Mastodawn

To clarify: I am saying this is what they want. Not that it is inevitable. But it's difficult to ignore the clear pattern of strategic decisions by these companies since the dawn of "services" until this benighted age.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/its-cheaper-for-you-and-more-profitable-for-us-in-1998-larry-ellison-predicted-the-world-we-live-in-today-where-you-pay-over-and-over-for-software-you-dont-own

wes Feb 16

@mttaggart I just came across this recent article about the 1990s "thin clients" that Oracle was pushing.

In 1998, Larry Ellison said we’d rent all our software, he was right

In 1998, Larry Ellison said we’d rent all our software, not own it, and he was right

TechRadar

James Tinmouth Feb 15

@mttaggart found 3 spindles of dvd-r's the other day, I'm gonna get archiving 😂

Taggart Feb 15

@tinmouth Finally my M-Disc writer makes sense

James Tinmouth Feb 15

@mttaggart had to go look that up! It's true none of my cd-rw's from the late 90s read anymore.

Galactic Stone Feb 15

@mttaggart Suddenly all that retro "obsolete" hardware isn't so niche and worthless. I have a stack of old laptops to cannibalize - enough to last a Linux lifetime.

Raymond Russell Feb 15

@galacticstone @mttaggart
Yeah, all those TV cash-for-gold adverts are gonna get dislodged by cash-for-RAM and cash-for-hdd's/sdd's

@raymierussell @galacticstone @mttaggart

Nicole Parsons Feb 16

The people funding the AI bubble are creating a profitable point of Chokepoint Capitalism.

Chips, memory, hard drives -- once placed in artificially short supply, ...

... when the AI Bubble bursts, they can hold the non-AI economy as hostage until they get their government bailout.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2023/02/17/the-worlds-most-vulnerable-supply-chain-impacts-all-supply-chains/

Monopolies & too few players -- a recipe for a crash & bailout.
https://www.riskhedge.com/post/the-next-big-AI-winners-are

The World’s Most Vulnerable Supply Chain Impacts All Supply Chains

The semiconductor supply chain is very vulnerable. China is unwilling to say they will not invade Taiwan, a critical choke point in the global semiconductor supply chain. Even worse, the chip supply chain affects all supply chains.

Forbes

@Npars01 @raymierussell @galacticstone @mttaggart

Levka Feb 16

Still true. Still vulnerable.

OutOfSpace - 不割席 Feb 16

@Npars01 @raymierussell @galacticstone @mttaggart
😯

Cy Feb 17

Wish I did. Could never afford much hardware, always wore it out until it broke.

CC: @[email protected]

Not a Spring Onion Feb 15

Open Source Enthusiasts Create Text Editor That Doesn't Require 32 GB RAM - Scientists Baffled

Phase 1: force AI adoption by removing other options to not use it

Phase 2: make computing unaffordable for the masses by buying up all stock of components, driving up demand while building datacenters.

Phase 3: further increase demand for and adoption of your cloud computing/AI datacenter by making people reliant on crappy cloud PCs/PCaaS devices with little horsepower to do much else

Phase 4: use telemetry/spyware in said datacenters to surveil/harvest data from every user of said cloud PCs and use it to serve hyper-targeted ads (everyone knows people love hyper-targeted ads) and send drone fleets to respond to/harass dissenters domestic terrorists

Phase 5: profit

Gabriel Feb 15

@tomcat
Hot take: if digital privacy is as unattainable as the people telling us to give up on it was, none of this would be necessary.
@mttaggart

vrek Feb 16

@tomcat @mttaggart back when I was a child, like in the 90s I had this idea of the future but not so orwellian. I imagined that most homes would eventually have a big powerful computer in a cliset/basement/attic and then have several like dumb terminals around that accessed that data. So like you have all the music you like on the central computer then you go in the kitchen and tell the kitchen terminal to play your favorite song.

Kinda like self-hosting but with basic input, screen, audio only

I support self-hosting

vrek Feb 16

@tomcat @mttaggart I do too, just didn't my 10 year old imagination.

