[supernikio2]

Your comment made me ponder and interesting thought: In my personal bubble most people use Android phones and Windows machines (lower income country than the US) which does show how different the world varies from person to person.

At first, the "Windows is an afterthought" comment made me squirm inside, as in order to game or do anything remotely hardware intensive one would have to move over to a self-built machine, which means leveraging Windows or Linux.

However, it does look like we are (perhaps not so slowly) moving towards an always-online world, in which everyone owns a dumb terminal to which they access powerful hardware on the cloud. Want to game? You can do so on NVidia's or Microsoft's hardware. Want to run a complex machine learning algorithm? Huggingface has got your back. I fear that's where we're moving toward, and in my opinion, takes away freedom from the end user.

[shrimp_emoji]

Yep. It's dystopian as hell to me.

And so many stakeholders are aligned towards it. Dumb terminals that sign in to a persistent account are easy and cheap for users. Companies are in control, enjoying DRM and analytics like never before. Governments can surveil their citizens more deeply than ever by subpoena of the cloud company.

But there's some hopium that, with things like homomorphic encryption, you could have the best of both worlds: cloud connectivity and privacy.