"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.
I could have done 99% of my last job from an old Atom X5-8500 tablet if I bolted on a good external display and HID. I am perfectly happy navigating with a little J5005 Pentium Silver NUC since everything lived in a browser anyways.
If excel needed more time, let it cook, long as you don't exceed a million rows it'll probably get there someday.
Video and production work requires real compute, but 99% of us desk jockeys could have got by with thin clients and a little elbow grease. But I would contend that we may be living int he golden age of low-watt computing because we have the some combination of all computer games ever written in the history of man, the vast majority of them compilable and runnable on today's ardware or otherwise emulatable
And thanks to Valve, there is it now a very established market for running even AAA 3D titles on dog shit commodity hardware. It's pretty much just the mfps crowd that have to buy each next years release of post-processing laden Call Of Modern Battlefied Spartan Halo 2027, that need to worry about graphics falling behind, when we have such a rich ecosystem of excellent indies. All of my favorite games are like five or eight years old (I play a ton of Crab Champions, and Risk of Rain 2, etc with my gaming crew, these days).
All that to say, old hardware will keep us gaming indefinitely if the will is there. I think the big threat is people forfeiting the sovereignty of their compute and consumption for the illusion of convenience, the same way so few people own ebikes in my country while everyone has Uber and Lyft fees every month on their statements.
Wair till people figure out they can be their own GeForce Now for $0 with Tailscale and Artemis/Apollo.
I set up an enterprise grade firewall on a computer I got from a deceased relative. It was probably already 8+ years old when I got it and had been replaced with something newer. I had it for a long damn time; during covid when everyone was home and a lot of people were having their home internet connection clogged up with multiple users doing zoom sessions and remote work, my crusty machine was doing a good job of balancing out and shaping our meager 100mbps connection for five people. I think the CPU maybe got to about 10% at peak, but usually ran closer to 4% most of the time. It used up all the memory, but that was how it was supposed to work. It had a traditional spinning hard drive in it.
I kept it until it was about 18 years old when I finally retired it. It never broke, never failed, hardware just quietly ran and ran. I never turned it off unless the power went out. I only retired it because it was too big (full desktop tower case) for the home I had moved into. I wiped the disk, loaded a minimalist linux on it and donated the whole thing, monitor, keyboard mouse all in perfect order.
Hardware lasts and you don't even have to be nice to it.
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?'
I dont think guns do what you think they do.
I didnt hit my head, I live in a functioning democracy where people who have these armed uprising fantasies are known as children.
In what circumstance are these guns going to become useful because all I see is major societal issues and tribalism.
Its crazy to see what is happening the US and the 2A proponents not doing the thing they have always claimed the 2A was for.
I agree that its very hypocritical of the bulk of 2A people to shirk the duty that they've been loudly proclaiming they need their guns to execute.
But guns do exactly what I think they do.
You're worried about societal issues and tribalism?
Those are already here.
You do not live in a functioning democracy, if you live in the US.
The only way you could think that you live in a functioning democracy is if you uh, haven't read the news in at least a year and a half, if you live in a magical dream world where reality is less important than your fanciful idealism.
There's a reason all the academic experts in ... you know, democracies, in decline, ... there's a reason they all left the country, months ago now.
Who is going to go around and enact your preferred policy?
A ... theoretical future administration?
How are we gonna get one of those, that you like, after Trump and ICE disrupt and rig the midterms?
You're aware that they literally declared anyone who is 'radically pro-transgender' to be 'a type of major terrorist group' right?
These are the same people that got a fuckton of people fired because they reposted clips of Charlie Kirk sayings Charlie Kirk said, after he died.
You are literally dangerously naive.
I dont think its being naive, I dont live there thank fuck but I have maga family and have visited.
Its just beyond a joke, when will the guns help the situation? It has never happened, bar maybe the black panthers but on a political direction level never. The US is an oligarchy and the people are celebrating, doesnt matter if they have nukes the people are not doing shit.
Ok so, you don't live here.
Heres the current situation:
There are significantly more privately owned firearms in the US... then there are people.
You... would need an actual plan, to make that not be the case.
If your plan is 'tell the government to go get all the guns'... that, that is the thing that all the stereotypical 2A people will literally start a widespread civil war or terrorism campaign or whatever you wanna call it, to resist giving up their guns.
That's the doomsday scenario they've built their culture around, for... at least 40 years.
Wishful thinking will not accomplish anything.
You are acting as if the guns can just be ctrl-z'd out of existence, as if somebody could just tick a box somewhere, and suddenly hundreds of millions if firearms just... stop existing.
Thats not how this works.
The country is already well on its way to increased factionalism and violence.
The Black Panther still exist by the way. And they do armed marches, stand guard around places.
They don't use the guns to shoot people, its force projection, it sends a message.
Like all the LGBTQ places that have had armed guards show up, to protect them, after Nazis/Proud Boys/Oath Keepers with guns threaten the club or cafe or whatever.
This kind of thing has been escalating since the George Floyd protests.
We're beyond the point of 'now everyone kiss and make up'.
American history is actually full of shit like this, even pretty modern American history.
You're not gonna make that all go away by simply being exasperated by it.
They should give up guns because they are the Nazis.
Are you aware of the concept that a non Nazi can possess a firearm, in the US?
Computing is the means of production. Go figure
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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