Technofeudalism. Great book by Yanis Varoufakis. He called it and it’s actually happening.
I still think it’s funny that he went from working at Valve as their Economist in residence studying digital markets to being the finance minister of Greece. I think the Valve job was more prestigious, especially since the rest of the EU was committed to fucking over Greece at the time.
I worked in a Citrix environment for long enough to know this is just stupid.
The people who would be okay with this already don’t own computers, they go with a phone.
I’d give up computing altogether, or even commit suicide if living mainly means being subservient to these soulless parasites.
Live on. We need manpower to fight the upcoming fight. Every person counts.
Don’t die for nothing. Die for something.
Or better yet, don’t die. Better the oligarchs die for you, than the other way around. Get movin’1
I’m comforted by the fact that we have such a substandard internet in Australia that the day would be over before an only online machine would even boot. And before you start, there’s no way I’d usr the flaky starlink solution either. I say “bring back the video store”. Where is Schitts Creek star Johnny Rose?
you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud
My real PC hope is to fashion the case into a French style billionaire solver
I think I’ll pass. I’ve been going to too many lengths lately to keep my data in my possession. I have no interest in giving it Bezos.
He can hope a lot of things, but Stadia sure didn’t take.
I had a friend who was a true believer in Stadia, he even sold his gaming PC as he was gaming in Stadia full time.
When Stadia shut down he told me “at least I get to keep the controller”
Little Lex Luthor should climb into one of his dick rockets and aim for Venus.
And the future thin client will just be a locked down chatgpt prompt. It will still suck just as much as it does now. You just won’t have choice.
Yeah, nope. No matter what OS, no matter what specs, I’m going to keep my PC.
I’ll always be able to play Balatro, Factorio, and he’ll, I’d go to text based MUDs first.
We need to get MUDs more popular again. But that would require getting Telnet popular again.
But why? You don’t need telnet to transfer text.
Because a MUD that isn’t part of a BBS feels wrong to me.
And get to it how? Through a PC?
Yes, Microsoft is already selling these
I’d love to install Linux on that
Shitty ass thin client running cheap hw that can’t do anything, a.k.a. Chromebook.
Isn’t that where Amazon makes 1/3 of their money?
Yeah its their cash engine they use for funding everything else so they can monopolise everything else by undercutting everyone
Thanks for reminding me to tear down my test AWS instances
I’ll repeat what I said elsewhere:
Renting PCs is probably overall cheaper and a lot better for the environment. Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client and something to access a few apps maybe 30 mins a day.
Even “power users” don’t need a machine.
If there were a non-profit or not-for-profit that was selling maybe an rpi we’d be saving a lot of money and reducing climate harm.
I just don’t trust bezos to not be greedy.
This pretty much already exists as the business model for web based apps and chromebooks, but it doesn’t work for all types of apps which is why chromebooks added android and linux app support
Desktop streaming isn’t the same as web apps.
- This assumes latency between one’s current location and the remote location is almost non-existent. It isn’t.
- This assumes we have fast and available internet all the time. I sure don’t.
- This assumes we can use the remote computer in every way we use our current computers. No way.
- This assumes, as you point out, they won’t be greedy once they control everyone’s machines. They will be.
- This assumes they won’t censor ‘dangerous’ sites on these machines. They will.
I will happily pay more for freedom from the corporation.
Modern desktop streaming is quite impressive. 100ms, 5% loss is no problem for most tasks. You don’t even notice it, and as a result your experience can sometimes be better.
Additionally you can offload some tasks to the local machine where appropriate.
You dont need to fit every users needs into a thin client setup, but you could fit probably 50% of all users onto one and they wouldn’t know any different. Think of the energy savings. Think of all that plastic that goes into a desktop or laptop that isn’t needed in a virtualized blade chassis. Think of the rolling performance upgrades. Think of never having your hardware go End of Support. Think of the old equipment that ends up properly e-wasted instead of shoved into a dump. Think of the batteries that no longer need to get produced.
I might play around with this idea and host my own non-profit Desktop as a Service.
I will say that, realistically, in terms purely of physical distance, a lot of the world’s population is in a city and probably isn’t too far from a datacenter.
https://calculatorshub.net/computing/fiber-latency-calculator/
It’s about five microseconds of latency per kilometer down fiber optics. Ten microseconds for a round-trip.
I think a larger issue might be bandwidth for some applications. Like, if you want to unicast uncompressed video to every computer user, say, you’re going to need an ungodly amount of bandwidth.
DisplayPort looks like it’s currently up to 80Gb/sec. Okay, not everyone is currently saturating that, but if you want comparable capability, that’s what you’re going to have to be moving from a datacenter to every user. For video alone. And that’s assuming that they don’t have multiple monitors or something.
I can believe that it is cheaper to have many computers in a datacenter. I am not sold that any gains will more than offset the cost of the staggering fiber rollout that this would require.
EDIT: There are situations where it is completely reasonable to use (relatively) thin clients. That’s, well, what a lot of the Web is — browser thin clients accessing software running on remote computers. I’m typing this comment into Eternity before it gets sent to a Lemmy instance on a server in Oregon, much further away than the closest datacenter to me. That works fine.
But “do a lot of stuff in a browser” isn’t the same thing as “eliminate the PC entirely”.
Most people don’t need a machine, they just need a thin client
Amazing how we’re come full circle
Right! I had no idea Bezos used Lemmy either!
If only “greedy” was his only problem!
