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Microsoft wants devs to build Electron AI apps on Windows 11, says no need of native code, despite RAM concerns
(www.windowslatest.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
-> push software that needs tons of ram
-> cause ram shortage
-> ???
-> ...profit?
At least for Enterprise where the real money is, "???" seems to be https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/windows-365-enterprise
This isn't some grand plan 5d chess. The people running these companies are dumb as hell and lucky. They get convinced from one silicon valley thought leader's blog post that ai and electron are the future and then direct the entire company in that direction thinking they're a great leader who will be remembered for pushing the company in a novel direction at just the right time. They attend a talk by a different thought leader who talks about a future of ai cloud computers that anyone can access from anywhere with more computational power than could ever fit into the shitty laptop they're accessing it from, then they go to the board meeting the next day with their bright new idea to do cloud personal desktops.
These companies are entirely responding to (nonsensical) market forces and the whims of high ranking individuals within their ranks. It's painful and ridiculous.
To be clear, there are some benefits to provisioning enterprise devices in a tightly controlled cloud environment, but we've all seen ideas with "some benefits" get shot down by managers and CEOs who "don't get why anyone would want that" so I'm not keen on giving Microsoft too much credit.
They're already hitting the storage side of things pretty hard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1rumwph/hp_laptop_falsely_advertises_having_1_tb_of/
Buy up all of the hardware on the planet to have a monopoly on compute/storage -> rent the compute/storage to everyone who can't buy it.
See also: Housing
I'm so glad I bought my laptop when I did recently, with plenty of RAM and storage. Just in time before that stuff becomes impossible to find or impossibly unaffordable.
This generation of hardware will probably be the plateau. The decline and fall is just around the bend. Maybe another generation of CPUs before those go for bust, too. They can rent out GPUs, RAM, and storage, but as far as I'm aware the CPU needs to be local on the device. At least, a CPU needs to be on the device...
I don't think it's a coincidence that this trend is occuring just as NPUs are starting to hit the market. Those chips are too powerful to let the plebeians own and use without restriction, in the corpo's view.
Whether a better system replaces this one after it falls, or we enter an era where consumer hardware is a thing of the past, remains to be seen. Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, tech companies will have to liquidate their data centers and secondhand servers will become cheap. That would do wonders for the fediverse and the decentralized web...
Posting scammy Amazon links feels like cheating when having these discussions, but I kinda get where they're coming from. The fact that people can try to sell a laptop with only 64gb disk is absolutely mental to me, because that's not even enough to let the BASE OS run normally and update reliably. And that's before you start doing anything on it.