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[–] 63 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way...

What's coming... is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them... and all the hardware is in forms that aren't going to be convertable into consumer devices.

What's going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade... Remember google Stadia, Luna etc...

People won't be buying PCs... they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content... governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that's a security risk they can't control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS's or firmware that can't be controlled.

Best of all it's super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month... and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts... you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you'll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.

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  • [–] 28 points 4 days ago (6 children)

    this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.

    i think more or less that’s it’s difficult to foresee what will happen in the next 5 years.

    what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”. it only takes a handful of poor decisions for a company to fail, and many more better decisions for it to succeed.

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  • [–] 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”.

    Well, I don't think people generally think that literally anymore. Nowadays what it ends up meaning is that if the company is such a monolith central to modern life, it can make the stupidest decisions imaginable and simply be "propped up" by sucking money out of our pockets.

    Less "They're too big to fail" and more "They won't let it fail, even if it should."

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    this is also very true.

    i do believe that the pendulum swings back and forth but at the moment it’s swinging in the direction of people who are inherently selfish (amongst many other things)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    I'll give up on technology before becoming dependent on the cloud. I'm set with what I have now for at least a decade, I'll downsize down to my last RPi or equivalent if I can't get components.

    I brought my 23 year old IBM x31 back to life last year just to see if I could, and it's happy to be dragged kicking and screaming until 2031, when I'm pretty sure it'll no longer be supported in the Linux kernel. I'll do it with the rest of my devices if I have to while cannibalizing components to keep others going.

    I can probably completely disconnect my network from the internet and live happily on the services I have running and my library card.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago

    this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.

    That's the neat part, your access can be dialed down. Oh you can't afford the normal plan... what about buying in 5 minute increments, what about with ads? They will be able to match you for what you deserve with your current earnings.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 days ago* (1 child)

    What you describe needs continued investment into datacenters, which will be a no go when the bubble pops. The hardware doesn't last forever (avg. life expectancy is somewhere around 6 years iirc), and running that hardware also isn't free at all.

    Add to that that you can nowadays run Cyberpunk 2077 on medium detail with 60 FPS on a freaking Android Phone with FEX and Proton, and personal computing is far from dead, regardless of what they want.

    Edit: I'd rather expect mainboards that make HBM available for consumer PCs to pop up, and that hardware for personal inference drops in price dramatically.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago

    At that point you connect your phone to a screen and use that to handle what is needed for paying bills and schoolwork instead of yet another subscription. It's after the AI bubble pops, so Greatest Depression time and nobody got spare cash for more services.

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