In my opinion we are witnessing the market influences of a new type of public-private "Phoebus cartel" except at a total global scale where anti-terrorism laws require pricing businesses and individuals out of owning their own compute forcing them to rent compute from multinational hyperscaler cloud businesses who are integrated with military intelligence operations. Computing technology after all is a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful are being punished for the non peaceful. It is too dangerous for governments around the world to allow individuals to posses the immense power of computing technology. Call me chicken little but we are witnessing the end of publicly available private general computing. Market changes influencing cost effectiveness analysis to favor public cloud is a deliberate goal to secure national critical infrastructure. I also think this coincides with the limits of MOSFET scaling and RISC-V permissive licensing. My only credentials for this is 15+ years working in fintech I&O for a US Fortune 500 company.

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stoltzmann 2 days ago | parent [-]

It certainly feels like we are being squeezed from all sides. I think the push to require ID verification for websites is also part of the plot - it all feels too coordinated, like governments all over the world have the same exact agenda to destroy our privacy. At some point you will have to verify your ID to use any computer system, and it will act just as a terminal to the cloud.

I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.

What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.

	▲	Byron_t_Bulb 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Anti terrorism laws will compel society into smart cities, continuous attestation of very high confidence subject/applicant identity. It is the only way to accomplish the mission. You can see it has already happened with "Know Your Customer" rules in banking. Mobile banking adds continuous "Know Where Your Customer Is". As our digital twins are distilled from social media via age verification this adds "Know What Your Customer Has Done". Then as we interact with AI chatbots with very high confidence identity this adds "Know What Your Customer Is Thinking". The fusion of these data points will enable our digital twins to be simulated into "Is My Customer A Terrorist" and then we will all have to deal with the quality and reliability of these systems. There will also be an unprecedented opportunity to optimize banking and marketing. The only problem I see is consent of the people however this is what we have collectively decided as a society long ago with United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) allowing the state to ultimately not require our consent or even awareness of its actions. Without having all the information it is impossible to come to any rational conclusion. We are out of the loop! Total Digitization is happening for better or for worse.