This whole post seems founded on the shaky assumption that all PC gamers would be on a roughly 3 year rebuild cycle anyway…

Not in my experience.

Even my most PC enthusiast friends would only ever have been upgrading every ~5 years anyway. That makes the ‘40% in 3 years’ an unexpectedly high number of upgraders.

My main PC rig is closer to ten years now, and no upgrade in sight. Cost of living with kids has made expensive hobbies untenable.

When it comes to making a stand, better late than never.

I have some sympathy with your view, but still downvoted because I refuse to accept it’s conclusion. Look at Japan, Scandinavia and many other countries where social responsibility still prevails. Throwing hands up and saying “well it’s just human nature” is the laziest get-out to avoid fixing the broken parts of ones own excessive, hedonistic culture.

It might be true that the ones that need to be convinced won’t listen to the argument itself. But we can start to re-empower more responsible citizens to impose shame - yes, fucking shame - on those that raise their kids and otherwise act irresponsibly in so many ways: the polluting shit they consume, the regimes they support with the subscriptions they pay for, the inefficient gas guzzlers they decide to drive off the forecourt. It needs checking.

Not even the GDPR?

Truth. I don’t support US tech either but their LLMs are state of the art and VERY useful… No point lying about it. I’m supporting Mistral.ai instead now. Their model is good enough for my use cases, and I’m hoping their recent reported uptick in users like myself helps fund the research and hardware to make them even more competitive.

What happened to it!? It’s a new technology in the early stages of adoption. A little patience…

I’m playing my part… Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I’ve been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.

Savage 😉

As AI and other forms of automation become more prevalent in our lives it has become urgent to teach kids about different forms of programming/AI/ML and their characteristics. The current situation is a shit show: too many people think ‘ChatGPT’ is merely plugged into everything and it’s just not like that.