what if ram buyout is part of a greater attack on personal computing

[jackpearse@nrw.social]

@lritter They rewind the Personal Computer Revolution which started in 1976.

And they now go back to Mainframe and terminal (browser).

So, what is the next „Personal Computer“?

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@lritter

SecureBoot is indeed one of those pretend-solutions, that do not really increase security of the machine, nor the customer, but only benefit the vendors.

There's only one good part, and only that one in the SecureBoot chain, and that is measured boot, i.e. checksum-chaining each subsequent piece of software before it's executed. Combine this with verity checked RO filesystems, that are linked to boot measures using a owner supplied key (=passphrase) and you're good.

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@lritter

All the other crap like firmware signing and bootloader signing and such are not really addressing the actual problem space.

SecureBoot doesn't solve the "protect the owner of a machine from the machine running code the owner doesn't want it to run", but instead solves the "let the machine only run code that the maker of the machine allow it to run", which is antithetical to free markets and ownership.

[me_@sueden.social]

@lritter Qualcomm taking over Arduino, Raspberry Pi being dependent on Broadcom (though they started building their own chips with the Pico microcontrollers).

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@lritter That's not a new fight though. The whole struggle for the ownership of our devices has been going on for over 20 years. In the noughties they called it TCPA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5z7hqwxBR4

[datenwolf@chaos.social]

@lritter https://www.lafkon.net/tc/

[floooh@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter IMHO this 'war on personal computing' had been going on in the background for decades with varying intensity, similar to how DDOS attacks happen all the time without bringing the whole internet down (mostly at least). Personal computing might go back to be the niche/hobbyist activity it was in the 70s to 90s, but it won't entirely disappear. I guess it might become an expensive hobby again though :/

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@floooh it begs the question what we wrote all this infrastructure for. certainly not so a bunch of locusts can run their datacenters on it, and nothing else.

[floooh@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter hmm yeah... AFAIK the home computer revolution was mostly feeding on an overcapacity of slightly outdated 8-bit chips which suddenly became very cheap at the start of the 80s, and hobbyists and enthusiasts started to build all sorts of awesome things with this 'junk'.

Maybe we'll see a similar Cambrian Explosion after the AI bubble pops and suddenly there's a shitton of just slightly outdated GPUs and memory flooding the market waiting to be used for actually interesting stuff :)

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@floooh indeed. i speculated as much myself.

[tomtrottel@mastodontech.de]

@lritter its way worse than "just" creating a "drug" syndicate. its colonization. its creating slaves and kills the rest. a drug dealer does not want to kill its users.

[falken@qoto.org]

@datenwolf @lritter and that isn't worth #Microsoft being in charge of what can boot on all PCs

#uefi #security #linux

[ingalovinde@embracing.space]

@floooh @lritter the problem is that it's not going to be general-purpose memory; it's going to be soldered chips in these GPUs.

And that these GPUs are completely impractical to run at home scale, with them having TDP measured in kilowatts.

At least these 8-bit chips were general purpose afaik?

[lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@tomtrottel "kill"

[tomtrottel@mastodontech.de]

@lritter yes, I was refering to my colonization analogy. you need to see the bigger picture cause this will have devestating consequence combined with what they can do with absolut enslaved computer users and the authorian tendencies that come with colonization. but never mind me, I am hope I am wrong and it is just a happy "lets turn them into addicts" :)

[aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@lritter your new year's resolutions are very ambitious D:

[bornach@fosstodon.org]

@IngaLovinde @floooh @lritter
If AI investor funding to build and run new data centres dries up, the cloud compute power will have to be sold off cheaply. Every hacker will be making services that run in the cloud. The fediverse might benefit from this.

Unviable data centres will have to be powered down and parts auctioned off. This will be an opportunity for those resourceful few who can figure out how to repurpose server rack hardware for home use
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/domesticating-old-server-hardware-in-the-age-of-shortages/

[lvk@mastodon.online]

@lritter i think the term which resonates with your doom scenario is 'learned helplessness'. Im also curious if the upcoming 'challenge-based learning'-methodology (which China also seems to adopt for schools) will combat it. Im also curious whether AI will further stigmatize 'deep' knowledge ("Since AI can write code for you, humans don't need to learn code anymore, and can use its outcome. Would you like me to run the app you described here?"). An engineer-based society might help?

[bornach@fosstodon.org]

@floooh @lritter
I think there will first be a race to the bottom along the enshittification curve. AI companies cannot convince enough free tier users to start paying so they will have to embed ads and sell promoted answers. Businesses will pay OpenAI/Google to train their chatbot to give a certain answer for specific topic areas, like when a user asks "where should we go out for a meal tonite?", "what is the best medication for a headache?", "what are the reviewer's saying about that movie?"

[ingalovinde@embracing.space]

@bornach @floooh @lritter your link is for general-purpose servers.

The "AI" servers are an entirely different thing from what I understand. Sure, you can salvage a motherboard and CPU and RAM sticks from them, but that's not a lot (like, the entire "AI" industry will only give you several hundreds thousands of relatively weak PCs, if you discard the GPUs).
Most of their hardware, most of their computing power, is in these overpowered GPUs, which are completely useless outside of "AI" loads in hyperscale data centers. Even if you get such a GPU for free, it will still not be worth it even to pay for electricity it consumes while running, not with kinds of the loads you might be able to run on it. There is no "repurposing" these GPUs afaik.