I think digital fascism is a likely motivator at this point. The ceos have all been hanging out with the political fascists, so there’s not much reason to think otherwise.

I've also seen this perspective online and I really hope it's just a theory and not reality.

IT departments are under a lot of pressure by business leadership to have AI offerings. Most businesses are asking to implement a buzzword, not solve any kind of business challenge.

resulting in cheapflation, and shrinkflation eventually.

As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they'll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won't be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they've begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.

My company is needing to go away from external storage for local only backups, as 2,4" 4TB HDDs are shit and unreliable and 4TB SSDs (like Samsung T5 Evo) are going from 200€ to 600€ (per disk. And we need 3 of those).
Instead we are pivoting to S3(-compatible)-Cloud as the main off-site storage.
I am certainly not thrillee but on the otger side, customers arent willing to lug around 3,5" HDD cases so....What else is there?

A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.

We've had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.

Now it's supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don't think it'll end.

A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn't even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we'll see improvement.

OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components' prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That's good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.

I've read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That's a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).

So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing "content" from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I'd want. Including production, standards and everything.

Yeah, my trick is to save up and try to buy the 2nd best components as much as possible. The very best will always have a shiny new thing tax attached to them, but 2nd best is where the real value comes in. Granted I'm not building gaming pcs, so this isn't too unreasonable. The current market won't let me get close to what I'd actually like though.

In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn't have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.

Nope! They're brand new shuckable (you can take out the hdd) external drives. I have 10 14tb drives in my nas that all came from this. And if you keep the enclosures, you can still warrenty them.

Used HDD aren't on the brink of dying some them could last decades.

I’ve trusted this site for a long time. https://shucks.top/

That's def Ai, but it seems well curated and the info looks pretty reliable. I go for the western digital drives myself, they seem to have the best reliability. To pop them open it's just plastic clips, and once you get the corners to pop you can usually pull the rest by hand.

None of the WD 14tb have been SMR as of yet. Neither have the two 18tb drives I've shucked.

Those other parts are turbo fucked now though. I guess I’ll keep my video game consoles going because at least they will always be able to play games; especially all my older ones.

You know they haven't. 

My old pack of floppy drives is going to make me rich!