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Comment by iaaan | Hacker News Reader

I've been saying this for years. These companies don't want you to own the compute hardware. They just want to flash the colored pixels in front of you.

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One has to be naive not to understand that the whole cloud computing model is nothing else than being back at the timesharing days.

The big difference is the hardware evolution, now the rooms are full of server racks with sliding pizza boxes, and the terminals are prettier.

Its true that owning hardware is really important especially at an age where privacy is becoming more and more critical. But the truth is hardware on the cloud is more efficient, it would allow devices to be literally be a screen and a wifi card, you can do anything anywhere. All consumer software is just colored pixels in front of you. To 90% of the planet a truly fast cloud streamed UI would be some much more capable and convenient. With generative AI more and more of our interfaces will also be generative. As the way we input things to most of our devices is literally pressing a location on flashing pixels, best experiences will naturally be optimized around a good screen and connection and that's just the nature of evolution for software being data <-> presentation medium

The main problem with cloud streamed is latency, and the other is fuck the cloud.

I, and probably a lot of the people here, spend so much time on the PC that every additional msec annoys me. If there's keyboard shortcut, then I'll learn it to avoid using the mouse.

Windows being a bloated slow mess even when run locally means that using it remotely all the time would be like torture.

I'm sure dealing with the 4k60 videos from my cameras would be a world of pain on the cloud too.

I don't need or want to pay a subscription for the tool I use for hours a day, with no advantages beyond vendor lock-in.

You need a computer either way... remote is basically all negatives when compared to local.

You are probably correct about 90% however.

90% of people are pretty ignorant about how their computers work, or how to use them more efficiently. They line up like lemmings to lose autonomy over their devices and pay subscriptions in exchange for the barest crumb of convenience.

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