Jeff Bezos hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
But it is precisely what he wanted as well :).
"You _must_ use a Cloud computer in order to make sure you're not doing anything illegal."
Amazon et al. will have to pry my tech from my cold, dead hands.
I'm just trying to isolate myself now from these toxic developments. If society falls into techno fascism after I'm gone, so be it. They wanted it. While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc.
There's a lot of bad things going on - but (and not saying this as justification) - there always has. There's always some power hungry person that claws their way to a position where they can benefit themselves at the expense of others. But the majority of people want to have good, peaceful lives with a sense of community and connection. Build things. Make art. Laugh. Grow and learn. Wonder about what could be, and build futures towards that.
Don't forsake them because of the all of the bad stuff that gets shoved in your face every day.
It's a dis-service to yourself and the life you have, and it weakens the people and groups that have do have the energy to stand up to not-so-good actors. If you're _happy_ being isolated then definitely go do that, but don't cut yourself off because you're only fed bad news everyday.
I just don't follow the mainstream news much anymore. I still like HN and some other tech sites.
And what have you done before giving up?
> While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc.
It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you.
I was a member of a political party (socialist). And I would go into discussions with the extreme-right fascists in my country (which currently have about 30% of votes). But there is no point. They don't care about facts or reason, it's more like a religion. They get themselves all worked up about internet memes about things that don't even happen and it's impossible to convince them of reality. I think they just enjoy being rabiately angry. In any case, I don't need that negativity in my life anymore.
> It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you.
I know the $10 hammer thing. But right now the government isn't the biggest threat here, surveillance capitalism is. Google and Meta don't come after us with hammers. The government threat is emerging (chatcontrol etc). I think for that opsec is much more important anyway.
But no for me never. I hate cloud.
It doesn't matter, the choice is being removed from the market. The clouders are already front running and scalping the hardware retail, just like scalpers were doing to GPUs during crypto.
Today's excuse is AI but it's the same process, just on an industrial scale - the clouders buy in bulk at low prices, create shortages and exorbitant retail pricing, which forces you to buy from them, providing them with nice profits. The only difference from vanilla scalping is, they sell the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.
The process is unstoppable without legislative intervention, it works with or without the presence of inflation - front running assures the scalping of retail. The high tariffs on Chinese hardware and the draconian restrictions on selling them gear for semiconductor manufacturing remove the only natural remedy - competition.
On the other hand, the existing semiconductor manufacturers are highly incentivized to sell in bulk so some leave the retail market altogether to become exclusive suppliers to big cloud and big OEM - e.g. Micron.
Beyond work I only use the PC for gaming and watching movies - so really if the only option was 'it has to be in the cloud', then my position becomes "well I guess I don't really play games any more". Not the worst thing.
But whatever. Just because Jeff wants that, doesn't mean it will be so. And like who cares what he thinks? The only hat he ever wears is "how do I make more money", not "how do I ensure people live good lives and enjoy themselves".
To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. (I know Microsoft had this and it was an amazing idea) For doing the non standard stuff like gaming/resource intensive development stuff I could rent a cloud pc.
I was blogging about this basic idea back in 2005, just over 20 years ago:
https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-comp...
I still think it's a good idea, but it sure is being slow to materialize in a practical form factor.
They could basically abandon MacOS completely and focus on iOS. I mean sometimes it feels like they abandoned macOS already.
With a decent internet connection I now struggle to see why anyone would want to buy a hardware Xbox. Games on the cloud version load instantly, play brilliantly and cost the same as the usual Game Pass as far as I can tell. The catalogue seems smaller maybe but aside from that I see little downside.
I could see it working well for PCs too - as long as the terminal device is seamless. I guess us devs have been renting computers in "the cloud" for decades anyway.
I moonlight in film restoration. One 2hr movie out of our scanner is easily 16 TiB or more depending on the settings we scanned with.
Getting this uploaded to a remote server would take ~39hr over a fully-saturated 1Gbe pipe.
On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already.
If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has.
Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.
Currently I am solving this problem by having like 6 AI services and drip-feeding each one with a little bit of problem so there is no context apparent from the queries.
So, uh. Yeah. I'll get right back on that "cloud PC" thing.
most of the time i'm doomscrolling, but every now and then you wanna play with linux, or llvm, or some VM cluster.
i bought a beefy rig for these 1% events in my life, and the rest of the time its doing basically nothing. seems a real waste.
You will own nothing and be happy.
You'll own nothing and like it. Not even your 'own' data. Everything sitting on someone else's server, free to access by whichever government agency feels like it. This is like communism x1000.
But it is, in fact, capitalism x1