[sgnelson]

I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points.

Now it feels like if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you.

I hope this is just a blip, but I think there is a trend over the past few years.

[thewebguyd]

I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is.

The democratization of technology was something that had the power to break down class barriers. Anyone could go get cheap, off the shelf hardware, a book, and write useful software & sell it. It became a way to take back the means of production.

Computing being accessible and affordable for everyone = working class power.

That is why its backsliding. Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders, and we lose access to hardware as it increasingly only gets sold B2B (or if they do still sell to consumers, they just raise prices until most are priced out).

When the wealthy want something, that something becomes unavailable to everyone else.

[indemnity]

Arguably Google and others like them would not even exist without access to cheap off the shelf hardware in their early days.

[kelnos]

Yes, and that's a part of the appeal to companies like Google. They've climbed the ladder, and now they're pulling it up behind them so others can't climb up to catch them.

[forgotoldacc]

Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.

[linguae]

Exactly! Apple wouldn't have existed without access to the MOS 6502 and other electronics, which allowed Woz to carry out his dream of building a personal computer. Microsoft might not have existed without the Altair 8800. Many 1990s and 2000s web startups got off the ground with affordable, available hardware, whether it's hand-me-down RISC workstations or commodity x86 PCs.

Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.

[mschuster91]

> Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders

While it's undeniable that MAFIAA et al have been heavily lobbying for that crap... the problem is, there are lots of bad actors out there as well.

I 'member the 00s/10s, I made good money cleaning up people's computers after they fell for the wrong porn or warez site. Driver signatures and Secure Boot killed entire classes of malware persistence.

[futuraperdita]

Is this not just "with freedom comes responsibility" applied to technology? Often the freedom to do something means that, when given that sovereignty and missing the requisite experience, that means you also end up with the freedom to harm yourself (whether through a misunderstanding of a danger or just simple error.)

Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?

[thewebguyd]

> Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?

Unfortunately, I think the old guard here is dying out and the majority want someone else choosing for them, which is why all the age verification & chat control-like bills have broad bipartisan support.

I'm in the "with freedom comes responsibility" camp. Obviously we should build secure systems, but our devices shouldn't be impenetrable by their own user. The "security" we are getting now is just security against the user having the freedom to do as they wish with their devices and software.

The cultural zeitgeist surrounding internet and computing freedom has changed to be in favor of more control and censorship. Not sure how we can stop it.

[EasyMark]

I don't see how it can be a blip if AI actually turns out to be successful. They'll likely gobble up any lose hardware for their datacenters until only scraps are left or the AI bubble pops if AGI isn't achieved in the next few years and stock values fall off a cliff

[kreco]

Interesting take.

In a naive way, when rich entities are interested in a limited resource it's basically over.

Somehow I can see a parallel with the housing crisis where the price go higher and higher.

I can't see both of them ending anytime soon unless there is a major paradigm shift in our life.

[nxor]

What's causing the housing crisis?

[lillecarl]

Corruption, Zoning, Investment housing

[antonvs]

I'm not a fan of ultra big tech, but I don't get the concern here exactly.

What high end technology do you want that you can't get?

In the 90s, I paid nearly $10k for a high-end PC. Today, I can get something like an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for ~$8k, with 24,064 CUDA cores and 96 GB RAM, that's capable of doing LLM inference at thousands of tokens per second.

I realize the prices from this example are a bit steep for many people, but it's not out of line historically with high-end hardware - in fact the $10k from the 90s would be something like $25k today.

My point is I don't see how "if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you." I'd love an example if I'm missing something.

[DevX101]

Software has been moving in the right direction. Tons of open source projects for every application imaginable. But hardware has gotten more closed. You can't replace batteries in phones, they get pre-loaded with state level spyware, laptops today have about the same hard drive space as 10 years ago to drive cloud usage, and GPUs and now memory seem to be becoming increasingly cost prohibitive for consumers.

[thescriptkiddie]

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

[EasyMark]

It's likely that all the mega cloud and AI companies want regular people forced to go to them for solutions and buying up any companies that might pose a potential for allowing that. In response they will use a small percentage of the trillions being thrown at them to eliminate those companies that allow for self hosting or mid tier providers to thrive.

[renewiltord]

This is an unreal thing to say. Dude I can buy a chip on eBay with almost a gigabyte of L3 cache. That’s never been possible before.

[nish__]

It's definitely just a blip.

[AlfredBarnes]

100% agree.

A little foil hat conspiracy i supposed, but the big companies saw nobodies become incredibly wealthy over the last decade, and this is the new companies protecting their position by limiting technology.