Alternativelly, having been bitten by a radioactive animal early that day, they’re now an animal themed superhero.

Well, a quick check of my Mini-PC which has a bit more software than Lubuntu and Kodi but not by much (so, also stuff like Firefox and qbittorrent) shows a bit over 20GB used for everything but the mount to were the qbittorrent is downloading files, so even in this day and age of stupidly expensive storage all the storage you need is still going to be about €20 or less (that’s the price of a new 64GB SATA SSD from AliExpress, which should fit the same connectors as your HDDs unless those PCs are so ancient they still use PATA instead of SATA).

I expect a dedicate distro for just a TV box like LibreELEC should be even smaller.

Mind you, I have the storage for the videos I watch in Kodi outside in the form of portable mobile HDDs since its a much better price per GB for bulk storage and the speed of even mobile HDDs is fine for playing h264 and h265 compressed stuff, so that’s of course not counted in those 20GB.

Upgrading an old PCs with a 64GB SATA SSD should be reasonable cheap and more than enough to run either LibreELEC or Lubuntu with Kodi plus a bunch of extra stuff.

That said, the benefit of a Mini-PC like the one I got (with an N100 processor or similar) is that it uses very little power (unlike old desktop PCs or even notebooks) so it’s cheap to just leave running all the time and it’s quiet.

When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.

These things were around €50 from AliExpress.

They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.

Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.

Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.

You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).

That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.

I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.

I got an N100 for about €130 last year but the same one with the same amount of memory (which was only 8 GB since that machine is for use as a TV Box + Home NAS combo) is now about €240.

Still way more affordable than the usual game machine with a dedicated graphics card and perfectly fine for many Indie games which are fun and have tons of replayability.

Now, if one want to play the latest God Of War on it, forget about it, though myself I genuinely find something like Rimworld more fun.

Fun gaming machine 2027: N100 Mini-PC with integrated graphics and Linux for playing games like Rimworld.

The main argument against the idea that the steep price increases in PC consumer hardware will lead to a Future of “everything runs on the cloud” and “the end of personal computing” is that the makers of software that can’t run on the cloud and remain decent (most notably game makers, as proven by the totally failure of things like Stadia) will just target their software the the hardware that’s expected that people will have in 2 - 5 times, which as far as we can tell is “the same hardware as people have now” because only a small fraction of gamers can afford to upgrade.

If people can’t afford upgrading their PCs, software makers can’t afford to demand upgraded computers.

I would even say that the trend towards that predates this shit - in the last decade or so it’s pretty much only AAA games who have been pushing the envelope in terms of hardware whilst increasingly Indie games are targetting lower end hardware.

That’s also good for Linux because, lo-and-behold, Microsoft is one of those software makers who with spectacularly bad timming just put out a main product that demands upgraded computers exactly when it’s way harder for people to afford upgrading their computers.

Well, we can’t really download Hookers or Blow via the Internet, so instead we had to settle for Porn and Digital Piracy.

It’s literally less than a cent (euro or dollar) for a whole bottle of tap water.

Out of curiosity I checked the price I pay for tap water in Portugal and 1 m³ (1000 l) costs around €0.5, so a 2l bottle of tap water contains all of 0.01 euro cents worth of it.

I’ve had the same experience.

The problem is always with posts done on a specific instance, so it’s probably still instance related, maybe the pictures on posts in that instance not being passed around as pictures but rather as a link back to that instance and it’s the instance that is blocking some VPN exit points (which is why sometimes if you reconnect the VPN it fixes - reconnecting usually changes the exit point and only some exit points are blocked).

American (maybe more broadly Western) Computer Consumer Products companies are indeed getting fucked.

The thing is, that doesn’t mean that the Future is one were Consumers are forced to not have PCs and have all their computing needs served from Big Companies’ Servers.

I think, going from evidenc of the former to expecting the latter is a jump too far to take since it’s only looking at one side of the equation in one part of the World.

It’s perfectly possible that it’s the Chinese companies that end up gaining from this, similarly to how in the EV space the result of Western auto companies not offering what most consumers actually wanted (which wasn’t a Tesla, since those are too expensive for most people) was that the Chinese created and expanded that industry are now handily outcompetting those Western companies in their home markets.

Chinese parts and Mini-PC (an area where there are still a lot of products well bellow $500) manufacturers are still happilly selling their products to buyers from all over the World on platforms like AliExpress and, as we’ve recently discovered, Chinese memory makers (actual makers using actual chip fabs, not memory module assemblers) are expanding their production and selling more and more product to consumer market module assemblers in China and Taiwan, filling in the void created by the big memory makers focusing on supplying the AI datacenter boom.

(PS: That said, the China side seems to be covered in the video)

Further, there are other natural reactions in other areas which go against a dystopian future of No More Personal in Personal Computing - for example, software makers, most notably game makers, when they’re scoping their products to the computing power that the expect will be available in 5 years, aren’t going to be targetting hardware significativelly more powerful than what is common now (because if they did otherwise their stuff wouldn’t sell), which means that naturally (though with some delay) the demand for more computing power and storage in personal devices is adjusting to the reduced availability of new devices with more storage and computing power, so rather that demand rather than going to go up it’s probably going to stagnate, meaning that the future is most likely one of people running old computers for longer and just repairing what breaks with parts from that generation (one where DDR4 memory is more popular than DDR5) that one where everybody (both consumers and software makers) meekly accepts that the only option is computation running on servers (something which, by the way, game makers have already tried with things like Stadia, which failed miserably).

In summary, yeah the consumer personal computing hardware industry in the West is hurting, but just that is nowhere enough to support this idea that in the Future, Worldwide there will be no more Personal Computers.

(PPS: My expectation of the likely future is probably closest in that video with that of the guy from Corsair).

They’ll listen to the lobbyists peddling them with hookers and blow (and promises of future non-executive board memberships and and millionaire speech circuit fees).

That’s all the expertise they care about.

A sterner finger wagging?!

Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.

Exactly - the more easilly the “riff-raff” is to swindle or the less capable they are to push back, the more intensely and shamelessly the “upper” classes take advantage of the rest.

You don’t just see it in the historical trends (such as ever more reduced levels of broad representativeness of elected politicians in for example the US or Britain), you also see it across nations: for example after the 2008 Crash, the wealthy in France (with its tradition of public rebellion) were actually saying they should be taxed MORE, whilst the wealthy in England (whose closest to “public” rebellion ever was the Barons rebelling against the King leading to the Magna Carta) were openly lobbying the Government to be taxed LESS (and got what they asked for, with Britain endind up in Austerity, with the anger caused by it being successfully redirected against Immigrants and The EU, hence Brexit, so the wealthy were totally right in not fearing the “riff-raff”).

PS: that spirit of not provoking the streets of wealthy French did not survive the Macron years, especially once he won against the “Gilet Jaunes” (Yellow Vests).

Surelly since then nobody ever again trusted their ability to run anything!

“The enemy will become incapacitated when they can’t stop themselves from rolling on the floor laughing!”

Bollywood films are real and everything in India does involve some kind of dance!

Wrap it in aluminum foil.

Whilst this sounds a lot like a foil hat joke, that’s literally the easiest way to wrap something in a conductive material cage (i.e. a faraday cage).

If you don’t want it to look ridiculous, put it inside a box whose inside has been lined with aluminum foil.

Mind you, personally I too would just cancel that shit, but the option is there to carry on using it whilst blocking its radio emissions.

It would be hilarious if Chinese companies were the ones that punctured the investment bubble around AI in America.