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.
Literally never.
Were not the target market.
I’m not giving up my PC, I’m running it until it dies, Big Tech can fuck off.
So that’s what they meant by techno feudalism.
The only thing people should be giving up is their Amazon Prime subscriptions and AWS hosting. You’re very likely getting ripped off and overcharged if you use AWS. Also although I recommend ordering from other websites if you have no choice but to use Amazon you don’t need Prime for free shipping, just wait until you have enough stuff in your cart such that you’re over the free shipping threshold. Don’t order unnecessary stuff to get over the threshold.
Imagine a world where you have been blacklisted from their services because you posted online about the corruption he feeds.
now imagine how difficult it will be to get or keep a job where you can’t use a computer when 85% of all jobs now require AI “skills”.
don’t worry, you can work in one of the many warehouses at Amazon…
Um no
These greedy fucks are coming after everything you have, that’s how this works.
Of course they want that. So they can control and see everything that people can do on their devices. With Moore’s law there is absolutely no reason why centralizing computers should make sense. This is pure corporate greed and nothing else.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Meanwhile, I’m preparing myself to long periods of internet outage and intermittent access.
been preparing for a decade, but got serious after 2018 for some reason
A few years ago, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos revealed how he thinks of local PC hardware as antiquated
People should be more aware that appeal to making you feel old or antiquated is one of the main strategies from corporations to push their products into you.
No, you’re not antiquated. Just be yourself and do things the way you like to do, not the way corporations want to force you into. No one should judge you, and if they do, they’re wrong for judging others for their way to do things. Don’t fall for that trap
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.
To be honest I don’t have any personal digital information that I give a shit about. It’s value is only derived from its ability to identify + track me, either for my convenience or for the highest bidder’s. Computational liberty is only an issue because we’ve made everything digital by default and that mindset has leaked into critical social functions (taxes, law, logistics, healthcare, etc…).
Software and data bloat is more astronomical than most people realize. Only about 10% of persisted data is ever touched again (don’t look up the ecological implications). Amazon could capture 90% of all compute hardware and the entire human race could get by just fine on 10%. We wouldn’t have access to niceties like app stores full of niche apps, 24MP phone cameras, 4k movies, 10 sluggish layers of software abstraction, 15 years of photos you never look at, etc…
But you could run a simple message server on basically any scrap of IoT e-waste. A highly available static website can be hosted with an old phone and a solar panel. Any device (fridge/watch/calculator/pregnancy test) can run Doom. All of Apollo 11’s source code is a fraction of the size of most web pages.
We’re continously expanding our hardware usage for infinitesimally small gains. We should demand that our governments legislate digital austerity for dozens of reasons, just pick what resonates best for you. Personal privacy, energy usage, ecological damage, corporate capture, information rot, brittle supply chains, national security, etc…
Sorry to break it for you, but no one actually plays Doom anymore.
We made physical toys and games into something expensive for adults and kicked kids out of the equation.
Now all they have are videogames and the most affordable ones (the ones on PC) are soon to disappear.
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.
I can’t agree with this more, but what’s the plan exactly?
Ok. One more time for everyone in the back. Ready?
Tax.
The.
Wealthy.
I couldn’t agree more with this either, but they’ve said no, and the politicians are being bought, so as a citizen, besides not buying their shit slurry, what is there to actually do about it more actively. I guess it’s just local politics, ultimately I don’t know in the aggregate how much it helps with these guys who have so much money they just wield it like a hammer. Not that that should be a good enough reason to do nothing
Keeping the issues in the conversation is good, but ideas and words only work so well, eventually someone has to enable mechanisms to do these things in reality, otherwise its just corps sucking each other off at the common person’s expense all the way to hell
stop funding their bullshit
A men
Stay aware. Keep up with happenings. :3
You know, I feel that’s causing a lot of distress, and not just for myself. I think maybe they also want desperate people, which might be why they’ve built their bunkers
E: shit, I don’t want to be more of a downer than I have to be, been there for too long, not helpful. There’s no way to win a war other than keep up the morale, thanks for the cat face, it did make me smile for what it’s worth lol ˄_~
And to be helpful this was something I came by last week in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet, it’s about as optimistic a thing that’s come about recently. And I’ll add it took me a hot minute to find it on my phone, despite knowing exactly which video I was looking for…
Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…
[redacted]
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.
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.
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
Thats the plan, organize yourselves now before they do it for you
plus they get to control and censor information much more tightly
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
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.
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.
Satellite TV was much more popular compared to cable generally in European countries, so phone lines make up the bulk of wired networking in a lot of places, making DSL a pretty practical option without having to lay a whole network. I get the feeling in countries where cable is much more common, DSL is reserved for the last resort level of service, whereas in Europe many of the telecoms make sure to deploy the latest standards.
I finally swapped to 1gbps fibre a year or two ago, but before that I was on about 250mbps with G.Fast DSL that honestly wasn’t bad at all. I believe the theoretical limits go much higher than that too
It’s DSL, so the speed depends on line length. To reliably get 250M you’re probably doing fibre to the footpath outside the building.
In the UK, where I believe VDSL and G.Fast both are achieved by putting the equipment in your local “green cabinet” which is the sub distribution between you and your local telephone exchange.
My cabinet is about a 200m straight line from my house, so I was lucky enough that I always got pretty close to whatever speed the telco was selling me.
My parents’ place is about 500m or so from theirs and I think they typically got about 70-80% of the “up to” rate on VDSL before they switched to fibre. It used to be more like 50% on regular ADSL/2/2+
I think you have to be kinda rural before you’re much further than that from a green cabinet (which of course isn’t an insignificant number of people, but I believe per capita it’s not typical)
in my rural part of the u.s., the telco only sells dsl to a max of 10 mbps (and as slow as 384kbps if you’re at the end of the signal’s reach–at which point they also charge you more for the shit-tier speeds)… even if you’re literally next door to their central office… and even if they don’t have fiber down your street (which is their reasoning for the artificial limit–to push people towards fiber so they can pull the copper).
They build the pipeline for themselves, we won’t know about it or have access
I feel like desktop as a service might work pretty well in a world where municipal fiber was commonplace but it’s the damnedest thing, the billionaire aligned politicians banned it in a bunch of places
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!!!
…being a human dildo sounds quite fun!
That’s just a business probrem for them, they’ll fix it with Amazon Fibre™ or something like that
They already have a Starlink-like program in the works. (Not that latency is important or anything with compute over internet.)
Yet another way to double-dip, I’m surprised they haven’t released it already
They want us more desperate for it so that we will accept a higher price.
Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
We’re so doomed. A lot of people will probably buy into this because they can’t possibly be inconvenienced by owning a computer.
I was talking about AI with someone the other day and they said, “Wow, in the future we probably won’t be able to work without a subscription to ChatGPT. Oh, well.” Like. wat. teh. faq. People see the convenience trap, but can’t be bothered to do anything about it. I hate this timeline.
Never ever ever. I learned to code on a 14 year old hp probook. I know how long I can hold out.
So stupid, given how quickly computers have become more powerful and cheaper over time. Local PC hardware will never be antiquated, and is only becoming more important over time.
