7 ms·

> I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere... One could argue that this period was just a brief fluke. Perso

> I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere... One could argue that this period was just a brief fluke. Personal computers really took off only in the 1990s, web 2.0 happened in the mid-2000s. Now, for the average person, 95%+ of screen time boils down to using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud".

btown 11mo ago
Even the most popular games (with few exceptions) present as relatively dumb terminals that need constant connectivity to sync every activity to a mainframe - not necessarily because it's an MMO or multiplayer game, but because it's the industry standard way to ensure fairness. And by fairness, of course, I mean the optimization of enforcing "grindiness" as a mechanism to sell lootboxes and premium subscriptions. And AI just further normalizes the need for connectivity; cloud models are likely to improve faster than local models, for both technical and business reasons. They've got the premium-subscriptions model down. I shudder to think what happens when OpenAI begins hiring/subsuming-the-knowledge-of "revenue optimization analysts" from the AAA gaming world as a way to boost revenue. But hey, at least you still need humans, at some level, if your paperclip optimizer is told to find ways to get humans to spend money on "a sense of pride and accomplishment." [0] We do not live in a utopia. [0] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-most-downvoted-comment-on-reddit https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-mo... - https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?st=JH2MUORV&sh=5997c5a5 https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
- throw23920 11mo ago
  I imagine there are plenty of indie single-player games that work just fine offline. You lose cloud saves and achievements, but everything else still works.
pksebben 11mo ago
That 'average' is doing a lot of work to obfuscate the landscape. Open source continues to grow (indicating a robust ecosystem of individuals who use their computers for local work) and more importantly, the 'average' looks like it does not necessarily due to a reduction in local use, but to an explosion of users that did not previously exist (mobile first, SAAS customers, etc.) The thing we do need to be careful about is regulatory capture. We could very well end up with nothing but monolithic centralized systems simply because it's made illegal to distribute, use, and share open models. They hinted quite strongly that they wanted to do this with deepseek. There may even be a case to be made that at some point in the future, small local models will outperform monoliths - if distributed training becomes cheap enough, or if we find an alternative to backprop that allows models to learn as they infer (like a more developed forward-forward or something like it), we may see models that do better simply because they aren't a large centralized organism behind a walled garden. I'll grant that this is a fairly polyanna take and represents the best possible outcome but it's not outlandishly fantastic - and there is good reason to believe that any system based on a robust decentralized architecture would be more resilient to problems like platform enshittification and overdeveloped censorship. At the end of the day, it's not important what the 'average' user is doing, so long as there are enough non-average users pushing the ball forward on the important stuff.
- idiotsecant 11mo ago
  I can't imagine a universe where a small mind with limited computing resources has an advantage against a datacenter mind, no matter the architecture.
  - bee_rider 11mo ago
    The small mind could have an advantage if it is closer or more trustworthy to users. It only has to be good enough to do what we want. In the extreme, maybe inference becomes cheap enough that we ask “why do I have to wake up the laptop’s antenna?”
    - galaxyLogic 11mo ago
jayd16 11mo ago
I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute. Also, is percentage of screentime the relevant metric? We moved TV consumption to the PC, does that take away from PCs? Many apps moved to the web but that's basically just streamed code to be run in a local VM. Is that a dumb terminal? It's not exactly local compute independent...
- kamaal 11mo ago
  Nah, your parent comment has a valid point. Nearly entirety of the use cases of computers today don't involve running things on a 'personal computer' in any way. In fact these days, every one kind of agrees as little as hosting a spreadsheet on your computer is a bad idea. Cloud, where everything is backed up is the way to go.
  - jayd16 11mo ago
    But again, that's conflating web connected or even web required with mainframe compute and it's just not the same. PC was never 'no web'. No one actually 'counted every screw in their garage' as the PC killer app. It was always the web.
    - kamaal 11mo ago
      In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back. This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away. In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.
      - galaxyLogic 11mo ago
        It's also interesting that computing capacity is no longer discussed as instructions per second, but as Giga Watts.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud" Our personal devices are far from thin clients.
- freedomben 11mo ago
  Depends on the app, and the personal device. Mobile devices are increasingly thin clients. Of course hardware-wise they are fully capable personal computers, but ridiculous software-imposed limitations make that increasingly difficult.
- Cheer2171 11mo ago
  But that is what they are mostly used for.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    On phones, most of the compute is used to render media files and games, and make pretty animated UIs. The text content of a weather app is trivial compared to the UI. Same with many web pages. Desktop apps use local compute, but that's more a limitation of latency and network bandwidth than any fundamental need to keep things local. Security and privacy also matter to some people. But not to most.
- bigyabai 11mo ago
  Speak for yourself. Many people don't daily-drive anything more advanced than an iPad.
  - eru 11mo ago
    IPads are incredibly advanced. Though I guess you mean they don't use anything that requires more sophistication from the user (or something like that)?
  - boomlinde 11mo ago
    The Ipad is not a thin client, is it?
positron26 11mo ago
Makes me want to unplug and go back to offline social media. That's a joke. The dominant effect was networked applications getting developed, enabling community, not a shift back to client terminals.
