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.
Step 1: Raise sales prices artificially
Step 2: Create affordable alternatives to rent.
Step 3: Wait until enough people claim that its cheaper and more comfortable to just rent.
Step 4: Wait until maket is destroyed.
Step 6: Raise prices.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy”
- Blackstone
Blackstone* They’re the ones doing this to the single family home market. They get far less attention than BlackRock, but pull far shadier shit.
Corrected.
What a fucking joke that would be on US American networks.
We are ranked like 30th in the world for bandwidth. No fiber dropped to the curb but the billionaires. And shit slow 20th century wireless speeds with technical acumen that we see today in Verizon’s ongoing 8 hour outage.
Bezos is so out of touch it is clown-like and stupid.
They want a data center heavy world but have no fucking pipeline to get data in and out for the rest of us.
What a human dildo.
Bezos is so out of touch it is stupid.
Is he out of touch or has he just recognized that 50% of the economic activity is already from the top 10% of the population?
I get the feeling the wealthy have just written off the bottom 90% of society and don’t actually give a flying fuck if anything works for us or not. He knows his core sales will go to people who do have fiber at their doorstep.
Maybe we’re the ones out of touch thinking they plan on having a place for us in this world at all.
Thats the plan, organize yourselves now before they do it for you
Even Ford, piece of utter feculence he was, understood that if you gave people money and time to spend it they’ll give it right back to you and everyone gets to come up together.
That was a PR stunt. Wages were being raised anyway, he just preempted what he knew was coming to make himself look good
Next you’re gonna tell me that Ford didn’t actually invent the weekend, but was pressured by unions.
Or that tipped wages aren’t meant to let the employees get a higher wage than they could at a fixed wage, but instead only benefit the business.
You and your crazy conspiracy theories. Now, if you’re done being wrong, I have a bridge to purchase.
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Censoring parts of gameplay as you play would be very impressive, btw. Not in a good way, but impressive, like when I first found out about ISP replacing/adding ads on http pages
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That’s clear, this is just a weird image
Also, I believe they don’t really need to have complete control for that, too
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I had to sign up for DSL this week in Frankfurt, DE as my neighborhood didn’t have cable or fiber internet. Don’t think that we’re gonna be cloud-ready any time in the next 50 years. DSL. Frankfurt. Major city.
Can we not pretend the problem is solely performance based? People keep doing this with generative AI and it keeps resulting in “oh shit, ghibli AI is so awesome”.
Especially since… can you watch a twitch stream? Congrats, you can stream a desktop. Even back with Stadia it was very much viable to play games like AssCreed over streaming and have a very comparable experience to it being local. And stuff like Geforce Now actually work REALLY well.
The issue shouldn’t be “can you make this perform well enough I want to use it”. It should be about ownership and the implication for… everything if all “personal computers” exist solely in a data center and all documents exist solely in The Cloud and so forth. Preservation of anything becomes nigh impossible and you suddenly have to pay a monthly fee to ever see your kid’s pictures again.
Having tried to play games over a gigabit connection, no. You really can’t. Latency is not something you can just handwaved away.
I don’t know what to say. Plenty of folk, myself included, have had no issues with the majority or games. And stuff like geforce now is quite successful
As someone who remotes home frequently, no, the experience is not quite right. Packet drop and latency cause lots of input errors and misclicks. Sometimes the local internet decides not to carry your packets, and sometimes even connecting over vpn doesn’t.
You do not want a cloud desktop. You want a physical desktop and supplement with cloud services you can’t run locally.
Again, plenty of folk, self included, have no issues with streaming from a datacenter and geforce now is quite successful.
Understand that the codecs make a huge difference. But the actual inputs are literally bytes per minute of data. MAYBE kilobytes if you are particularly good at Starcraft
That means nothing if your latency spikes or some packets drop at the moment you need to click and not hold, or move the mouse precisely and drop.
People will surrender all ownership if you can provide more content more cheaper and conveniently, ownership is much lower on most people’s priority than convenience
And a big factor in trying to combat/delay that is to not frame it as “This doesn’t even work”. Because then it is literally one free trial away from being normalized for like 95% of the audience.
Then people still flock up on centralised systems.
Don’t even dare to do P2P 😅!
Eh. Some stuff does make sense to centralize.
Like, the concept of a thin client (what these basically are “close enough” to) is a really good one. They drastically simplify security and costs for corporate environments. And, even in the before times, it might genuinely make sense to just pay for a month/hundred hours of GFN if you wanted to play the latest AAA game rather than upgrading your five year old computer that handles everything else you play perfectly.
The bigger issue being that it now increasingly makes sense to pay for years/thousands of hours of GFN because of how broken the everything is. And the vultures (like Amazon and nVidia) smell the decay.
