In general I agree, but I’d put any conspiracy higher than AI, that’s just the scam de jour. It would be more along the lines of making conditions favourable for the death of personal computing and other boot on the face of humanity goals. It’s also likely this is a fairly natural evolution of late stage capitalism with technology, no conspiracy needed.

In this case it’s making lots and lots of GPU datacenters, which after a bubble pop will be useful for making compute a subscription for the masses and processing shittons of video feeds for the surveillance state, and the odd bit of AI.

This is why I don’t make much of the ‘the chips will be obsolete by the time they’re turned on’ argument, compute is compute, max efficiency or not. Obsolescence might sink a few (or many) companies, but the centralized compute assets will remain and need repurposing. Way too many of those purposes are harmful to the 99%.

If it’s just a couple of books, Anna’s Archive has your back.

Weird I know, but IMO it’s best to hand curate books and music (I have comics not manga, but same deal there). Automated tools can quickly rack up more books than you’ll read in a lifetime, and enough new music to listen to for a decade fits in a TB (even mostly FLAC). The problem then becomes finding what to read / listen to next, which gets worse with size.

That said, having a large local nonfiction book / journal article library can be useful to grep through, especially given current internet search problems.

And PSN gives JKR a royalty… Still, hard to pirate on PS hardware you don’t really own.

Super fun, but ethically you should pirate this one.