this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Alternative outcomes:
Gaming bifurcates.
Indies and certain AAs aim for the 'good ending', realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you're actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.
AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.
... but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off "journalists" and "influencers".
3rd potential outcome:
Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.
Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.
All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.
4th potential outcome:
... nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. 'Piracy' becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.
I grew up in Russia and it's sometimes so mindboggling that people don't know their way around digital piracy. It may sound bad, but I actually think that it's the only thing that can keep the market healthy. I pay for games, movies, books and whatever else there is purely because I like them. And if I don't like the content you made, you are getting no money. If I have to pay for it before judging it's value, what insentive does the producer of the content have to make it actually good?
See I just grew up as poor white trash in the US.
I guess just more technically inclined than much of my fellow white trash?
But yeah, exactly... why pay for something you can get for free, safely, if you know what you are doing?
You do it because you either really, really want to support a particular game or developer, or, as Steam/Valve has been saying for like 20 years now... because the version that you are paying for is actually substantially better, is substantially easier to access.
Basically, if official market prices are so high that the risk and hassle of using a gray or black market is less than the differential between gray/black market price snd official price... you use the gray/black market.
This is a pretty well understood concept in actual, academic economics, but in the US we have an insanely corpo/finance slanted public representstion of what 'economics' even is.
If the fundamental framework of IP laws and market practices is inherently biased against the consumer... obviously, people are going to broadly not like that, and other people are going to just skirt around them...
The main difference between the US and Russia in say, the 90s, is that everyone in the US knew they were destined to become a millionaire (economy doing quite well) where in Russia, things were just generally being gutted and sold for scrap, under the table (economy doing quite bad).
Its the Always Sunny in Philly scene, oh you're new poor, its easy to tell... see, we're old poor, we know how to do this.
I'd say there is a reasonable likelihood that the broad, ongoing economic collapse of living standards for 90% of Americans will lead to a cultural tone shift.
What is the Russian term, schmekalka, something like that?
Basically: Coming up with an improvised solution based on what you already have, as opposed to figuring out how to buy some new thing for the task?
A lot of the US is going to have to think a lot more like that, otherwise they'll just become literal debt slaves.
Like, shit, I still refuse to pay for any fixed location internet plan that charges for datacap, data limits. This is now common and widespread in the US, but is completely bullshit and unjustifiable from an actual 'what does this cost the ISP' perspective.
We largely lost that fight over a decade ago, but I'm still pissed about it.
I see secondhand hardware and indie devs winning out. I see local AI suffering too. Almost as if they're trying to keep it to themselves.
Why would they ever do that?
What do you mean by 'local AI suffering'?
Did you mean to say 'surviving'?
As in small, less capable, but still potentially useful when used in sane ways... people doing more of that?
Like, the fundamental problem with the idea of local AI dying out as a thing... is that most of the Chinese developed models are developed under a much more open souce type of paradigm.
Its not 100% open source, but its way more open source than than US corpo models.
So... anybody can still download an run one of those.
I've had Qwen3-8B working on my Steam Deck for around a year now. Not super fast, but it does work, and... a Steam Deck is not exactly a juggernaut of GPU compute power.
Anybody with a modern laptop could figure it out.
I've tried a number of local models and even the 8b models aren't that good. Unless there's some insane breakthrough, much better hardware will be required to get the kind of results that would be timely enough or high quality enough to be useful.
So it might drive the kind of performance enhancement that will be needed to truly democratize and make the technology accessible, but until then more performance is needed.
My 2024 laptop has basically increased $800 or so in price because of the buy ups. This will either drive optimization or kill progress or maybe some of each on a continuum.
I also firmly believe that part of the storage and ram buy-up was intended to make higher end compute further out of reach of us plebs, forcing us further into the “everything as a service" model and that corporate AI is a big bet that they can lay off even more people </foil hat time>
That said, if you found good results with qwen, 8b, dm me a link for the specific model, I'd love to try it. I'm still a hobbyist. 😁
I use the Alpaca flatpak, it just lets you download a variety of models, manages them all inside a contained local environment.
Even has some tools support that is expanding, basic web searches, speech to text, text to speech... and if you can find a GGUF format model, supposedly Alpaca can run this manually, and there's a good deal on huggingface.
https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca
Unfortunately, if you're running Windows, I... have no clue how to set up an LLM there.
Also your tin foil hat thing isn't even tin foil hat.
Like, various people in the AI space have outright stated that they want to see a paradigm where everyone just rents compute time from them because PCs are othereise too expensive, while acting like it just happens to be the new reality that everything is so expensive, for some reason.
Nvidia went from gaming GPUs being about 50% of its business to something more like 5%, in about 5 years.
Fortunately the AI bubble will be popping soon, as ... everyone has run out of money to lend.
Unfrotunately this will destroy the economies of the West.
Yay capitalism!
For the moment, I haven't had the motivation to switch everything over to Linux, but it is coming down the line. To that end, I do know how to set up models and windows, and it's not all that hard, but what is the specific model name? Is it just the Quen 8b?
Come to think of it, I might actually be able to install the flat pack into the Windows subsystem for Linux if it behaves the way I think it's supposed to.
Could be a very interesting experiment.
Well, if you're coming from a Windows packground, a flatpak is roughly, to the user at least, similar to an exe.
You download a flatpak, install it, blingo blango it has its own environment that is essentially sandboxed, as it pulls in its own dependencies and such.
But, you'll need to either go with a linux distro that comes with flatpak support pre-configured, or, set up flatpak support on a different distro.
Once you've got either of those, there are free app 'stores' for flatpak that make it extremely simple to browse, download, install a flatpak program.
Then you just click, download Alpaca, run it, and its got a menu, add new models, search through what it has access to, "Qwen 3", 8b parameter variant, download, then use it.
I am personally using Bazzite at the moment, I used to use a bunch of Debian, variants of Debian (Ubuntu, PopOS), have futzed around with Arch and even Void... Bazzite is so far the happy medium I've found between stability, extensibility, and also being pretty close to cutting edge in terms of driver updates and kernel updates.
If you wanna try WSL (which is named backwards, but whatever), I... I have no idea what you'd have to do to get flatpaks working... on... Windows... but if you think you can, best of luck!