Technofeudalism. Great book by Yanis Varoufakis. He called it and it’s actually happening.
I still think it’s funny that he went from working at Valve as their Economist in residence studying digital markets to being the finance minister of Greece. I think the Valve job was more prestigious, especially since the rest of the EU was committed to fucking over Greece at the time.
I worked in a Citrix environment for long enough to know this is just stupid.
The people who would be okay with this already don’t own computers, they go with a phone.
you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
I’d give up computing altogether, or even commit suicide if living mainly means being subservient to these soulless parasites.
Live on. We need manpower to fight the upcoming fight. Every person counts.
Don’t die for nothing. Die for something.
Or better yet, don’t die. Better the oligarchs die for you, than the other way around. Get movin’1
My real PC hope is to fashion the case into a French style billionaire solver
He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.
I don’t think Stadia’s problem was the technology, though. It actually worked pretty well if you had a decent internet connection.
The issue, imo, was that nobody trusted in the longevity of the platform. Given Google’s track record, why would anyone want to buy in to something that would likely only last a few years? I know they ended up refunding people, but it’s not like they do that with every prodict they’ve cancelled.
I had a friend who was a true believer in Stadia, he even sold his gaming PC as he was gaming in Stadia full time.
When Stadia shut down he told me “at least I get to keep the controller”
Stadia was great for what it was. As a hardcore PC gamer who went more casual it was the answer to my gaming needs. Being able to play anywhere on any device was amazing.
They refunded all my purchases and I got to keep a bunch of free hardware I had gotten with Stadia bundles.
Yeah I loved stadia. I built a proxmox VM with sunshine to get my fix back
I think I’ll pass. I’ve been going to too many lengths lately to keep my data in my possession. I have no interest in giving it Bezos.
Little Lex Luthor should climb into one of his dick rockets and aim for Venus.
I’m comforted by the fact that we have such a substandard internet in Australia that the day would be over before an only online machine would even boot. And before you start, there’s no way I’d usr the flaky starlink solution either. I say “bring back the video store”. Where is Schitts Creek star Johnny Rose?
Yeah, nope. No matter what OS, no matter what specs, I’m going to keep my PC.
I’ll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he’ll, I’d go to text based MUDs first.
We need to get MUDs more popular again. But that would require getting Telnet popular again.
But why? You don’t need telnet to transfer text.
Because a MUD that isn’t part of a BBS feels wrong to me.
And the future thin client will just be a locked down chatgpt prompt. It will still suck just as much as it does now. You just won’t have choice.
And get to it how? Through a PC?
Shitty ass thin client running cheap hw that can’t do anything, a.k.a. Chromebook.
Yes, Microsoft is already selling these
I’d love to install Linux on that
Isn’t that where Amazon makes 1/3 of their money?
Yeah its their cash engine they use for funding everything else so they can monopolise everything else by undercutting everyone
Thanks for reminding me to tear down my test AWS instances
If you pay for them with credits it’s just costing them money
youll have to pry my 4 thinkpads from my cold dead hands you slimy sack of shit
I think that the problem will be if software comes out that’s doesn’t target home PCs. That’s not impossible. I mean, that happens today with Web services. Closed-weight AI models aren’t going to be released to run on your home computer. I don’t use Office 365, but I understand that at least some of that is a cloud service.
Like, say the developer of Video Game X says “I don’t want to target a ton of different pieces of hardware. I want to tune for a single one. I don’t want to target multiple OSes. I’m tired of people pirating my software. I can reduce cheating. I’m just going to release for a single cloud platform.”
Nobody is going to take your hardware away. And you can probably keep running Linux or whatever. But…not all the new software you want to use may be something that you can run locally, if it isn’t released for your platform. Maybe you’ll use some kind of thin-client software — think telnet, ssh, RDP, VNC, etc for past iterations of this — to use that software remotely on your Thinkpad. But…can’t run it yourself.
If it happens, I think that that’s what you’d see. More and more software would just be available only to run remotely. Phones and PCs would still exist, but they’d increasingly run a thin client, not run software locally. Same way a lot of software migrated to web services that we use with a Web browser, but with a protocol and software more aimed at low-latency, high-bandwidth use. Nobody would ban existing local software, but a lot of it would stagnate. A lot of new and exciting stuff would only be available as an online service. More and more people would buy computers that are only really suitable for use as a thin client — fewer resources, closer to a smartphone than what we conventionally think of as a computer.
EDIT: I’d add that this is basically the scenario that the AGPL is aimed at dealing with. The concern was that people would just run open-source software as a service. They could build on that base, make their own improvements. They’d never release binaries to end users, so they wouldn’t hit the traditional GPL’s obligation to release source to anyone who gets the binary. The AGPL requires source distribution to people who even just use the software.
i will simply not use new software for my personal cases then, if it comes down to it ill make my own. im a simple girl, ill manage my media and play my 20 year old games till i die