And… I didn’t want to crap on the other person too much but I do think p2p is why so many people think this can’t work. There is a big difference between streaming from your computer over starbucks wifi and connecting to a major data center. And there are also arguments for power and ecological impact but that becomes a MUCH bigger mess full of bad actors and incomplete comparisons.
At the same time I’m seeing a bunch of ads for “hardware is getting too expensive, use Akamai cloud for your gaming etc instead, now with AI blah blah!”
Bitch, you’re the reason hardware is so expensive!
Create the problem, then offer an over-priced ‘solution’
There is no cloud, just someone else computer.
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.
Ok so the tactic is to drain the corporations of their money.
- piracy
- dis-enshittification
- jailbreaking devices
- opensource hardware
- decentralization
Everything a subscription. You’ll own nothing and like it!
And, people, I can’t stress this enough, FUCK JEFF BEZOS!
We went from mass surveillance to hardware confiscation real quick.
These companies are so large that they don’t need the consumer market anymore. The consumer is now the competition. They can essentially purchase the entire planet’s output of computing hardware years in advance to force us out of the market and lease it back to us at inflated rates. Then, they turn all that tensor compute against us to make everyone’s life a living digital surveillance hell.
Forget Internet freedom, computational liberty is now at risk. Who needs all that expensive legal and technological architecture to steal your data, report on you to the government, and enforce DRM when they control bare metal access to your rented corporate cloud hardware because consumer PC equipment is too astronomically expensive to afford for the average person?
We need to elevate the prosecution of anti-trust to the level of religious inquisition, and burn these companies at the stake. They’re using AI to literally enslave humanity, and it’s working.
At this pace they will make owning a compyter illegal. Being everything a remote service governments doesnt need to preoccupy by cryptography and business will not have to worry about addblockers and user profiling will be easier.
This is essentially market manipulation via speculation. The artificially create scarcity to drive up demand and price. They do it with food, they do it with housing, and they do it with healthcare. The basic things we need to survive are being held by fewer and fewer owners; then held hostage by those owners via monopolization; just to squeeze more from us. The earth is a fucking resort for the 3000 billionaires in this world, and the rest of us are allowed to work here at the pleasure of our overlords.
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
Me: sits on 7 different low budget but sturdy PCs 😎
Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…
more like if only enough people actually cared about what is going on in life. Most governments with this issue atm are facing massive apathy in regards to actually voting on what they want. They either don’t vote at all, or blind vote not bothing to research anything. I wish I could say this was strictly a US issue as well but, I believe most democratic governments are having this issue. I know for sure Canada is.
First we need to trust-bust the government until we get a government that is actually representative of the people, not representative of the wealth.
It’s not that the government is not capable or as inefficient as they are so often portrayed. They are actually quite capable and frighteningly efficient. They’re just not working for us anymore.
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FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT
I’ve been screaming this since Crucial closed up
People have been screaming this since right to repair, since FOSS, since Microsoft in the 90s, since stallman. Consumers consistently lose because the vast majority of people don’t give a shit and politicians that could regulate our way out of this are easily purchased.
Unsurprising that capitalists want to seize all the means of computation for themselves.
Murica is a deranged shithole. Linux is our only way out of this. To all hardware manifacturers: Build your goddamn drivers for it and free us!
~cry in the capitalist vacuum…
Cloud is just a fancy word for giving up your freedoms. You rely on some greedy corporation and for what? What would the benefit even be?
I quite like that I can access my D&D character sheets or my CV through iCloud. I like that if my phone suddenly exploded my stuff is backed-up. I like that Steam has cloud saves on top of local ones. That is about where it ends, though. The idea of renting a computer, especially from these goons, is completely ridiculous and I hope people don’t validate it just so they can play expensive games(cheaper games needing less intense hardware exist and are often really, really good).
So, there are clear benefits but you’re right that after a point it’s just not worth it. I’d rather fuck around with emailing myself copies of things than let the entire tech world take over our lives like this.
I’ll give up computers entirely before I rent one from you greedy pricks.
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?
This is stupid. I will never rent a computer mainframe.
Imagine the unparalleled censorship when the far-right tech elites decide what you can do on “your” computer.
One way or another, major company-backed OSes are moving towards that. Checking all your pictures, messages, videos, audio, for your own good. For now it’s creeping on mobile, but don’t worry, it’ll come to a windows near you soon enough.
Good thing you can uninstall Windows for now, then.
Also, I have a feeling that Bezos’ threats to kill the PC (yes, I’m calling them threats because they sound like threats), and the KYC stuff going around are somehow linked.
Bezos’ threats against the very existence of the PC could also be construed as a threat against self-hosting, including the Fediverse, and against the existence of alt OSes as well.
