LRwhat if ram buyout is part of a greater attack on personal computing
any other indicators?
the pattern would be: make personal computing expensive, complicated, and unnecessary while making cloud dependence cheap, simple, and required. whether coordinated or emergent, the trajectory is similar - computing power migrating from personal ownership to rental access.
possible indicators:
hardware consolidation:
* RAM concentrated in data centers, not consumer hands
* repair parts increasingly scarce or locked down (right-to-repair battles)
* custom silicon (M-series, Snapdragon X) that's harder to upgrade or swap
* soldered components becoming standard even in "pro" machines
software centralization:
* operating systems pushing cloud dependencies (win 11's ms account requirements, ChromeOS model)
* Adobe, Microsoft, AutoCAD all shifted to subscription models requiring internet validation
* local AI models possible but corporations pushing API-dependent solutions
* progressive web apps replacing locally-run software
knowledge degradation:
* fewer people learning to build PCs or understand their machines
* tech education shifting from "how computers work" to "how to use apps"
* repair culture dying as devices become unrepairable black boxes
* documentation and schematics increasingly proprietary
economic pressure:
* hobbyist computing priced out (current RAM situation)
* home servers becoming impractical vs cloud services
* development tools increasingly cloud-based (GitHub codespaces, cloud IDEs)
honestly, all fairly weak and circumnavigable indicators, but also possibly a death by a thousand cuts.
on the other hand, videogames. a lot more going on for PC. valve's healing influence. is cloud gaming a serious force by now? doubtful.
possible deliberate future attack vectors:
SSD controller chips - a "sudden shortage" would be catastrophic. if NAND controllers became scarce or prohibitively expensive, it would force cloud storage dependence overnight. people couldn't even backup locally anymore.
PSUs - capacitor or transformer supply "disruption" would halt all PC building.
BIOS/UEFI firmware - a "security crisis" requiring signed firmware. approved vendors only or nothing boots
CPU microcode "security patches" - a discovered "fundamental flaw" requiring always-online validation to boot. turns every processor into a subscription service. precedent already exists with Intel Management Engine and AMD PSP.
ethernet/network chips - if networking hardware became scarce or required licensing/authentication.
discrete GPU extinction - already happening organically, but accelerated scarcity would eliminate any serious computing, gaming, or AI work on personal machines.
the plot thickens
"Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud"
https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/jeff-bezos-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-bezos-envisions-that-youll-give-up-your-pc-for-an-ai-cloud-version
the plot gains further viscosity
"Western Digital is already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026 — chief says some long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 already in place"
it appears genai sloppers have understood that the only way to win is to destroy their greatest competitor: personal computing.
Keith Judge@lritter Yep, I had planned to hugely upgrade my gaming PC this year, but I think my old one now has a year or two more life in it.
The Seven Voyages Of Steve@KeefJudge @lritter Very much looking forward to component manufacturers grovelling back to their old customers and eating shit when their fly by night flashy customers go bankrupt
Mark Ripley@sinbad @KeefJudge @lritter Oh yes. When OpenAI suddenly pull those orders, and mfrs are sat with warehouses full of unsold stock, hopefully there will be a h/w discount bonanza :)
@sinbad @KeefJudge @lritter Even better, maybe we could coordinate a no-buy situation, so Crucial et al go bust themselves. That'll learn 'em. Power to the people!
@MarkRipley @sinbad @lritter A less optimistic way this could play out is we end up with what are basically terminals with minimal power/RAM, with all the compute power in "cloud" servers (whether LLM or otherwise).
@KeefJudge @MarkRipley @sinbad it's probably going to end up in a narratively dissatisfying split, with a majority living in "computational east germany", and two minorities enjoying full access: upper middle-class professionals and frugal harry tuttles.
@KeefJudge @sinbad @lritter ...which was Larry Ellison's plan all along, if you remember "thin clients" from 20 years ago.
@MarkRipley @KeefJudge @sinbad love it how when i look up this guy and he is immediately associated with another shitty thing i already know about (oracle).
Turing complete chair@archydragon also linked to in this thread
@lritter Ah, sorry, didn't scroll up enough.
𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦)there is only one way.
everyone becomes self organized in open supply chains and we together build all the things we need for ourselves and until we dont we depend and essentiallt beg big tech to be nice to us
... essentially giving them time to enshittify things further 🤷♀️
toerror@lritter States need to realise that some things are actually strategic resources, including the whole supply chain and support for those systems.
