Submitted 2 months ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
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.
Never ever ever. I learned to code on a 14 year old hp probook. I know how long I can hold out.
so everyone owning their own pc is "antiquated" but everyone owning their own car is super cool and awesome.
got it.
Nah, they want everybody to only use their robotaxi too.
Wait so you’re saying we can have these cars that can come pick up a bunch of people and it’ll be more efficient than everyone having their own car? What if we put the car on some kind of pre defined path, like a fixed one that can’t move. Would that make it more efficient?
Nah, everyone owning their own car is just the fucking norm. What’s cool is buying a new car. Often, and brand new.
When an economic system encourages you to constantly replace the same product, the concept of ownership becomes a little blurred. I mean, if you spend part of your budget on it every month for your entire life, it’s not much different from renting.
I would rather lower the specs of my network than rent anything from them. If in 2035 I can only afford a raspberry pi 7, so be it.
Internet and access to servers is the first thing that govts turn off when they get uppity.
Seems like a fatal risk to have online only services.
Seems like a fatal risk to have online only services.
Maybe that’s the whole idea.
“Own nothing and be happy”
It’s not at all surprising that fatcats looks at the juicy profits that Apple makes with their iOS closed garden and think “I want me some of that” - wanting to be a monopolist with captive customers makes the most business sense and is the most natural thing in a Capitalist Economic and Political environment.
Most of the economic activity around Technology nowadays is rent-seeking and only the part which isn’t at all about money - open source - isn’t about corraling people into closed spaces, removing their choices and then extracting the most money possible from people who now have no other option.
It’s kind like already 20 or 30 years ago Banks looked at cash payments and though that they should find a way to get comissions on those, same as they did with card payments, so already back they they were pushing things like electronic wallets (back then those were basically a special kind of card) and keep pushing it for decades (often with the support of governments, since 100% electronic payments are great for civil society surveillance), and nowadays in some countries there are pretty much no cash payments.
So yeah, these people will totally try and get together with hardware makers with a dominant market position to slowly close down PC technology - for example the whole point of TPM is to take control away from the owners of the hardware and the “trusted” in “trusted platform” (aka TPM) isn’t about it being trusted by the owner of the hardware, it’s about it being trusted by the business selling the OS, who in turn can sell access to the thus gatekept environment to software making businesses.
I believe the whole requirement for TPM 2.0 in Windows 11 even though it doesn’t actually need it is just a step in a broader strategy to turn PCs into a closed platform controlled by Microsoft.
Alternative Advice: Buy up old used mini-pcs if hardware is too expensive. Don’t buy AWS unless you actually need cloud services (i.e. you’re hosting a website).
I won’t say VPSs don’t have their utility, but anyone framing it as an alternative to owning a PC is completely DeLuLu and need their head examined.
There are other VPS providers you can use, though, most of the Fediverse uses Hetzner, for instance.
I wish Hetzner didn’t require uploading my legal documents (they asked for my passport or ID) to verify my account. Otherwise, seems cool. I’m in the US.
I won’t say VPSs don’t have their utility, but anyone framing it as an alternative to owning a PC is completely DeLuLu and need their head examined.
I’ve been trying using a VPS entirely as a development box. Something that has my entire development environment in it. Then I can just SSH to it from wherever and always have my workspace ready where I left off in tmux.
It has it’s pros and cons. But it’s definitely not a crazy idea. In fact it’s a pretty old idea.
Even game streaming has gotten some traction. And when GPUs all cost $4k, maybe GeForce streaming isn’t a bad financial choice.
My answer to that: 🖕
Well chucklefuck you need a basic PC to act as the client. You know what kind of computer most people have? A shitty PC good enough to be the fuckin client. Why would they want to pay for a shitty pc to rent another one when they can just use the fucking shitty PC they bought at walmart for 300 for 8 fuckin years like they do now? That is $3 a month amortized beat that bitch.
They will sell it like streaming services or printers and ink. The first Amazon PC is free, then the subscription price and amount of ads go up. Eventually people will stick because all their files are there, and their Amazon PC does not support mass storage devices like USB sticks to download all of their work.
It can’t be free because it costs too much. You need data centers near customers for acceptable latency. You also need a computer to connect to your amazon PC.
No your phone won’t work. To prove this. Get a really expensive phone that you can a keyboard and display to. This is already a thing right. Run a remote desktop software on your actual PC wired vastly preferred. Now go next door and ensure you have acceptable wifi. Try this out and tell me how it works for you.
Now imagine it with average wifi which is often terrible in my households with the shitty phones people have creating an experience that is orders of magnitude best case scenario we have created above.
The first Amazon PC is free
Whoa lets not go too far off the crazy cliff now.
Something something my cold dead hands
Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.
How he thinks he can make more billions by forcing yet another subscription model that takes ownership away from individuals.
TBH I don’t think he’s wrong, especially in HIS position.
Namely I think having the flexibility of the cloud is amazing… but NOT at the cost of losing sovereignty.
So when Bezos uses AWS he is actually smart because he remains sovereign. When anybody though does rely on another system that they do not own for critical tasks then then lose sovereignty and thus agency.
TL;DR: cloud or not, maintain your agency.
TL;DR: cloud or not, maintain your agency.
Even that is getting harder, thanks to google and micro$hit doing everything they can to lock down their respective OSs. Linux on a desktop, yadda yadda, but we’re ~12 years into the smartphone era and we still don’t fully own those electronic pieces of shit. Only a limited number of models can receive custom roms.
FWIW I do have 2 Linux phones and… they work. The problem IMHO is that non-software companies believe THEY can lock or profit their customers via an “app”. If they only provided a Web page instead rather than a mandatory mobile application then it wouldn’t matter so much.
