"Son, why are you collecting all those old PCs?" This is why, I'm not going to use a fucking Windows Portal or a xAI TerminalX (or whatever the elongated muskrat will name it) to use whatever OS they allow, while surveilling me 24/7 for my own safety.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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3.5 hours!!!! Love ya Steve, but I ain't got time for all that
I'd rather use a weak single board computer for all my computing needs than rely on some corporate-controlled remote server. As much as these corporations would love for us to only have a dumb terminal, the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
Usually enough to watch any sort of video content in HD and play thousands upon thousands of games with zero issue. Just the PS2 library alone is several years worth of content and you can play them all with a good emulator (PCSX2) and a computer from the last 15 years... I'm hoping there's a silver lining in the price hikes, like seeing a renaissance of video game development, with actually optimized games that focus on gameplay and don't take 100gb per map, or maybe people start going back and playing the OG SW: Battlefront II online again.
People use PC for work too.
Most work requiring a PC can be performed by hardware released in the last 15 years.
20 if you are being minimalist.
If all of the work is just typical office stuff, even the software from 15 years ago is more than enough.
I don't want to not be able to have consumer computer parts, although part of me is ready to be done with computers again all together.
In any case, I was just at a Tool collective today to get some tools for a project, and it seems like every time I turn around the solution, or at least mitigation, to this modern world is CO-OP's. If I can't have consumer computers and have to use shared resources, I would definitely prefer to do it as a non profit collective with a management board beholden to the members, not a corporate entity.
Ironically, the "own nothing and be happy" line comes from an essay envisioning a future of co-ops.
You can have my PC when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
and also
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
cyberpunk cowabunga it is then
The US has more guns than people and perp walked a compromised predator into office. The whole purpose of these weapons has come and gone.
... So the people should be disarmed and dispossesed so that capital can direct their fates?
They should be disarmed... by the predator in chief?
Are you thinking this through very hard?
ICE is actively shooting innocent civillians, en masse, we've got people starving and dying of malnutrition in concentration camps...
And now, now is the time for everyone to give up their guns?
Are you ok, did you hit your head recently?
Your strategy is 'give up the guns because the Nazis won the government?'
American (maybe more broadly Western) Computer Consumer Products companies are indeed getting fucked.
The thing is, that doesn't mean that the Future is one were Consumers are forced to not have PCs and have all their computing needs served from Big Companies' Servers.
I think, going from evidenc of the former to expecting the latter is a jump too far to take since it's only looking at one side of the equation in one part of the World.
It's perfectly possible that it's the Chinese companies that end up gaining from this, similarly to how in the EV space the result of Western auto companies not offering what most consumers actually wanted (which wasn't a Tesla, since those are too expensive for most people) was that the Chinese created and expanded that industry are now handily outcompetting those Western companies in their home markets.
Chinese parts and Mini-PC (an area where there are still a lot of products well bellow $500) manufacturers are still happilly selling their products to buyers from all over the World on platforms like AliExpress and, as we've recently discovered, Chinese memory makers (actual makers using actual chip fabs, not memory module assemblers) are expanding their production and selling more and more product to consumer market module assemblers in China and Taiwan, filling in the void created by the big memory makers focusing on supplying the AI datacenter boom.
(PS: That said, the China side seems to be covered in the video)
Further, there are other natural reactions in other areas which go against a dystopian future of No More Personal in Personal Computing - for example, software makers, most notably game makers, when they're scoping their products to the computing power that the expect will be available in 5 years, aren't going to be targetting hardware significativelly more powerful than what is common now (because if they did otherwise their stuff wouldn't sell), which means that naturally (though with some delay) the demand for more computing power and storage in personal devices is adjusting to the reduced availability of new devices with more storage and computing power, so rather that demand rather than going to go up it's probably going to stagnate, meaning that the future is most likely one of people running old computers for longer and just repairing what breaks with parts from that generation (one where DDR4 memory is more popular than DDR5) that one where everybody (both consumers and software makers) meekly accepts that the only option is computation running on servers (something which, by the way, game makers have already tried with things like Stadia, which failed miserably).
In summary, yeah the consumer personal computing hardware industry in the West is hurting, but just that is nowhere enough to support this idea that in the Future, Worldwide there will be no more Personal Computers.
(PPS: My expectation of the likely future is probably closest in that video with that of the guy from Corsair).
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