- grumbel 11mo ago
  Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. You only went online to download and send messages, but could then go offline and read them in an app of your choice. Web2.0 discarded the protocol approach and turned your computer into a thin client that does little more than render webapps that require you to be permanently online.
  - cesarb 11mo ago
    > Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. There was also FidoNet with offline message readers.
  - positron26 11mo ago
    > called Usenet and worked offline People must have been pretty smart back then. They had to know to hang up the phone to check for new messages.
seemaze 11mo ago
I think that speaks more to the fact that software ate the world, than locality of compute. It's a breadth first, depth last game.
wolpoli 11mo ago
The personal computing era happened partly because, while there were demands for computing, users' connectivity to the internet were poor or limited and so they couldn't just connect to the mainframe. We now have high speed internet access everywhere - I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.
- almostnormal 11mo ago
  Centralized only became mainstream when everything started to be offered "for free". When it was buy or pay recurrently more often the choice was to buy.
  - troupo 11mo ago
    There are no longer options to buy. Everything is a subscription
    - rightbyte 11mo ago
      Between mobilephone service including SMS and an ISP service which usually include mail I don't see the need for any hosted service. There are FOSS alternatives for about everything for hobbyist and consumer use.
      - api 11mo ago
        There are no FOSS alternatives for consumer use unless the consumer is an IT pro or a developer. Regular people can’t use most open source software without help. Some of it, like Linux desktop stuff, has a nice enough UI that they can use it casually but they can’t install or configure or fix it. Making software that is polished and reliable and automatic enough that non computer people can use it is a lot harder than just making software. I’d say it’s usually many times harder.
        rightbyte 11mo ago
        I don't think that is a software issue but a social issue nowadays. FOSS alternatives have become quite OK in my opinion. If computers came with Debian, Firefox and Libre Office preinstalled instead of only W11, Edge and with some Office 365 trail, the relative difficulty would be gone I think. Same thing with most IT departments only dealing with Windows in professional settings. If you even are allowed to use something different you are on your own.
torginus 11mo ago
I dislike the view of individuals as passive sufferers of the preferences of big corporations. You can and people do self-host stuff that big tech wants pushed into the cloud. You can have a NAS, a private media player, Home Assistant has been making waves in the home automation sphere. Turns out people don't like buying overpriced devices only to have to pay a $20 subscription, and find out their devices don't talk to each other, upload footage inside of their homes to the cloud, and then get bricked once the company selling them goes under and turns of the servers.
- __alexs 11mo ago
  You can dislike it but it doesn't make it less true and getting truer.
- jhanschoo 11mo ago
  You can likewise host models if you so choose. Still the vast majority of people use online services both for personal computing or for LLMs.
- api 11mo ago
  Things are moving this way because it’s convenient and easy and most people today are time poor.
  - torginus 11mo ago
    I think it has more to do with the 'common wisdom' dictating that this is the way to do it, as 'we've always done it like this'. Which might even be true, since cloud based software might offer conveniences that local substitutes don't. However this is not an inherent property of cloud software, its just some effort needs to go into a local alternative. That's why I mentioned Home Assistant - a couple years ago, smart home stuff was all the rage, and not only was it expensive, the backend ran in the cloud, and you usually paid a subscription for it. Nowadays, you can buy a local Home Assistant hub (or make one using a Pi) and have all your stuff only connect to a local server. The same is true for routers, NAS, media sharing and streaming to TV etc. You do need to get technical a bit, but you don't need to do anything you couldn't figure out by following a 20 minute Youtube video.
api 11mo ago
There are more PCs and serious home computing setups today than there were back then. There are just way way way more casual computer users. The people who only use phones and tablets or only use laptops as dumb terminals are not the people who were buying PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, or they were they were not serious users. They were mostly non-computer-users. Non-computer-users have become casual consumer level computer users because the tech went mainstream, but there's still a massive serious computer user market. I know many people with home labs or even small cloud installations in their basements, but there are about as many of them as serious PC users with top-end PC setups in the late 1980s.
npilk 11mo ago
But for a broader definition of "personal computer", the number of computers we have has only continued to skyrocket - phones, watches, cars, TVs, smart speakers, toaster ovens, kids' toys... I'm with GP - I imagine a future when capable AI models become small and cheap enough to run locally in all kinds of contexts. https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents
- seniorThrowaway 11mo ago
  Depending on how you are defining AI models, they already do. Think of the $15 security camera that can detect people and objects. That is AI model driven. LLM's are another story, but smaller, less effective ones can and do already run at the edge.
WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
I guess we're in the kim-1 era of local models, or is that already done?
MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
I look forward to a possibility where the dumb terminal is less centralized in the cloud, and more how it seems to work in the expanse. They all have hand terminals that seem to automatically interact with the systems and networks of the ship/station/building they're in. Linking up with local resources, and likely having default permissions set to restrict weird behavior. Not sure it could really work like that IRL, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it. It'd make our always-online devices make a little more sense.

