise fail in 5-10 years after the last hard drives get made for consumers. Eventually you will lose all your files and have no way to back them up. No Jellyfin server for movies you legally ripped, no GOG installers for games you legally bought, no music library or ebooks either, they'll all be gone, stolen, so you buy it all over again in perpetuity.

Our only hope, really, is small businesses continuing to build physical PCs with equal power as the cloud devices. But would parts manufacturers let them? The current situation with data centers, SDDs, and RAM shows that parts manufacturers are increasingly only interested in selling to other large businesses. Consumers can't boycott that.

I fully expect to be unable to access my bank or make appointments or get meaningful employment if I don't switch over in 10 to 20 years.

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.

Techno-feudalism, ladies and gentlemen.

How he thinks he can make more billions by forcing yet another subscription model that takes ownership away from individuals.

Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.

• piracy
• dis-enshittification
• jailbreaking devices
• opensource hardware
• decentralization

That's Nvidia's whole game plan. Subscription to use their hardware. Limits on hours of gaming. Pay to play more hours.

He needs to be uploaded to a cloud himself. A bullet to the head will do that.

Over my dead body Jeff.

"We have all this hardware and no consumers because businesses just buy up the competition who were using us, and fire the workers. We need to sell it, but to who? All corporate entities who aren't dying already picked a ~~cloud provider~~ landlord. We own the enterprise market. Who else can we rent seek from?"

Your democrats and republicans are going to cross the aisle to help these guys own your hardware and operating systems. They are already killing open source 3d printers in new york for 'gun safety' purposes. Democrats and republicans crossing that aisle certainly is for the benefit of the people and not corporations who will create the software that can't print 3d guns. This, but for computers is next.

"Owning your operating system is for protecting children! We don't want them printing guns or talking to strangers online!"

Hey Jeff — you know what I think is antiquated and should be relegated to the annals of history?

Billionaires.

Go away and live your life of luxury and shut the fuck up. Don't you have enough fucking money?

It never was a thing that kept quiet..

Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today

This is hilarious, because every single facility of note, and especially datacenters has local, grid independent generators. Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for 'off-grid' power plants to give them more control over their power and costs. In the more reachable territory, residential solar promises value by mitigating your exposure to eletrical rate changes, and in some cases combined with home energy storage, people are going off-grid. A lot of commercial interests also pad out their facilities with solar panels, because it is cheaper than sourcing entirely from the grid, and this was before the recent rate hikes inflicted by datacenter buildouts.

His analogy is bogus because he implies off-grid energy generation is a thing of the past while AWS itself is a huge driver of off-grid energy generation in a world where off-grid energy generation is actually increasing.

It's not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think "I want me some of that" - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.

Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn't at all about money - open source - isn't about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.

It's kinda like 20 or 30 years ago when Banks looked at cash payments and thought that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they got with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments so that relentless push for controlling and getting a cut of every single trade has worked in those countries (and people in those places, such as Sweden, having traded a small hidden increase in price - due to banks now getting comissions in everything - and huge loss of privacy for a tiny bit of convenience genuinelly think they're better of).

So yeah, these software fatcats will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the "trusted" in "trusted platform" (aka TPM) isn't about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it's about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.

I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn't actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft, whilst as we see here other companies are trying to created closed platforms by having everything run in their servers, like Google tried almost a decade ago for games with Stadia and was also tried 2 or 3 decades ago by the likes of Sun Microsystems with the push for Thin Clients.

Over my dead body.

Money has never bought brains

Why should I? Actually, after reading the article, not just the headline, it left me rather worried. All available resources are being pumped into "AI" now, for the convenience of chatting with ChatGPT about everyday stuff, for creating Grok bikini deepfakes or Copilot MS Paint memeslop.

With the effect of computer hardware, like CPU/GPU, RAM and SSDs becoming unaffordable for normal users (and thus normal PCs which need those components), some day users might have no other choice than owning just a "stupid" rig of mouse, keyboard and screen with all computing happening in some "AI cloud".

Sounds to me like some top-level enshittification!

If you want to be financially free, have no debt. Pay off any loans, dont have subscriptions. Make your monthly costs to be as low as possible.

That is freedom but its the opposite of what is advertised.

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

The means of information are the new means of production