I didn't know "gaming cafes" were still a thing. I also wonder what the bandwidth is like. Processing power is straightforward to acquire (buy GPUs) but decent bandwidth can be very hard to acquire in certain areas and yet is necessary if you want to rent out those machines as clients need to bring the data to them fast (labelled assets for ML training, etc).
This is very impressive. I've been following the progress of akash.network: https://akash.network/
They wrote two white papers which gave me a much better understanding of the challenges involved in creating a "market for compute" although I'll admit that much of the maths went over my head.
Akash looks cool! I am working on a self hosting solution (https://protos.io) that is similar to Sandstorm, and I've been dreaming of a way to deploy VMs on various cloud providers, without requiring an account creation beforehand and without having any intermediaries. Akash looks like it could become that. Unfortunately at the moment you can only deploy containers, and I need the ability to deploy full VMs.
Heya! I’m Jamie, I’m actually one of the co-founders of FluidStack, the company in the post. We’ve been working with gaming cafes to help them earn money during the lockdown across the US, and offering them out to customers as ultra-cheap servers for machine learning, video rendering, and cloud gaming.
We would love feedback from HN on this -- if anybody has thoughts -- I’d love to hear them! You can also reach me at jamie@fluidstack.io if you’d rather email me anything. Thanks!