btown 11mo ago

Even the most popular games (with few exceptions) present as relatively dumb terminals that need constant connectivity to sync every activity to a mainframe - not necessarily because it's an MMO or multiplayer game, but because it's the industry standard way to ensure fairness. And by fairness, of course, I mean the optimization of enforcing "grindiness" as a mechanism to sell lootboxes and premium subscriptions. And AI just further normalizes the need for connectivity; cloud models are likely to improve faster than local models, for both technical and business reasons. They've got the premium-subscriptions model down. I shudder to think what happens when OpenAI begins hiring/subsuming-the-knowledge-of "revenue optimization analysts" from the AAA gaming world as a way to boost revenue. But hey, at least you still need humans, at some level, if your paperclip optimizer is told to find ways to get humans to spend money on "a sense of pride and accomplishment." [0] We do not live in a utopia. [0] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-most-downvoted-comment-on-reddit https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-mo... - https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b/seriously_i_paid_80_to_have_vader_locked/dppum98/?st=JH2MUORV&sh=5997c5a5 https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

throw23920 11mo ago
I imagine there are plenty of indie single-player games that work just fine offline. You lose cloud saves and achievements, but everything else still works.

pksebben 11mo ago

That 'average' is doing a lot of work to obfuscate the landscape. Open source continues to grow (indicating a robust ecosystem of individuals who use their computers for local work) and more importantly, the 'average' looks like it does not necessarily due to a reduction in local use, but to an explosion of users that did not previously exist (mobile first, SAAS customers, etc.) The thing we do need to be careful about is regulatory capture. We could very well end up with nothing but monolithic centralized systems simply because it's made illegal to distribute, use, and share open models. They hinted quite strongly that they wanted to do this with deepseek. There may even be a case to be made that at some point in the future, small local models will outperform monoliths - if distributed training becomes cheap enough, or if we find an alternative to backprop that allows models to learn as they infer (like a more developed forward-forward or something like it), we may see models that do better simply because they aren't a large centralized organism behind a walled garden. I'll grant that this is a fairly polyanna take and represents the best possible outcome but it's not outlandishly fantastic - and there is good reason to believe that any system based on a robust decentralized architecture would be more resilient to problems like platform enshittification and overdeveloped censorship. At the end of the day, it's not important what the 'average' user is doing, so long as there are enough non-average users pushing the ball forward on the important stuff.

