If you haven't noticed, you've been not paying attention. I canceled Prime a while ago and they try very hard to get you back. And they try to sneak on you billed expedited shipping when over minimum gratis shipping quota. Dark patterns galore.
It would be a major pain for me to boycott them completely so I don't, yet.
How would a national government (not TLAs) target particular individuals in a large number of users and what information can they gather given e.g. https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy ? So perhaps not quite as easily as ordering a tap.
My national government has no business knowing which protocols I use to contact which endpoints and tamper with that traffic. Wrapping up that information in a tunnel is a good first protection layer.
You forget that nation-states control your ISP. And of course you can choose your VPN provider or run your own.
The provider and national TLAs will see all traffic that is in cleartext and meta traffic which is even more valuable. It can also actively tamper with that traffic. So you're technically incorrect and you assume your threat model is universal. It's not. And, of course, there are use cases for Tor, whether with or without VPN.
A free running cellular automaton (CA) approach in hardware would work, but each cell would be a much souped up SRAM cell, the interactions would be all local and 2D. Considering Cerebras is 40 G SRAM on the 300 mm WSI and is about at the cooling limit I'm afraid you do not have 5 orders of magnitude. Perhaps reversible spintronics can help with the power draw, but you still have to splat a higher dimensional network so not just local interactions into a 2D array.
You seem to not be using open source software packaged for multiple architectures or which can be built for your binary target. Most people will be just using a browser and an office suite.
You seem to trust Nvidia. I don't.
They write
"Of course, AMD is trying to get into the the AI training and inferencing game itself with the Instinct MI300 chip. And that, perhaps, is the main if modest cause for hope. If AMD can gain some traction in that huge market, it will not only be making lots of money, it will be in a position to do a similar thing to Nvidia and push some of that technology across into its gaming GPUs."
which strikes me as incorrect. AMD MI is pretty widespread in HPC. With margins lower in the consumer market it makes sense to focus on HPC.
I would look into thin clients and Lenovo etc. tiny PC for office on eBay. I run old low power low noise rackmount Supermicros which are nice but hard to find at low prices.
Ok, if you don't use their web site you won't see the UX dark patterns. Trust us, they there and fit with the overall garbagefication theme. Annoys the living shit out of me. At least no more Prime Video UI and ad trainwreck.