Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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> Yep. To the point it makes you wonder if the "AI bubble" is totally misunderstood. It's less "AI bubble" and much more "Monopolize computing". Buy up computers until most companies have no choice but to use cloud.

Unless prices get categorically higher, I don't think that's likely. Like 10x more than it is now.

Companies were buying computers for all their employees in the 90's, where a mediocre laptop could pretty easily cost two grand in 1990s money. My mom just bought a middle-of-the-road laptop for about a thousand dollars in today-money, and that was a consumer buying it; companies can generally spend more. "No choice but to use the cloud" feels like it's way too strong of a conclusion to draw.

I think they'll keep cheap consumer electronics for the most part. Not as cheap as this last decade, but still cheap. They just want to control the entire software chain from boot to network-accessed resources.

Are you human? Then you must verify it from a "trusted computer", preferably with your driver's license. Gets governments and corporations as much information as they want, along with a guarantee that you can't "steal" their content and can't avoid their ads.

Oh I don’t disagree with that, I was responding to the very specific point made by OP about companies being “forced” to use the cloud.

I have no doubt that Google and Microsoft will increasingly do things to force us to provide more data so they can do awful things to us.

Cloud wasn't sold as a performance thing. It's more about outsourcing the maintenance (let AWS replace a dead PSU at 4AM) or for the promise of scaling tasks to infinity for dynamic demand (web hosting).

You might see interest in thin-client plays for the same reason. They'd like to replace the local desktop with throwaway $50 terminals because it's easier to deploy on a standardized VM image and not have to replace dead SSDs and CPU fans.

Workstation tasks that require low-latency and high performance seem to stay local because the performance is simply not there.

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