Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogen on Nostr: Gotta say it: if Jeff Bezos, who is surely among the most malevolent and avaricious ...

Gotta say it: if Jeff Bezos, who is surely among the most malevolent and avaricious human beings who has ever crawled between Hell and Heaven, is making public noises about how it's now nonsensical to think of #computing as a hobby, you'd better believe that he's only voicing the desires of the entire business sector. They feel like they finally have their excuse to choke off amateur access to "compute", and Bezos and his chums must be salivating over economic projections that predict astronomically increasing profit from metering out "compute" by the TOKEN.

Superintelligent sludge, dispensed by LLM sludge dispensers, is the great and glorious #AI #future, a future in which only a privileged elite get direct access to computer hardware. I'm not sure how many fools are still blithering, willfully blinding themselves to the real actual plans of Silicon Valley executives, about technology in the "techno-optimistic" manner of the 1990s boom times, when it still seemed like personal computing was the greatest miracle ever achieved—and it was an American one!

I don't doubt that there's a *patriotic* undercurrent to high-tech boosterism, the stubborn determination of #tech enthusiasts to ignore the immense damage which has been done and is still being done by racist and greedy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Nobody likes being told that the thing in which they've placed all their hopes for decades is actually a menace. Nobody wants to hear that the *one thing* that the United States could still feel proud about, U.S. technological dominance, is really a fascistic nightmare.

The glittery techno-optimist dream is dying. The dream is being killed, NOT by the "haters" and the "doomers"—people like me have no power or influence in this system. It's Silicon Valley itself who is eager to snuff out the daydream they once championed. It's *obsolete* now, they say. The future of "compute" is corporate server farms serving up a trickle of "superintelligent" LLM ooze, with users charged by the word. If you wish for a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping upon the very concept of personal computing—forever.

~Chara of Pnictogen