Re: The last part of the above quote, i.e. "Too often in this industry hardware is used to solve software problems."

This one will be quickly coming home to roost in the coming year(s)... Regardless of other Moore's Law aspects losing validity (or past tense already), the "law" also never considered the kind of extreme capital accumulations which would enable a few companies buying up major parts of the entire RAM/GPU market supply (without actually being able to or even wanting to use it[1]), just to transform (or terminate) the landscape/era of personal computing as we know it and so cement their monopolies...

Maybe similar to how #OpenSource culture provided tens of millions of years of free R&D and product development & maintenance labor for Big Tech™, the 50-60 year long era of personal computing provided more generally valuable insights into the types and behaviors people would use computing for. These insights came with the "costs" and maybe unintended side-effects of enabling more individual (and social/political) agency, authority, self-realization, self-organization, creativity and creation of alternatives to capital & state-controlled infrastructure/monopolies, especially since networks were added to the mix. Shouldn't have too much of that!

There might still be a separation of church and state (in some places), but capital and state have always been chums and are becoming ever more entangled everywhere. With the amount of AI & datacenter investments already done (incl. by govts), ROI is becoming increasingly questionable _UNLESS_ AI was just the shiny opportunity to entice sufficient amounts of people to partake and invest these exorbitant sums in this gigantic infrastructure build-up, but the goal was something much larger: Phasing out personal computing and supplanting it with increasingly "thin client"[1] hardware in combination with ad-supported subscription models (mobile phone hardware & software is more than halfway there already). Centralized compute infrastructure to mediate, surveil & censor not just all media/communication (of course unencrypted), but also to provide computation itself as limited resource only, executed centrally/remotely via subscription/quotas and monitored to ensure it cannot be used in unintended ways (or by unintended people/orgs). Very much like the recent wave of debanking hitting left-wing entities in Germany, only applied to computation itself...

Nothing of these developments are in any form in the interest of democratic societies!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnlgwyVahCY
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client

#AI #PersonalComputing

@toxi @aramba

Wow, I so love your essay, and what a tour de force it is: personal memoir, reflections on programming, reflections on education, a manifesto for creative programming ... simply wonderful.

#programming #PersonalComputing