6 ms·

Jeff Bezos hopes that you'll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud

42 points by _____k 9mo ago

cjbenedikt 9mo ago
Hmmm...I'm not technical well versed but doesn't it sound a bit like the initial Chrome idea???
Jigsy 9mo ago
Considering how countries are trying to push things like Chat Control, I can see them having a hard-on for ideas like this. "You _must_ use a Cloud computer in order to make sure you're not doing anything illegal." Amazon et al. will have to pry my tech from my cold, dead hands.
- purplecats 9mo ago
  yes, you are an outlier, and one day (presumably <50 years) your hands will be cold and dead, along with your representation in the holdout resistance movement. you must make a bigger impact than standing your (individual) ground
  - Jigsy 9mo ago
    Well, I'm almost 40, so I'm hoping I will be dead by then.
  - wolvoleo 9mo ago
    I've given up trying to improve society. They keep voting for the worst idiots they can, buying from the worst exploitative businesses etc. Most people are acting against their own interest and I'm not going to change that. I'm just trying to isolate myself now from these toxic developments. If society falls into techno fascism after I'm gone, so be it. They wanted it. While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc.
    - InexSquirrel 9mo ago
      I could be wrong, but maybe you trying to shield yourself from these things also cuts you off from the good that's happening? There's a lot of bad things going on - but (and not saying this as justification) - there always has. There's always some power hungry person that claws their way to a position where they can benefit themselves at the expense of others. But the majority of people want to have good, peaceful lives with a sense of community and connection. Build things. Make art. Laugh. Grow and learn. Wonder about what could be, and build futures towards that. Don't forsake them because of the all of the bad stuff that gets shoved in your face every day. It's a dis-service to yourself and the life you have, and it weakens the people and groups that have do have the energy to stand up to not-so-good actors. If you're _happy_ being isolated then definitely go do that, but don't cut yourself off because you're only fed bad news everyday.
      - wolvoleo 9mo ago
        Oh I do, I just participate less online. I go to more local events. But I see there that more people tend to disconnect online too (lgbt community etc). I just don't follow the mainstream news much anymore. I still like HN and some other tech sites.
    - wolvesechoes 9mo ago
      > I've given up trying to improve society. And what have you done before giving up? > While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc. It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you.
      - wolvoleo 9mo ago
        > And what have you done before giving up? I was a member of a political party (socialist). And I would go into discussions with the extreme-right fascists in my country (which currently have about 30% of votes). But there is no point. They don't care about facts or reason, it's more like a religion. They get themselves all worked up about internet memes about things that don't even happen and it's impossible to convince them of reality. I think they just enjoy being rabiately angry. In any case, I don't need that negativity in my life anymore. > It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you. I know the $10 hammer thing. But right now the government isn't the biggest threat here, surveillance capitalism is. Google and Meta don't come after us with hammers. The government threat is emerging (chatcontrol etc). I think for that opsec is much more important anyway.
Finnucane 9mo ago
The year of Linux on the Desktop will happen because it will be the only choice for the desktop.
wolvoleo 9mo ago
Biggest cloud vendor wants everyone to subscribe to his services. Well yeah of course. He has to say that, it's literally his job. But no for me never. I hate cloud.
- bigbadfeline 9mo ago
  > I hate cloud. It doesn't matter, the choice is being removed from the market. The clouders are already front running and scalping the hardware retail, just like scalpers were doing to GPUs during crypto. Today's excuse is AI but it's the same process, just on an industrial scale - the clouders buy in bulk at low prices, create shortages and exorbitant retail pricing, which forces you to buy from them, providing them with nice profits. The only difference from vanilla scalping is, they sell the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear. The process is unstoppable without legislative intervention, it works with or without the presence of inflation - front running assures the scalping of retail. The high tariffs on Chinese hardware and the draconian restrictions on selling them gear for semiconductor manufacturing remove the only natural remedy - competition. On the other hand, the existing semiconductor manufacturers are highly incentivized to sell in bulk so some leave the retail market altogether to become exclusive suppliers to big cloud and big OEM - e.g. Micron.
  - general1465 9mo ago
    Which is going to work, only if people will buy into it. However if they won't (see Google Stadia or Micrslop's crying about people refusing Copilot) then whole thing will just implode into a lot of cheap hardware everywhere.
- aldarion 9mo ago
  I don't use cloud at all. Basically all of my backups are on external hard drives.
xg15 9mo ago
Meanwhile in the cloud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620835
xvxvx 9mo ago
Called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511477 You'll own nothing and like it. Not even your 'own' data. Everything sitting on someone else's server, free to access by whichever government agency feels like it. This is like communism x1000.
- biglyburrito 9mo ago
  Don't call this communism, when it's simply end-game capitalism.
- solid_fuel 9mo ago
  > This is like communism x1000. But it is, in fact, capitalism x1
- mikestew 9mo ago
  Mmm, this is nothing like communism, by any definition I’m aware of. Now, “$ADJECTIVE capitalism”, such as “late-stage capitalism”, that I can go along with.
  - cudla100 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- RedComet 9mo ago
  Strange claiming you "called it', people were saying this far earlier than 8 days ago.
JohnFen 9mo ago
I can't imagine a circumstance where I would do that. It's simply a nonstarter. I need to remain in complete control of my machines, and I am not in control of anything in the cloud.
- InexSquirrel 9mo ago
