171–180 of 407 posts
When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available). I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.
This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that. What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?
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"The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet" https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208
Remember when AOL bought Time Warner? I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.
2010s ATT leadership was something else.
I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.
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I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is. The democratization of technology was something that had the power to break down class barriers. Anyone could go get cheap, off the shelf hardware, a book, and write useful software & sell it. It became a way to take back the means of production. Computing being accessible and affordable for everyone = working class power. That is why its backsliding. Tho…
Arguably Google and others like them would not even exist without access to cheap off the shelf hardware in their early days.
Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.
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I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project. Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better price…
Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho. Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer).…
[1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why...
I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals…
Every day I hate AI and big tech more and more. Just when I think I couldn’t hate them anymore, they find a way.