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.
This is stupid. I will never rent a computer mainframe.
Submitted 2 months ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
PissingIntoTheWind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
GameGeologist36@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Over my dead body Jeff.
GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 2 months ago
He needs to be uploaded to a cloud himself. By a bullet to the head.
kureta@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
There’s no quite part anymore. It’s all out in the open. Be it politics, capitalism, police brutality,… you name it.
f314@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Seize the means of computation!
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.
I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:
- 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.
- 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe
- 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.
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2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.
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2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.
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2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.
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2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably
evol@lemmy.today 2 months ago
In 2040s do we just move our brains into our own self hosted data centers?
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.
KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is part of the AI push, but it assumes that it succeeds. With luck it can be stopped.
FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Yup, just don’t eat the shit they are shoveling.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
Dojan@pawb.social 2 months ago
Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for ‘off-grid’ power plants to give them more control over their power and costs.
Yeah, like how Elong Musk is poisoning Memphis with his illegal generators spewing smog all over the place.
TheProtagonist@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Why should I?
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah thats gonna be a no from me
orioler25@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Though this is all motivated by capitalistic expansion, it’s also worth noting that liberals have been trying to eliminate the dissent facilitated through online activism and information campaigns for a few years now. Ownership over our PCs means that there can always be an internet operated and monitored by us.
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 1 month ago
I can’t believe we in a place where that needs to be said.
orioler25@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You gotta pay more attention then. Many of us have expected this for nine years, some sixty years.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Weird. You would think that the “genius” would know that the very AI and Quantum computing his organization and other Billionaires are building out, is going to undermine anything of value that is Centralized. Really proof his genius is how to exploit others and not really the reality we are finding ourselves in. I am LOL inside as the shift back to decentralized services will be a bloodbath for Centralized anything.
bunchberry@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s… literally the opposite. The giant AI models with trillions of parameters are not something you can run without spending many thousands of dollars, and quantum computers cost millions. These are definitely not services that are going to fall into the hands of everyday people. At best you get small AI models.
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The evidence is the trend overtime in terms of organizations getting hacked (countless studies and reports on it). This is the graph to watch closely as it is the path we are on and there is a point on that curve that Centralization becomes a liability.
grapefruittrouble@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Perfect! And after that we can rent our phones from the cloud too. Maybe our electric cars after that?
Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s like an EU member purchasing the F-35 under Krasnov. Yep, fuck that shit.
Butterphinger@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I’ll host my photos on a jailbroken pregnancy test.
TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
If China wants to win against these assholes, all they have to do is help develop open alternatives to TSML and ASML and not invade Taiwan so these assholes have to bear the brunt of the AI bubble.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Literally no reason to live if you have to subscribe for air.
No reason to hold back then, this planet is not big enough for billionaires.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 months ago
…and how show I access this cloud compute? Stick my fingers into a network socket and wiggle them?
apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t buy computers from wax figures.
orbitz@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Cheap computer (I’m Canadian so let’s say these are maple bucks) say $500, what’s a rental $30 a month, so 16ish months before it’s paid off.
I ran a media PC off a $300 computer for years (I can’t recall exactly least 2 maybe 3). If you need more you probably don’t need a cloud one, if you get a cloud one it’s cheaper to buy a cheap computer every 2 years.
It may make a sense to some but I enjoy having my nas backup and separate media PC. Also if Amazon goes down you can’t even access the calculator, least with no Internet there are options at home.
GaryGhost@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Amazon sucks
vin@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
It never was a thing that kept quiet…
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s just many people on the way were telling you
- "but imagine not having to upgrade"
- “internal DACs are noisy, only go wired if you’re a true audiophile”
- “stop being a luddite”
vin@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
- Not everyone always wants heated seats, so we’re actually lowering the price by having it as a subscription
Minimac@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
He so damn trash
weew@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Aren’t people backdoor already doing this? There are lots of people who only have their phone and maybe a tablet, and for basically everything that might actually require computing power (i.e. photo editing) they end up using a web app or something.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, web apps are like that, that’s why I’m dropping them (alongside with Electron apps) as soon as possible. Currently in the process of writing a DAP plugin for KATE, so I can have a nice GUI debugger on Linux without having to use VSlop Code.
ftbd@feddit.org 2 months ago
What’s wrong with VSCode? There’s an open source version (codium) which works just as well for me.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No.
FreeBooteR69@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I have a linuxbox with decent hardware that i can squeeze 4 years out of still, a steamdeck, and steamframes soon. I’ll be good for quite a while, long enough to ride out the AI slop-bubble
Lexam@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yes rent a computer from the cloud, while your Internet is capped at a terrabyte
chasteinsect@programming.dev 2 months ago
Terry Davis was right…
m3t00@lemmy.world 2 months ago
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I love how the author keeps bringing up how expensive it would be to implement a system of cloud computing rental because no one would pay the amount it would require to make such a thing profitable. But we’re talking about Jeff bezos here who took billions of dollars worth of loss for over 10 years before making Amazon the profit machine that it is now. Simply by making things cheaper for a long period of time until the customer base eas so used to the model that they could picture doing it any other way and their competition went out of business. I can totally foresee them doing this exact thing with cloud computing. Make it really cheap get people hooked where they have gotten rid of all of their in person computers and then, once access to home computing is either prohibitively expensive or impossible to do because parts are no longer available or otherwise impossible for people to switch away, jack up the price and make it profitable by squeezing every dime out of the average consumer.
This was also, by the way, Netflix’s strategy as well as Spotify and all the other cloud-based services that people are “addicted to”. Take billions and loss to get people used to your service and not consider any alternative. Then once you have a captive audience shoot that price to the Moon.
Christobootswiththepher@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yarrr