@fromjason Every single part of this. Yes.
> We'll see a mainstream politician and/or tech elite call for outlawing local computing. This is big tech's end goal—position AI (LLM, agentic, or whatever buzzword of the time) as critical infrastructure needed to run our software, leverage fear tactics into regulatory capture, then, the long game is to work towards a cloud-tethered world where local compute is a thing of the past. Thin clients with a hefty egress invoice each month. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) will become the Comcast of computational power.
The artificial scarcity of DRAM and skyrocketing hardware prices are serving this goal too; especially since this whole thing is Scam Altman’s doing. I was being facetious when I first started saying that we are seeing the end of affordable, powerful home computing, but I fear that this is becoming truer every day.
Web-based document editing, cloud file storage, and media streaming have made this the case for a number of years already for the vast majority of people’s use cases. The advent and (alarmingly quick and quiet) acceptance of usable, cloud-based game streaming is a terrifying sign of what’s to come. Why would you spend $1200+ on a gaming PC when you can stream one from the cloud for just a few bucks per month? AI is just the natural progression of this, particularly the forced usage and fear-mongering.
The “cloud-native” craze may be turning around, but I think we’re are so used to cloud-based tools that we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s truly too late.
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