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Comment by adamtulinius | Hacker News Reader

Can we please not kid ourselves with thoughts about how this being good from certain perspectives, when the development is _clearly_ bad for consumers?

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I do agree with the negatives, but at the same time, I do see some upside. I live in a cycling city, and need to rent a car maybe once a year. why then should I bother myself with the annoyances of vehicle ownership?

Let me be clear here: I do not own a car and I live in a city that doesn't require car ownership.

There is a difference between choosing not to own something because it is personally more efficient or reasonable to do so, and being priced out of owning something. I don't own a car because I don't need it, I rent because I cannot afford a home.

Done charitably, I think the mainframe model of shared compute does meet most person's needs where they don't need to care about latency. It would allow us to take advantage of economies of scale. The problem, imo, is that no one has an incentive to do this as a service, so it would turn into rent-seeking.

But I do care about latency . . . and I want things to still work when the wifi is dodgy. I already find things like Office 360 deeply frustrating (only use it for work).

You do, but most people don't. So not enough people will complain that it will make any difference. And the people who don't complain will just keep forking out money because they're addicted.

Most don't? Streaming isn't large enough to say that yet I don't think. Google Stadia wasn't a big hit

Sure, a shared model does make sense in many ways. We could share within a family, neighbour cooperatives, and similar scales. With the users co-owning the means of processing.

But the current model is that we all rent from organisations that use their position of power to restrict and dictate what we can do with those machines.

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