Technology

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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.

Wonder if all the AI shit has actually been a way to inflate the price of computer hardware to the point where something like this is the only way some people will be able to afford to use computers at all.

"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!"

This is part of the AI push, but it assumes that it succeeds. With luck it can be stopped.

This is stupid. I will never rent a computer mainframe.

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

Oh, are we doing thin clients, again?

I think once a generation thin clients come up as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

There's no quite part anymore. It's all out in the open. Be it politics, capitalism, police brutality,... you name it.

I love how the author keeps bringing up how expensive it would be to implement a system of cloud computing rental because no one would pay the amount it would require to make such a thing profitable. But we're talking about Jeff bezos here who took billions of dollars worth of loss for over 10 years before making Amazon the profit machine that it is now. Simply by making things cheaper for a long period of time until the customer base eas so used to the model that they could picture doing it any other way and their competition went out of business. I can totally foresee them doing this exact thing with cloud computing. Make it really cheap get people hooked where they have gotten rid of all of their in person computers and then, once access to home computing is either prohibitively expensive or impossible to do because parts are no longer available or otherwise impossible for people to switch away, jack up the price and make it profitable by squeezing every dime out of the average consumer.

This was also, by the way, Netflix's strategy as well as Spotify and all the other cloud-based services that people are "addicted to". Take billions and loss to get people used to your service and not consider any alternative. Then once you have a captive audience shoot that price to the Moon.

Since the ubiquity of smartphones, PC relevancy has been on the decline, and now with the pricing out of regular people, I imagine they will eventually become a completely niche and rare thing, to the point where even renting them out won't be common or necessary. What's more concerning to me is where the internet is going. In a few decades I think it will be mainly used for banking, medical an other administrative things, with the social aspect heavily regulated and monitored, and will only be used by businesses. We've lived through a very unique time, and things are bound to change massively, so enjoy it while you can.

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.

Over my dead body Jeff.

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!

So that's why they are paying Microsoft to make all the computers suck.

Yeah thats gonna be a no from me

I'll host my photos on a jailbroken pregnancy test.

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

This isn't a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.

I'm older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos's statements are just the most recent example. He's no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:

• 1970s remote compute power: This couldn't really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.

• 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe

• 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.

• 2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.

• 2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.

• 2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.

• 2030s remote compute power....in the cloud....probably