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whether we want unobservable ungovernable far off machines running the future forever, or whether we want a future where actual people can compute & see what ha
by rektide 4y ago
whether we want unobservable ungovernable far off machines running the future forever, or whether we want a future where actual people can compute & see what happens seems to matter. the numbers may perhaps stack up to suborn PC needs to industrial computing needs now, but is that the future anyone should actually want? should the invisible hand of capital be the primary thing humanity should try to align to?
and where is the growth potential? is the industrial need going to become greatly newly empowered & helpful to this planet, to us? will it deliver & share the value potential out there? PC may be a smaller factor today, but i for one am incredibly fantastically excited to imagine a potential future 10 years from now where people start to PC again, albeit in a different way.
individual PCs have no chance. it's why the cloud has won. on-demand access wherever you are, consistent experience across devices is incredibly incredibly convenient. but networks of PCs that work well together is exciting, and we've only so very recently started emerging the capability to have nice easy to manage ops/automated multi-machine personal-computing. we've only recently emerged to maturity where a better, competitive personal computing is really conceivable.
it's been the alpha linux geeks learning how to compute and industrial players learning how to compute, and the invisible hand has been fat happy & plump from it, but imo there's such a huge potential here to re-open computing to persons, to create compelling interesting differently-capable sovereign/owned computing systems, that are free from so many of the small tatters & deprevations & enshittifications that cloud- that doing everyting on other people's computers as L-Users- unnerringly drops on us. we should & could be a more powerful, more technically-cultural culture, and i think we've severely underrated how much subtle progress there's been to make that a much less awful, specialized, painful, time-consuming, low-availability, disconnected effort than it used to be.