4 ms·
I can't think about the cloud without immediately grasping its huge downsides: absolutely no privacy at all, data lock-in, forced migration, forced obsolescence
by api 4y ago
I can't think about the cloud without immediately grasping its huge downsides: absolutely no privacy at all, data lock-in, forced migration, forced obsolescence, and things just vanishing if the rent is not continuously paid.
I have files on my computer from the 1990s and 2000s. If we lived in the cloud-centric world those projects that I did back then would probably be gone forever since I'm not sure I would have kept paying rent on them.
There's also no retrocomputing in the cloud. I can start DOSBox on my laptop and run software from the DOS era. That will never be possible in the cloud. When it's gone it's gone. When a SaaS company upgrades, there is no way to get the old version back. If they go out of business your work might be gone forever, not just because you don't have the data but because the software has ceased to exist in any runnable form.
It all seems like an ugly dystopia to me. I don't think I'm alone here, and I think these things are also factors that keep development and a lot of other things local in spite of the advantages of "infinite scalability" and such.
I'm not saying these things are unsolvable. Maybe a "cloud 2.0" architecture could offer solutions like the ability to pull things down and archive them along with the code required to access them and spin up copies of programs on demand. Maybe things like homomorphic encryption or secure enclaves (the poor man's equivalent) can help with privacy.
... or maybe having a supercomputer on my lap is fine and we don't need this. Instead what we need is better desktop and mobile OSes.
- gabereiser 4y agoI agree with you that a cloud 2.0 architecture is needed. I don’t agree with you that you can’t run DOSBox in the cloud. You totally can. In fact, you can containerize a dosbox app and forward the output over websockets or tcp. I have files from 1990s and 2000s as well. I keep backups, as everyone should when dealing with cloud/internet/not-my-machine.
- api 4y agoI can run DOSBox in the cloud. What I can't do is run an old version of Google Docs, Salesforce, Notion, or Alexa. I can run old commercial software that I paid for in DOSBox or a VM because I have the software, even if it's just in binary form. I have the software and the environment and I can run it myself. That's the difference. The cloud is far more closed than closed-source commercial software. I can also run the software with privacy. When I run something locally there's nobody with back-end access that can monitor every single thing I do, steal my data, scan my data to feed into ad profile generators or sell to data brokers, etc.
- imachine1980_ 4y agoi think yu are mixing saas whit cloud you ca run fireckraker functions, and old verion of rocky linux, but is 100 times more complex than pay for the sistems and the cloud provider encourges this propietry tools because of this omthing similar will be dinamo or firbase which are pay as you go saas
- furyofantares 4y ago> I have files on my computer from the 1990s and 2000s. If we lived in the cloud-centric world those projects that I did back then would probably be gone forever since I'm not sure I would have kept paying rent on them. On the other hand, I don't have any of my 90s/2000s projects because I would occasionally lose a hard drive before transferring everything to my new machine, or would occasionally transfer not-everything and then later regret it. I guess dropbox isn't "the cloud", but I haven't lost anything since I started paying for dropbox when it came out, and things wouldn't just vanish if the rent is not continuously paid. I sure wouldn't mind more cloud services that improve and add to the local computing experience rather than deliver themselves only through a browser and a web connection.
- api 4y agoWith local stuff you can lose it. With cloud you will lose it eventually if it's dependent on any form of SaaS that you don't control.
- togs 4y agoI used to agree about paying rent for my old files until I realized that it costs me anyways to ensure those files are available over a long time.