  Same feeling here, and I'm already getting frustrated with Windows pushing their crap into my OS. Definitely don't want even more of that. Beyond work I only use the PC for gaming and watching movies - so really if the only option was 'it has to be in the cloud', then my position becomes "well I guess I don't really play games any more". Not the worst thing. But whatever. Just because Jeff wants that, doesn't mean it will be so. And like who cares what he thinks? The only hat he ever wears is "how do I make more money", not "how do I ensure people live good lives and enjoy themselves".
webdevver 9mo ago
if everyone had symmetric gigabit, this would be a no-brainer. imagine having auto-scaling CPUs, auto-scaling RAM, etc - it would incentivise some cool OS architecture (yes yes, privacy issues aside etc.) most of the time i'm doomscrolling, but every now and then you wanna play with linux, or llvm, or some VM cluster. i bought a beefy rig for these 1% events in my life, and the rest of the time its doing basically nothing. seems a real waste.
biglyburrito 9mo ago
lol absolutely never.
kotaKat 9mo ago
The last time I tried this Microsoft killed my CloudPC trial not even 24 hours after starting it, wiping out the initial work I'd been doing in the computer I was renting. So, uh. Yeah. I'll get right back on that "cloud PC" thing.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Of course, cloud is the new timesharing.
wormius 9mo ago
Bloody rentierists. This is what I've been realizing more and more as this "AI" push combined with rising consumer hardware prices. IMO this is an intentional war on consumers to force them into being digital serfs (like MS and Sun and all the others wanted back in the day). Mainframes->Minis (and mainframes)->Micro/PC->Cloud(and back we go to centralization). You will own nothing and be happy.
SvenL 9mo ago
Well, at least for gaming It worked for me quite well with GeForce NOW. I have a MacBook can play here and there some games I like - as a casual gamer it’s fine. I wouldn’t bother to maintain a gaming PC for the casual gaming sessions I have. In this sense - yes, I gave up my non existing gaming PC to rent. To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. (I know Microsoft had this and it was an amazing idea) For doing the non standard stuff like gaming/resource intensive development stuff I could rent a cloud pc.
- mmmlinux 9mo ago
  Apple could do this if they wanted to. Hey Apple, Put the Pro back in the iPhone Pro. Give me a dock and and macOS in docked mode.
  - general1465 9mo ago
    30% App Store fee. Not gonna happen.
  - SvenL 9mo ago
    I would love that. For the things I do on my phone the hardware is so oversized - it’s really ridiculous. It’s definitely capable of running desktop things. Most of the apps out there are just webpages anyway (which are responsive). They could basically abandon MacOS completely and focus on iOS. I mean sometimes it feels like they abandoned macOS already.
- DamnInteresting 9mo ago
  > To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. I was blogging about this basic idea back in 2005, just over 20 years ago: https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-computer/ https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-comp... I still think it's a good idea, but it sure is being slow to materialize in a practical form factor.
peppersghost93 9mo ago
If the option of owning my own computer is taken I'll own old computers. If they somehow take that away I'm giving up and moving to a cabin in the woods.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- butvacuum 9mo ago
  with or without a manifesto?
  - peppersghost93 9mo ago
    I knew someone would compare me to Uncle Ted but I don't share political ideology with him. I'd just want to live out my life peacefully in nature.
    - wolvesechoes 9mo ago
      > I'd just want to live out my life peacefully in nature. But it is precisely what he wanted as well :).
general1465 9mo ago
I am kinda using LLM for code generation, but the moment I will have the chance (Smaller models or cheaper hardware), I am hosting it locally, because I don't want to give anyone my data. Currently I am solving this problem by having like 6 AI services and drip-feeding each one with a little bit of problem so there is no context apparent from the queries.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
efficax 9mo ago
but don't i need a pc to use the pc in the cloud
- acuozzo 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
_23sd 9mo ago
Seems like this article misses the enterprise angle which is the main question. I'm sure some gamers aching for an upgrade will sign up for cloud PCs while RAM is overpriced, just like how Geforce Now had a moment while GPUs were overpriced. But does it make any sense for businesses with massive fleets of Windows laptops, and might already have some kind of VDI setup, to replace them with thin clients? Would need some significant progress on the hardware.
- hereonout2 9mo ago
  I'm not really a big gamer but was looking into buying an xbox again. I already had a controller and thought why not try xbox cloud gaming on my Samsung TV. With a decent internet connection I now struggle to see why anyone would want to buy a hardware Xbox. Games on the cloud version load instantly, play brilliantly and cost the same as the usual Game Pass as far as I can tell. The catalogue seems smaller maybe but aside from that I see little downside. I could see it working well for PCs too - as long as the terminal device is seamless. I guess us devs have been renting computers in "the cloud" for decades anyway.
  - acuozzo 9mo ago
    > I could see it working well for PCs too I moonlight in film restoration. One 2hr movie out of our scanner is easily 16 TiB or more depending on the settings we scanned with. Getting this uploaded to a remote server would take ~39hr over a fully-saturated 1Gbe pipe.
    - hereonout2 9mo ago
      Clearly one use case where it wouldn't work. On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already. If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has. Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.
neuralRiot 9mo ago
It could have been a good idea if tech corps wouldn’t have demostrated to be such huge POS.
petre 9mo ago
Yeah, he also hoped to rent Venice for his wedding, but he had to move the venue because people got annoyed. They'll probably also get fed up with him shoving his cloud down their throats. He could then move on to mining asteroids using robots, who won't be unionizing.
weirdmantis69 9mo ago
Hasn't client server architecture been a thing for a while? I don't understand the need for this, DRAM prices not withstanding.
twelvedogs 9mo ago
thin clients suck
aldarion 9mo ago
This is frankly evil. We really seem to be moving towards some crazy hybrid of the Animal Farm, 1984 and the Brave New World.

