Technology

Fuck you, Bezos. And fuck Amazon. I'd go full Luddite before giving you a single cent.

I guess there's more than one reason all pc parts are rising at a ridiculous rate

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.

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

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.

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.

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

"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!"

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.

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!

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.

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

Over my dead body Jeff.

Yeah thats gonna be a no from me

I don't buy computers from wax figures.

That's like an EU member purchasing the F-35 under Krasnov. Yep, fuck that shit.