ShadSterling Feb 16

@vrek @tomcat @mttaggart same, tho I imagined it including your household email server, and with the option to make your stuff accessible remotely. If only we’d organized society around enabling the many rather than around enriching the few

vrek Feb 16

@ShadSterling @tomcat @mttaggart exactly, I imagined it like electricity. Your power company doesn't care if you run a TV or a fridge. You would buy a certain amount of data/time for your central server, like a giant ups for your power company, and then just get all your media from there...

Violet Madder Feb 16

@tomcat @mttaggart

And everything ends up looking like Gaza. Yes. This is the plan.

Binary Large Octopus Feb 15

@mttaggart I hope this will help break the mental cycle that mandates the necessity of having to buy new stuff regularly instead of using what's already there up to its actual lifetime. That way, this would in the long term hurt companies who's business model relies on creating artificial demand instead of providing actually necessary products and services.

The Orange Theme Feb 15

@mttaggart I am so sick of these fucks.

Botolo Feb 15

@mttaggart I still have my Commodore 64. They will never trap me. 10 PRINT “C64 RULEZ” ; 20 GOTO 10 ; RUN #c64

@mttaggart argggghhh

@mttaggart
Wooo compute gouging 😑

lemgandi Feb 16

Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

@lemgandi This is actually malice! It's rapacious greed, the purest evil!

lemgandi Feb 16

@mttaggart Why not Both?

@lemgandi Then what's the point you're trying to make?

Ørum Feb 16

@lemgandi @mttaggart this sentence has given so many fucking assholes the benefit of the doubt.

lemgandi Feb 16

@oerum @mttaggart

I disagree. Both are equally reprehensible. The tactics of opposition may vary.

Carlos Solís Feb 16

Guess I'll have to be extra careful of my SSDs, chances are they might be the last ones I'll be able to own for the rest of the decade.

Jerry 🦙💝🦙Feb 16

@mttaggart cf express and dram prices are already skyrocketing. Hitting the photographers hard.

RuffLandings Feb 16

@mttaggart I look forward to an upcoming glut of YouTube content discussing home tape library robots.

The Turtle Feb 16

@mttaggart whaddya suppose they're gonna do when all those drives get old in a few years? Dump them in the ocean? Nope, they will go in big crates and get wrapped in saran wrap and sold in lots of 1000, to guys in industrial suburbs who will uncrate and sell them for thirty bucks each.

"Not good enough for AI, but good enough for you!"

The moment Samsung or Hitachi start selling 10-petabyte drives,all those little terabyte SSDs will suddenly be worth fuckshit except to normal users.

The Turtle Feb 16

@mttaggart i remember the days when guys would hand-edit the bad block tables on Seagate ST-225s and sell them for $100 because new ones were still $300 and nobody could afford ST-4096s. A whole cottage industry sprang up around keeping 225s around. A whole 20 meg 40 years ago. 20 meg was actually large enough for Windows 1.02 or Digital Research GEM or just fuckin' DOS and Multimate or WordStar.

Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd Feb 16

@the_turtle @mttaggart It gets sent into the shredder in the name of privacy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQoKFovvigI though this is a video by Google from 2013 and I dunno if they're still doing it now

How Google Protects Your Data

YouTube

@koakuma @the_turtle Even if they wanted to resell, the cost of logistics for such an operation would outstrip profits.

Into the dump they'll go. We haven't even begun imagining the e-waste of this absurd misadventure.

The Turtle Feb 16

@koakuma @mttaggart i am laughing very hard. I used to love the stories on birdsite about all the fun stuff guys would find on "properly wiped" drives discarded or sold in lots from datacenters, or just thrown out back in a dumpster at BestBuy.

...and they can monitor and alter the results the computing produces to their advantage. Or deny it completely to those they want to punish.

nieuemma Feb 16

@mttaggart I very much wish I had purchased a 4TB NVME drive when they were 230 USD, now that the one I wanted is 700+.

I also wish I had ordered my laptop with 32GB, instead of 16GB DDR5, when it was an 80 USD upgrade, rather than now costing 300+.

musing_sys🇨🇦Feb 16

@mttaggart That has been their stated intention, so I would not be surprised that’s where this is going. When’s that AI bubble gonna burst?

