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Comment by LocalH | Hacker News Reader

Services that require a cloud connection without a compelling reason are rent-seekers. There's absolutely no reason why the client software can't do the calculations that the server is doing to "optimize" cutting, other than for the purpose of turning something into a subscription that most assuredly should not be as such.

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> There's absolutely no reason why the client software can't do the calculations that the server is doing to "optimize" cutting...

Well, there is one reason: the cloud is more powerful. A computationally heavy task can run locally, but if uploading to the cloud and sending the results back is 10x faster, most users would probably prefer that. However, the best way to solve that (IMO) is to by default do local computation and have a subscription for cloud access.

Given how much compute is available locally today (especially if your task is amenable to leveraging a GPU) there aren't a lot of consumer-level applications that can't run locally in an acceptable amount of time.

Nonsense. It doesn't take anything more than an old netbook to "optimize" a set of floats that were already arranged as a series of linked coordinates in a couple of seconds. The typical desktop can easily handle several thousands of points in less than the time it takes to punt them across the internet and back.

A full page PDF of text with a few thousand letters specified as TTF outlines prints in realtime on pretty much everything while being rasterized into far more data than the cutting instructions for a plotter with a knife, and Adobe isn't grabbing at wallets for the privilege of doing so.

The other reason is that “the cloud” is a big dongle in this case. It makes sure you have a subscription, pay your fees, and you can’t run away with software you never have. Also, it’s much easier for the vendor to manage the cloud-based software than on installed packages on your local matching.

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