RE: https://climatejustice.social/@terminaltilt/115896899179047548
I’m now officially moving from “the cloud is just someone else’s computer to “ to “the cloud is just a landlord for your data”
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@lily @terminaltilt I am so quoting that at work.
@lily @terminaltilt No commercial cloud or SaaS for me, not on my watch. Anything I upload to a coimmercial cloud first goes through local strong encryption. A reciepient has to bear with decrypting, then, but that is also for their protection.
If I have to share data w/ anyone, I have a NextCloud at hand, controlled by myself.
Not buying from and doing business with Jeff Bezos, I am exercising my free (as in Freedom) will. There are many local businesses, also manufacturers, available to buy from online, which I clearly prefer over greedy Jeff.
Anyone CAN buy elsewhere, but that's up to you, also the choice not to do business w/ the cheapest bidder. E. g., you may intend to establish a customer relationship that also considers service and support.
@lily @terminaltilt I think the shame is: a central computer we all rent off of could be very efficient. A lot of waste could be prevented. How often am I actually utilizing all of my local CPU or GPU?
That said, I do not trust these landlords one bit. You are giving up power when you rent your hardware or software, and you know these people will abuse you once they have the power because they have done that every time they have gained any power.
As someone who hates "the cloud" but also happens to be good at it and is employed by it (well... Not atm... But usually) I want to clarify... I hate "the cloud" as it stands today. Do I think there is value in abstraction, ease of use, and a powerful API for people who don't have an infrastructure skillset? Absolutely!! Do I think our only option that we should accept is three major providers and hyper consolidation towards our corporate overlords? Absolutely fucking not! I've always loved and worked towards the idea of what I've referred to as "commoditized micro clouds". And I LOVE the feeling of reclaiming old hardware to run cool shit.
Also just a quick side tangent as an infrastructure engineer: anyone with the approach of just throwing more hardware at the problem and never fixing that (not including those having to make those decisions because external constraints that affect their livelihood) and people that have forced me to do exactly that can suck a big butt. 💜
@lily @terminaltilt it's so convenient, people don't bother to think about it from enough angles to talk themselves out of it. Whenever I see aaS anything, I think, "We own your aaS". And now, they've collectively accumulated enough of the Earth's resources, that they own its technological future. They'll get a piece of it from here on out. No wonder they're building end of days happy tanks for themselves. Once enough people figure it out, they're going to be ticked. How many billions of years do we have before the sun sets for good? Where are people so in a hurry to go that they want to be the only ones going there?
@lily I feel exactly like that already with VPS and domain providers
Attention @mhoye , I think this is something you've been saying for years, specifically wrt to Linux system design choices.
@lily @terminaltilt Cory Doctorow has written about this a lot. And his recent talk at 39C3 gave a lot of history on this war against general purpose computing.
Whenever I CAN NOT buy from Amazon, I WILL NOT buy from Amazon!
Jeff is a bad employer and the little antrophomorphic rocketman is so spooky.
@terminaltilt @dazzr This is a very unfortunate reality. The same with Walmart. My advice to others has always been "boycott where you you have the access to do so". And anyone that judges those that don't have the privilege and access to find other venues can fuck right off with that and have clearly never experienced the lack of privilege.
@lily @terminaltilt
And when we watch analogy of electricity and computation, we can ask if I have solar panels, own my own utility, would I be better of? And answer now is yes. Similarly, you are financially better in a long run with computation capability you own.
It is cute, how continuation of analogy gonna bring to opposit conclusion, opposit to one pushed by monopolist. 🫢
@lily @terminaltilt The thing is...i remember something VERY similar predicted in the fiction work of Isaac Asimov.
Huge computers controlling all the robots..that doesn't have a computer brain of its own.
@lily @terminaltilt The next step is you are just a tenant farmer for the landlord's data.
This feudalism sound in the word landlord makes this hard to translate into German. The English term sounds so much more true.
@MichelPatrice @terminaltilt honestly, at this rate, probably... And I'll be on the front lines!
Also your English is great! 💜
@lily @terminaltilt I already pulled everything from the cloud.
The worst part of this to me? The way I and many others were pilloried and mocked when we predicted EXACTLY THIS OUTCOME (not to mention privacy issues and the like) back in the early aughts when we criticized early cloud storage services like Dropbox.
But no one likes to hear, "I told you so." And no one who told us we were being alarmist or just stupid back then is going to apologize.
(20 years from now, this post copypasta with 'cloud' replaced by 'AI'.)
@lily @terminaltilt Lazy Eye Dr. Evil, what a dirtbag. All the tech bros are such garbage!
@lily @terminaltilt #Linux and all those thrift store PCs are looking real nice right about now.
One of my arguments for #LibreOffice now is : it can run on your computer without internet connection.
@lily @terminaltilt This fits with Larry Ellison wanting to watch everyone when they are on the toilet.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/billionaire-constant-ai-surveillance
@lily @terminaltilt Yup. Power is acting like power always does: Consolidate more power.
Pretty speeches and noble words of yesteryear never mean squat.
@lily @terminaltilt how long until "Installing software" becomes "sideloading"?
EVERY DATA CENTRE IS A US MILITARY BASE!
Nothing ever changes. In feudal times you gave 50% of your produce to the land lord.. essentially you had a land subscription to the land owner. The rich will always make their power work one way or the other to extracting wealth from the poor.
@lily @terminaltilt Yes that's where it's moving towards. Apple and amazon both want you to use their cloud, hough microsoft has went further to make it default for everything, even your login. As amazon has big cloud business....I'm sure Bezos is all for it. I recently moved my cloud to self hosted nextcloud. I do still have icloud...but that is more i device convenience on some files and Apple one for my wife and I to stream apple music and few other things it provides.
@lily @terminaltilt
Good luck with that. People can computer with 2 strings and a bit of sticky tape if they want to (yes I exaggerate hugely). The fundamentals are known. Mostly computing got physically smaller, which then allowed for more bloat. But a logic gate is a logic gate, even if you make it out of matchsticks, or bottletops or whatever.
@lily @terminaltilt looks like Bexos is eating all the pies now.
@lily @terminaltilt I think it's hilarious that they are still trying this shit when they haven't fixed or addressed the very fundamental issue at hand.
Internet access. It's not cheap, it's not easy to get, it's not available every where, especially at reasonable speeds and has more outages than there are back orders on insulin!
@lily @terminaltilt the current consumer RAM and storage shortage is conveniently timed for this too...
Can someone within earshot of Jeff please tell him to fuck off with this shit.
@lily @terminaltilt HOA fee for my background image!?!
@lily @terminaltilt A sh!tty landlord who keeps jacking up the rent, reads all your mail and won't return your furniture and oher posessions when you try ot move out.
@lily @terminaltilt And so we come full circle, back to the “dumb terminal” of the mid 20th century.
@lily this is I think where the important criticism of AI really lies - not a narrow focus on some specific tech, but refusing to budge on the older, more important battle over "the cloud"