S★m V★rm★Feb 16

@mttaggart @briankrebs If this is true then RIP Apple/Acer/Dell's business model

Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd Feb 16

@mttaggart I wonder what would happen if the costs get too high to bear and people ended up... opting out entirely from computing

I mean it's not like you need computers to be able to grow a couple trees for food right

Luna :3

Feb 16

@koakuma @mttaggart most people have already done this, now they are just pushing away the few who are left. most tech companies dont care, phones and cloud subscriptions are more profitable anyway.

Luna :3

Feb 16

@mttaggart i genuinely think most tech companies would like to completely eliminate personal computers, and they have mostly succeeded. they make much more money if people buy phones that cost as much as computers and then pay a subscription for someone else to do their computing.

Dex Feb 16

@mttaggart I don't believe in this take, and I'm especially not a big fan of the conspiratorial language you're using to describe it. How does a large spike in demand for a monopolized industry give any indication that the goal is to move users over to cloud computing? What makes this different from the pandemic shortage, or the 2011 Japan earthquake? From my perspective, this takes away from a lot of the closer, very concrete problems AI is causing right now.

@threedollarchickenparm @mttaggart a few months ago Bezos said on an interview that in the future all workloads will be on the cloud. This doesn't prove all of them want or are planning and trying to kill personal computing without the cloud, but certainly some are.

https://youtu.be/s71nJQqzYRQ?t=3110

Dex Feb 16

@DiogoConstantino @mttaggart I'm going to assume you mean the interview described here, please correct me if you mean something else:

To me, Lex Luthor repeatedly referring to AWS in this segment tells me that he's thinking about data centres rather than personal computing. Amazon has consumer facing cloud products like Luna that could have been name dropped. Thats why the brewery metaphor gets so much attention. Every ChatGPT wrapper running their own data centre actually is turbo unsustainable!

I could see Amazon selling people on a subscription to a traditional laptop or desktop. We already have seen that with companies with Corsair and HP. But to me, the number of articles I see misinterpreting this interview screams of a propaganda campaign to make subscription hardware seem reasonable.

The Interview: From Amazon to Space — Jeff Bezos Talks Innovation, Progress and What’s Next

YouTube

@threedollarchickenparm @mttaggart I think it's.

@threedollarchickenparm @mttaggart I can see that too, but I can also see PC's becoming not much more than glorified dumb terminals that display what is computed on the cloud, and run workloads that companies don't want to pay for, or that just do some processing of data acquire by peripherals, or data to feed peripherals.

Eventually, AWS will f* their enterprise customers, but not before being useful to them while f* end consumers.

Dex Feb 16

@DiogoConstantino @mttaggart I welcome the difference in opinion on the future of computing, but there's little evidence that cloud-only hardware is the direction we're headed in right now. There's especially no evidence in the short term.

Subscription-based hardware should be the point of concern as it still erodes the consumers right to ownership, and it's already happening. Heck, PlayStation UK just announced an official avenue for leasing the PS5 three days ago.

Every mainstream news outlet focusing on the idea of cloud-only computing only makes subscription-based hardware seem relatively reasonable.

Also, treating this idea as a reality also takes away from conversations about the very real, concrete problems with AI. We're implying that the trillions of dollars being spent on creating a machine to replace workers is actually for a different (and I would argue less evil) purpose.

Nah, don't be that dystopian. It'll suck for sure, however they will still want to get rid of all of the old used ones on a regular basis...

@agowa338 Do you know what happens to these disks after they're used the way they get used in a data center?

It depends what they were used for. Some get trashed. But a surprisingly high amount gets sold off in bulk to companies that then repackage the pallets down into smaller bundles of e.g. 100 pcs. Then it gets sold to another that repackages in e.g. 10 pcs bundles which then often lands on ebay...

@agowa338 The ones used for training workloads are not usable after 1-2 years max. Anything fronting hot storage will be in a similar situation. Sure, some may be resold, but if they already have a shorter lifespan, the supply issue remains.

well as I said it for sure will suck. However it's not "as dystopian" as you said with being cut of from the means of computation.

Also don't forget to also keep an eye on China. As prices rise there will be more and more opportunities for new companies to enter the market (ones that don't have their factory processes optimised to keep faulty units per production cycle in check).

Same for GPUs the first "all china" GPUs should be purchasable in a few months

@agowa338 @mttaggart they use mostly enterprise disks that can't be used on consumer PC.