42 points by _____k 9mo ago

Hmmm...I'm not technical well versed but doesn't it sound a bit like the initial Chrome idea???

Jigsy 9mo ago

Considering how countries are trying to push things like Chat Control, I can see them having a hard-on for ideas like this. "You _must_ use a Cloud computer in order to make sure you're not doing anything illegal." Amazon et al. will have to pry my tech from my cold, dead hands.

purplecats 9mo ago
yes, you are an outlier, and one day (presumably <50 years) your hands will be cold and dead, along with your representation in the holdout resistance movement. you must make a bigger impact than standing your (individual) ground
- Jigsy 9mo ago
  Well, I'm almost 40, so I'm hoping I will be dead by then.
- wolvoleo 9mo ago
  I've given up trying to improve society. They keep voting for the worst idiots they can, buying from the worst exploitative businesses etc. Most people are acting against their own interest and I'm not going to change that. I'm just trying to isolate myself now from these toxic developments. If society falls into techno fascism after I'm gone, so be it. They wanted it. While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc.
  - InexSquirrel 9mo ago
    I could be wrong, but maybe you trying to shield yourself from these things also cuts you off from the good that's happening? There's a lot of bad things going on - but (and not saying this as justification) - there always has. There's always some power hungry person that claws their way to a position where they can benefit themselves at the expense of others. But the majority of people want to have good, peaceful lives with a sense of community and connection. Build things. Make art. Laugh. Grow and learn. Wonder about what could be, and build futures towards that. Don't forsake them because of the all of the bad stuff that gets shoved in your face every day. It's a dis-service to yourself and the life you have, and it weakens the people and groups that have do have the energy to stand up to not-so-good actors. If you're _happy_ being isolated then definitely go do that, but don't cut yourself off because you're only fed bad news everyday.
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      Oh I do, I just participate less online. I go to more local events. But I see there that more people tend to disconnect online too (lgbt community etc). I just don't follow the mainstream news much anymore. I still like HN and some other tech sites.
  - wolvesechoes 9mo ago
    > I've given up trying to improve society. And what have you done before giving up? > While I am around I'll shield myself as much as possible by self hosting, custom phone ROMs etc. It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you.
    - wolvoleo 9mo ago
      > And what have you done before giving up? I was a member of a political party (socialist). And I would go into discussions with the extreme-right fascists in my country (which currently have about 30% of votes). But there is no point. They don't care about facts or reason, it's more like a religion. They get themselves all worked up about internet memes about things that don't even happen and it's impossible to convince them of reality. I think they just enjoy being rabiately angry. In any case, I don't need that negativity in my life anymore. > It is the opium for nerdy people. You are not important, and this is the only thing that shields you. Your custom ROMs will mean nothing if they decide to come for you. I know the $10 hammer thing. But right now the government isn't the biggest threat here, surveillance capitalism is. Google and Meta don't come after us with hammers. The government threat is emerging (chatcontrol etc). I think for that opsec is much more important anyway.