idiotsecant 11mo ago
I can't imagine a universe where a small mind with limited computing resources has an advantage against a datacenter mind, no matter the architecture.
- bee_rider 11mo ago
  The small mind could have an advantage if it is closer or more trustworthy to users. It only has to be good enough to do what we want. In the extreme, maybe inference becomes cheap enough that we ask “why do I have to wake up the laptop’s antenna?”
  - galaxyLogic 11mo ago

jayd16 11mo ago

I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute. Also, is percentage of screentime the relevant metric? We moved TV consumption to the PC, does that take away from PCs? Many apps moved to the web but that's basically just streamed code to be run in a local VM. Is that a dumb terminal? It's not exactly local compute independent...

kamaal 11mo ago
Nah, your parent comment has a valid point. Nearly entirety of the use cases of computers today don't involve running things on a 'personal computer' in any way. In fact these days, every one kind of agrees as little as hosting a spreadsheet on your computer is a bad idea. Cloud, where everything is backed up is the way to go.
- jayd16 11mo ago
  But again, that's conflating web connected or even web required with mainframe compute and it's just not the same. PC was never 'no web'. No one actually 'counted every screw in their garage' as the PC killer app. It was always the web.
  - kamaal 11mo ago
    In time Mainframes of this age will make a come back. This whole idea that you can connect lots of cheap low capacity boxes and drive down compute costs is already going away. In time people will go back to thinking compute as a variable of time taken to finish processing. That's the paradigm in the cloud compute world- you are billed for the TIME you use the box. Eventually people will just want to use something bigger that gets things done faster, hence you don't have to rent them for long.
    - galaxyLogic 11mo ago
      It's also interesting that computing capacity is no longer discussed as instructions per second, but as Giga Watts.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud" Our personal devices are far from thin clients.

freedomben 11mo ago
Depends on the app, and the personal device. Mobile devices are increasingly thin clients. Of course hardware-wise they are fully capable personal computers, but ridiculous software-imposed limitations make that increasingly difficult.
Cheer2171 11mo ago
But that is what they are mostly used for.
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
  On phones, most of the compute is used to render media files and games, and make pretty animated UIs. The text content of a weather app is trivial compared to the UI. Same with many web pages. Desktop apps use local compute, but that's more a limitation of latency and network bandwidth than any fundamental need to keep things local. Security and privacy also matter to some people. But not to most.
bigyabai 11mo ago
Speak for yourself. Many people don't daily-drive anything more advanced than an iPad.
- eru 11mo ago
  IPads are incredibly advanced. Though I guess you mean they don't use anything that requires more sophistication from the user (or something like that)?
- boomlinde 11mo ago
  The Ipad is not a thin client, is it?

positron26 11mo ago

Makes me want to unplug and go back to offline social media. That's a joke. The dominant effect was networked applications getting developed, enabling community, not a shift back to client terminals.

grumbel 11mo ago
Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. You only went online to download and send messages, but could then go offline and read them in an app of your choice. Web2.0 discarded the protocol approach and turned your computer into a thin client that does little more than render webapps that require you to be permanently online.
- cesarb 11mo ago
  > Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. There was also FidoNet with offline message readers.
- positron26 11mo ago
  > called Usenet and worked offline People must have been pretty smart back then. They had to know to hang up the phone to check for new messages.

seemaze 11mo ago

I think that speaks more to the fact that software ate the world, than locality of compute. It's a breadth first, depth last game.

wolpoli 11mo ago

The personal computing era happened partly because, while there were demands for computing, users' connectivity to the internet were poor or limited and so they couldn't just connect to the mainframe. We now have high speed internet access everywhere - I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.