So, despite have working Linux phones (albeit far from perfect) I’m still relying on a deGoogled Android phone so that I can run mobile “apps” for only a couple of, quite important to me, services.
To summarize, I don’t think it’s the OS themselves that fuel lock-in but rather apps that require those locked down OSes.
I worked with someone that defend this isea to the letter, just not contemplating companies.
The argument stemmed from an alledge visit he had done to Japan, where he had seen terminals connected to mainframes, and people used those from their house.
I was only able to raise one argument: that is not my computer.
Mind that this man was extremely tech savvy, an experienced and proficient programmer and played the roles of IT solutions an security implementer and supervisor at the company we worked at. And we handled sensitive information.
To him, relegating everything to an outside server was a dream, as removed the hassle and responsability of having to maintain, repair, replace and upgrade hardware. Everything needed should be a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse or trackball.
Yeah beyond the obvious problems with latency it mostly comes down to trust: trusting them with your data, trusting them to have enough capacity and trusting to not enshittify in the future. I reserve that level of trust for close friends, certainly not companies and absolutely not bezos.
There are plenty of smart tech workers without the first clue about morality or human rights. Outside of tech these people are ignorant and naive. That’s why so many techbros become libertarians and stumble into fascism. It’s cluelessness and a lack of curiosity to discover the world outside of tech.
tech is the field furthest away working with humans hence why they are more conservative in some case, biotech is somewhere in between(used to be only well off people who can afford scientist level schooling and cost, still kinda is)
Nah, Bezos. Linux is getting better by the day.
That’s why they have to make the hardware unobtainable. This is well underway.
And they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot in the process.
That’s the thing, with a free operating system you can do whatever the fuck you want. The best games coming out are indie developers and they can target hardware people have. We can wait them out.
It’s really important not to discard functional hardware now, even by throwing it into recycling. It’s more useful intact and may not be replaceable forever.
Could 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.
Shit like this is why I’m glad I’m almost dead.
Imagine the tracking and monitoring of activity they could do. Might as well go voyeur at that point.
Sometimes renting from the cloud is a perfectly acceptable solution. However companies leap to using AWS and similar cloud solutions WAY more than necessary or advisable. It is easy to rack up thousands in bills outstripping the costs of buying some hardware and slapping the software onto it. The cloud can scale and do a bunch of cool things but much of the time companies don’t need it, or the complexity it brings.
Salesman shills product, nothing new. Besides, there is too much commodity hardware floating around for this to be plausible.
For now. The hobbyist space is under attack, with Qualcomm buying Arduino, and RAM prices through the roof.
If you price out hobbyists from consumer hardware, and offer a slightly cheaper alternative in the cloud, what will consumers do
I’m hanging onto every bit of consumer hardware for this very reason. Hobbysts should get more into recycling and refurbishing existing hardware, especially mobile phone boards instead of buying doohickies.
Fuck you, Bezos. And fuck Amazon.
Going full luddite is counter-productive
A historical context Luddite would probably be destroying datacentres presently, we might have a thing or two to learn from them.
Maybe not. I’m pretty sure the ratio of productivity vs waste of time when sitting in front of a pc is actually <<1 in my case.
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.
because that’s how capitalism works. PC hardware is so cheap and easy to make, the ROI is getting lower and lower each cycle.
if they only sell access to the hardware, profits go up exponentially and potentially forever.
this is why “x as a service” is used so much.
it’s one of the reasons why windows 11 is so shitty. they’re using it as a playground to test the limits of what consumers will accept. the experience is so atrocious that the next version will likely be hosted as a virtual desktop through Azure that you pay for hourly.
when it’s released, all the shitty things with 11 will be magically resolved and you’ll hear so many “reviews” talk about “how they listened to the end users and care about the user experience but it’s just not possible to deliver the great experience they want on consumer hardware”.
it’s always about the money.
I think you give them too much credit, I think it’s just incompetence and feature creep, and Microsoft desperately trying to hold on to users while more switch to Linux. The enshittification will rapidly increase, and more will realize they don’t have to pay at all for a good operating system.
They gotta do something with all those data centres once the AI bubble pops. Pop pop!
Exactly. This is really just hedging their bets. They know the carpet is being pulled and now they’re in the bargaining phase. (This plus Jensen asking people to be nicer about AI shlock.)
I want to see community DCs like we have community gardens. Municipal plots for hobby computing or offsite subsistance storage.
Love it!
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.
Genuenly I refuse to use cloud PCs, I don’t give a fuck how “cheap” they are or how “convenient” they are I ain’t using it. If there is still hardware being produced that works with Linux I’m buying it, if no hardware exists I’m gonna keep using my old hardware until new hardware that does support Linux comes out.
The only thing that’s gonna be replaced is capitalism and by extension the capitalist class.
“We have all this hardware and no consumers because businesses just buy up the competition, and fire the workers. We need to sell it, but to who? We own the enterprise market.”
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.
I guess there’s more than one reason all pc parts are rising at a ridiculous rate
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kamen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, we get it, Bezos. You want us to shove more and more money down your throat.
Reading the article, the analogy with an own generator and the power grid kind of makes sense at first… until you also make an analogy with broadcast and cable TV for example - you don’t get to choose what’s on, and in the latter case you’re practically paying for ads and some programming in between. So… how about no.
My fear is that those shortages (artificial or not) might at one point really drive us in a different direction. My only option for now is to vote with my wallet and use my stuff for as long as practically feasible.
AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I’m prepared to contribute a whole lot of pennies to the cause.
kamen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Given how greedy he is, you’ll have quite a lot of contributing to do.