Finnucane 9mo ago

The year of Linux on the Desktop will happen because it will be the only choice for the desktop.

wolvoleo 9mo ago

Biggest cloud vendor wants everyone to subscribe to his services. Well yeah of course. He has to say that, it's literally his job. But no for me never. I hate cloud.

bigbadfeline 9mo ago
> I hate cloud. It doesn't matter, the choice is being removed from the market. The clouders are already front running and scalping the hardware retail, just like scalpers were doing to GPUs during crypto. Today's excuse is AI but it's the same process, just on an industrial scale - the clouders buy in bulk at low prices, create shortages and exorbitant retail pricing, which forces you to buy from them, providing them with nice profits. The only difference from vanilla scalping is, they sell the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear. The process is unstoppable without legislative intervention, it works with or without the presence of inflation - front running assures the scalping of retail. The high tariffs on Chinese hardware and the draconian restrictions on selling them gear for semiconductor manufacturing remove the only natural remedy - competition. On the other hand, the existing semiconductor manufacturers are highly incentivized to sell in bulk so some leave the retail market altogether to become exclusive suppliers to big cloud and big OEM - e.g. Micron.
- general1465 9mo ago
  Which is going to work, only if people will buy into it. However if they won't (see Google Stadia or Micrslop's crying about people refusing Copilot) then whole thing will just implode into a lot of cheap hardware everywhere.
aldarion 9mo ago
I don't use cloud at all. Basically all of my backups are on external hard drives.

xg15 9mo ago

Meanwhile in the cloud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46620835

xvxvx 9mo ago

Called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511477 You'll own nothing and like it. Not even your 'own' data. Everything sitting on someone else's server, free to access by whichever government agency feels like it. This is like communism x1000.

biglyburrito 9mo ago
Don't call this communism, when it's simply end-game capitalism.
solid_fuel 9mo ago
> This is like communism x1000. But it is, in fact, capitalism x1
mikestew 9mo ago
Mmm, this is nothing like communism, by any definition I’m aware of. Now, “$ADJECTIVE capitalism”, such as “late-stage capitalism”, that I can go along with.
- cudla100 9mo ago
  [flagged]
RedComet 9mo ago
Strange claiming you "called it', people were saying this far earlier than 8 days ago.

JohnFen 9mo ago

I can't imagine a circumstance where I would do that. It's simply a nonstarter. I need to remain in complete control of my machines, and I am not in control of anything in the cloud.

InexSquirrel 9mo ago
Same feeling here, and I'm already getting frustrated with Windows pushing their crap into my OS. Definitely don't want even more of that. Beyond work I only use the PC for gaming and watching movies - so really if the only option was 'it has to be in the cloud', then my position becomes "well I guess I don't really play games any more". Not the worst thing. But whatever. Just because Jeff wants that, doesn't mean it will be so. And like who cares what he thinks? The only hat he ever wears is "how do I make more money", not "how do I ensure people live good lives and enjoy themselves".

webdevver 9mo ago

if everyone had symmetric gigabit, this would be a no-brainer. imagine having auto-scaling CPUs, auto-scaling RAM, etc - it would incentivise some cool OS architecture (yes yes, privacy issues aside etc.) most of the time i'm doomscrolling, but every now and then you wanna play with linux, or llvm, or some VM cluster. i bought a beefy rig for these 1% events in my life, and the rest of the time its doing basically nothing. seems a real waste.

biglyburrito 9mo ago

lol absolutely never.

kotaKat 9mo ago

The last time I tried this Microsoft killed my CloudPC trial not even 24 hours after starting it, wiping out the initial work I'd been doing in the computer I was renting. So, uh. Yeah. I'll get right back on that "cloud PC" thing.

pjmlp 9mo ago

Of course, cloud is the new timesharing.

wormius 9mo ago

Bloody rentierists. This is what I've been realizing more and more as this "AI" push combined with rising consumer hardware prices. IMO this is an intentional war on consumers to force them into being digital serfs (like MS and Sun and all the others wanted back in the day). Mainframes->Minis (and mainframes)->Micro/PC->Cloud(and back we go to centralization). You will own nothing and be happy.