almostnormal 11mo ago
Centralized only became mainstream when everything started to be offered "for free". When it was buy or pay recurrently more often the choice was to buy.
- troupo 11mo ago
  There are no longer options to buy. Everything is a subscription
  - rightbyte 11mo ago
    Between mobilephone service including SMS and an ISP service which usually include mail I don't see the need for any hosted service. There are FOSS alternatives for about everything for hobbyist and consumer use.
    - api 11mo ago
      There are no FOSS alternatives for consumer use unless the consumer is an IT pro or a developer. Regular people can’t use most open source software without help. Some of it, like Linux desktop stuff, has a nice enough UI that they can use it casually but they can’t install or configure or fix it. Making software that is polished and reliable and automatic enough that non computer people can use it is a lot harder than just making software. I’d say it’s usually many times harder.
      - rightbyte 11mo ago
        I don't think that is a software issue but a social issue nowadays. FOSS alternatives have become quite OK in my opinion. If computers came with Debian, Firefox and Libre Office preinstalled instead of only W11, Edge and with some Office 365 trail, the relative difficulty would be gone I think. Same thing with most IT departments only dealing with Windows in professional settings. If you even are allowed to use something different you are on your own.

torginus 11mo ago

I dislike the view of individuals as passive sufferers of the preferences of big corporations. You can and people do self-host stuff that big tech wants pushed into the cloud. You can have a NAS, a private media player, Home Assistant has been making waves in the home automation sphere. Turns out people don't like buying overpriced devices only to have to pay a $20 subscription, and find out their devices don't talk to each other, upload footage inside of their homes to the cloud, and then get bricked once the company selling them goes under and turns of the servers.

__alexs 11mo ago
You can dislike it but it doesn't make it less true and getting truer.
jhanschoo 11mo ago
You can likewise host models if you so choose. Still the vast majority of people use online services both for personal computing or for LLMs.
api 11mo ago
Things are moving this way because it’s convenient and easy and most people today are time poor.
- torginus 11mo ago
  I think it has more to do with the 'common wisdom' dictating that this is the way to do it, as 'we've always done it like this'. Which might even be true, since cloud based software might offer conveniences that local substitutes don't. However this is not an inherent property of cloud software, its just some effort needs to go into a local alternative. That's why I mentioned Home Assistant - a couple years ago, smart home stuff was all the rage, and not only was it expensive, the backend ran in the cloud, and you usually paid a subscription for it. Nowadays, you can buy a local Home Assistant hub (or make one using a Pi) and have all your stuff only connect to a local server. The same is true for routers, NAS, media sharing and streaming to TV etc. You do need to get technical a bit, but you don't need to do anything you couldn't figure out by following a 20 minute Youtube video.

api 11mo ago

There are more PCs and serious home computing setups today than there were back then. There are just way way way more casual computer users. The people who only use phones and tablets or only use laptops as dumb terminals are not the people who were buying PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, or they were they were not serious users. They were mostly non-computer-users. Non-computer-users have become casual consumer level computer users because the tech went mainstream, but there's still a massive serious computer user market. I know many people with home labs or even small cloud installations in their basements, but there are about as many of them as serious PC users with top-end PC setups in the late 1980s.

npilk 11mo ago

But for a broader definition of "personal computer", the number of computers we have has only continued to skyrocket - phones, watches, cars, TVs, smart speakers, toaster ovens, kids' toys... I'm with GP - I imagine a future when capable AI models become small and cheap enough to run locally in all kinds of contexts. https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents

seniorThrowaway 11mo ago
Depending on how you are defining AI models, they already do. Think of the $15 security camera that can detect people and objects. That is AI model driven. LLM's are another story, but smaller, less effective ones can and do already run at the edge.

WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago

I guess we're in the kim-1 era of local models, or is that already done?

MSFT_Edging 11mo ago

I look forward to a possibility where the dumb terminal is less centralized in the cloud, and more how it seems to work in the expanse. They all have hand terminals that seem to automatically interact with the systems and networks of the ship/station/building they're in. Linking up with local resources, and likely having default permissions set to restrict weird behavior. Not sure it could really work like that IRL, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it. It'd make our always-online devices make a little more sense.