A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated, ready to be replaced by cloud options from companies like AWS and Azure.
Bucha Bull to me.
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
Fuck you Jeff.
Fuck that shit. Switch to Linux.
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!!
When AWS had the major outage recently, my self-hosted services kept on running. The programs on my Linux machines and other devices I own were also not impacted. Thanks, Jeff, but I’ll stick with my “antiques”. Also, fuck you.
How he thinks he can make more billions by forcing yet another subscription model that takes ownership away from individuals.
“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 providerlandlord. 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.
He needs to be uploaded to a cloud himself. A bullet to the head will do that.
Why would i do this motherfucker ?
I think a lot of consumers will welcome this (at first).
For instance, Geforce Now is a pretty appealing value proposition at current rates compared to the cost of buying and owning an equally performant gaming computer. You pay less up front and you pay less in total than the total lost to depreciation over the time of ownership.
But of course, this is the first, honey trap phase of enshitification.
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.
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.
Techno-feudalism, ladies and gentlemen.
That’s Nvidia’s whole game plan. Subscription to use their hardware. Limits on hours of gaming. Pay to play more hours.
People complaining about ram and GPU prices don’t know how to make a budget.
It’s just skill issue, not a plan for our technomaniac overlords to take away our technology from our hands