SvenL 9mo ago

Well, at least for gaming It worked for me quite well with GeForce NOW. I have a MacBook can play here and there some games I like - as a casual gamer it’s fine. I wouldn’t bother to maintain a gaming PC for the casual gaming sessions I have. In this sense - yes, I gave up my non existing gaming PC to rent. To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. (I know Microsoft had this and it was an amazing idea) For doing the non standard stuff like gaming/resource intensive development stuff I could rent a cloud pc.

mmmlinux 9mo ago
Apple could do this if they wanted to. Hey Apple, Put the Pro back in the iPhone Pro. Give me a dock and and macOS in docked mode.
- general1465 9mo ago
  30% App Store fee. Not gonna happen.
- SvenL 9mo ago
  I would love that. For the things I do on my phone the hardware is so oversized - it’s really ridiculous. It’s definitely capable of running desktop things. Most of the apps out there are just webpages anyway (which are responsive). They could basically abandon MacOS completely and focus on iOS. I mean sometimes it feels like they abandoned macOS already.
DamnInteresting 9mo ago
> To be honest for 95% of stuff it would be enough to connect my smartphone via USB-C to a dock for mouse/keyboard/displays etc. I was blogging about this basic idea back in 2005, just over 20 years ago: https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-computer/ https://www.damninteresting.com/retired/mobile-phone-as-comp... I still think it's a good idea, but it sure is being slow to materialize in a practical form factor.

peppersghost93 9mo ago

If the option of owning my own computer is taken I'll own old computers. If they somehow take that away I'm giving up and moving to a cabin in the woods.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
butvacuum 9mo ago
with or without a manifesto?
- peppersghost93 9mo ago
  I knew someone would compare me to Uncle Ted but I don't share political ideology with him. I'd just want to live out my life peacefully in nature.
  - wolvesechoes 9mo ago
    > I'd just want to live out my life peacefully in nature. But it is precisely what he wanted as well :).

general1465 9mo ago

I am kinda using LLM for code generation, but the moment I will have the chance (Smaller models or cheaper hardware), I am hosting it locally, because I don't want to give anyone my data. Currently I am solving this problem by having like 6 AI services and drip-feeding each one with a little bit of problem so there is no context apparent from the queries.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

efficax 9mo ago

but don't i need a pc to use the pc in the cloud

acuozzo 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal

_23sd 9mo ago

Seems like this article misses the enterprise angle which is the main question. I'm sure some gamers aching for an upgrade will sign up for cloud PCs while RAM is overpriced, just like how Geforce Now had a moment while GPUs were overpriced. But does it make any sense for businesses with massive fleets of Windows laptops, and might already have some kind of VDI setup, to replace them with thin clients? Would need some significant progress on the hardware.

hereonout2 9mo ago
I'm not really a big gamer but was looking into buying an xbox again. I already had a controller and thought why not try xbox cloud gaming on my Samsung TV. With a decent internet connection I now struggle to see why anyone would want to buy a hardware Xbox. Games on the cloud version load instantly, play brilliantly and cost the same as the usual Game Pass as far as I can tell. The catalogue seems smaller maybe but aside from that I see little downside. I could see it working well for PCs too - as long as the terminal device is seamless. I guess us devs have been renting computers in "the cloud" for decades anyway.
- acuozzo 9mo ago
  > I could see it working well for PCs too I moonlight in film restoration. One 2hr movie out of our scanner is easily 16 TiB or more depending on the settings we scanned with. Getting this uploaded to a remote server would take ~39hr over a fully-saturated 1Gbe pipe.
  - hereonout2 9mo ago
    Clearly one use case where it wouldn't work. On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already. If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has. Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.

neuralRiot 9mo ago

It could have been a good idea if tech corps wouldn’t have demostrated to be such huge POS.

petre 9mo ago

Yeah, he also hoped to rent Venice for his wedding, but he had to move the venue because people got annoyed. They'll probably also get fed up with him shoving his cloud down their throats. He could then move on to mining asteroids using robots, who won't be unionizing.

weirdmantis69 9mo ago

Hasn't client server architecture been a thing for a while? I don't understand the need for this, DRAM prices not withstanding.

twelvedogs 9mo ago

thin clients suck

aldarion 9mo ago

This is frankly evil. We really seem to be moving towards some crazy hybrid of the Animal Farm, 1984 and the Brave New World.