"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.
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".
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.
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.
They could basically abandon MacOS completely and focus on iOS. I mean sometimes it feels like they abandoned macOS already.
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.
You will own nothing and be happy.
So, uh. Yeah. I'll get right back on that "cloud PC" thing.
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.
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.