Léon van Kammen@lritter i think the term which resonates with your doom scenario is 'learned helplessness'. Im also curious if the upcoming 'challenge-based learning'-methodology (which China also seems to adopt for schools) will combat it. Im also curious whether AI will further stigmatize 'deep' knowledge ("Since AI can write code for you, humans don't need to learn code anymore, and can use its outcome. Would you like me to run the app you described here?"). An engineer-based society might help?
aeva
datenwolfSecureBoot is indeed one of those pretend-solutions, that do not really increase security of the machine, nor the customer, but only benefit the vendors.
There's only one good part, and only that one in the SecureBoot chain, and that is measured boot, i.e. checksum-chaining each subsequent piece of software before it's executed. Combine this with verity checked RO filesystems, that are linked to boot measures using a owner supplied key (=passphrase) and you're good.
All the other crap like firmware signing and bootloader signing and such are not really addressing the actual problem space.
SecureBoot doesn't solve the "protect the owner of a machine from the machine running code the owner doesn't want it to run", but instead solves the "let the machine only run code that the maker of the machine allow it to run", which is antithetical to free markets and ownership.
@lritter That's not a new fight though. The whole struggle for the ownership of our devices has been going on for over 20 years. In the noughties they called it TCPA.
Against TCPA
sofia ☮️🏴@datenwolf @lritter damn, that was a blast from the past 👀.
⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️@datenwolf @lritter and that isn't worth #Microsoft being in charge of what can boot on all PCs
LisPiSSD controller chips - a "sudden shortage" would be catastrophic. if NAND controllers became scarce or prohibitively expensive, it would force cloud storage dependence overnight. people couldn't even backup locally anymore.
Who backs up mass data onto SSDs? They're still not even close to being competitive with HDDs.
BIOS/UEFI firmware - a "security crisis" requiring signed firmware. approved vendors only or nothing boots
This is a somewhat more realistic problem and part of why "trusted computing" got so much criticism. It also doesn't help that it literally doesn't work (how many times have keys been leaked or vulnerabilities in implementations been found by now?).
JackPearse@lritter Solution: Go Vintage!
Quincy ⁂@lritter They rewind the Personal Computer Revolution which started in 1976.
And they now go back to Mainframe and terminal (browser).
So, what is the next „Personal Computer“?
Sean Kleefeld@lritter Well, crap. This is something that I had not considered before. 😖
dasparadoxon@lritter its the colonization of the computer indigenous world, local computer users and self-reparing and developing savages are basicly the indigenous population. and it is in full progress.
@tomtrottel you see a self-sufficient people, i see future addicts i mean customers! customers!
@lritter its way worse than "just" creating a "drug" syndicate. its colonization. its creating slaves and kills the rest. a drug dealer does not want to kill its users.
@tomtrottel "kill"
@lritter yes, I was refering to my colonization analogy. you need to see the bigger picture cause this will have devestating consequence combined with what they can do with absolut enslaved computer users and the authorian tendencies that come with colonization. but never mind me, I am hope I am wrong and it is just a happy "lets turn them into addicts" :)
Robin Hübner@lritter i think this is ascribing malice to something which is almost entirely mechanically profit driven
Michael Engel@lritter Qualcomm taking over Arduino, Raspberry Pi being dependent on Broadcom (though they started building their own chips with the Pico microcontrollers).
Andre Weissflog@lritter IMHO this 'war on personal computing' had been going on in the background for decades with varying intensity, similar to how DDOS attacks happen all the time without bringing the whole internet down (mostly at least). Personal computing might go back to be the niche/hobbyist activity it was in the 70s to 90s, but it won't entirely disappear. I guess it might become an expensive hobby again though :/
@floooh it begs the question what we wrote all this infrastructure for. certainly not so a bunch of locusts can run their datacenters on it, and nothing else.
@lritter hmm yeah... AFAIK the home computer revolution was mostly feeding on an overcapacity of slightly outdated 8-bit chips which suddenly became very cheap at the start of the 80s, and hobbyists and enthusiasts started to build all sorts of awesome things with this 'junk'.
Maybe we'll see a similar Cambrian Explosion after the AI bubble pops and suddenly there's a shitton of just slightly outdated GPUs and memory flooding the market waiting to be used for actually interesting stuff :)