So, if you're not in a techbro-adjacent world you might not know this, but a lot of gamer bros have finally started rebelling against AI. Because they were all waiting for Black Friday sales to get new PC parts, but AI companies are buying up all the PC parts, so they all logged in on Black Friday looking for deals and found everything three times as expensive as it was a few months ago. And I mean everything. It's not just GPUs this time like it was with the crypto miners, it's RAM and SSDs and even fucking HDDs.
You tell a gamer bro he can't get a 1TB SSD for less than 200 smackeroos and he'll be against anything you tell him is to blame.
There's also a large migration of gamers to Linux, which came as a surprise to me when I first learned it because the conventional wisdom for so long had been that you can't game on Linux at all. The release of the Steam Deck changed that narrative overnight, since it runs on a custom Linux distro that Valve made because they don't want to deal with Microsoft's bullshit either. The vast majority of PC games now run just fine on Linux, and the only ones that don't are ones that use a specific form of anti-cheat software (mostly online competetive games, like League of Legends). Even that will probably change in the future, since the migration to Linux will incentivize game companies to do their anti-cheat differently.
Most of the linux distros that people are moving to have no AI features and no intention of including them. And, of course, even if some develop them in the future, the linux community can always be counted on to provide a no-AI alternative. They are extremely protective of their disc space, after all. So there is a real coalition building here, in a population that has a lot of cash to use to lean on the powers that be. I think we have some reason to be optimistic.
