This concept may be the most important of all of the various concepts we cover here or elsewhere. I originally wrote:

Basically like the SETI @Home Project, but for something not pointless

This seems right

Which I feel is a pretty decent tl;dr, but I figured I’d elaborate, though with the hope that the concept should become self evident pretty quickly.

At a high level, you know all of these devices that we have, with their compute, storage and network that makes computers function? Well, do you also know how they spend the majority of their lifetimes sitting around doing fuck all? I mean, outside of the time you spend mindlessly rage scrolling TikTok. And then beyond those devices you actively use, do you know all of the other countless old devices you have literally piling up that you’re unsure what to do with?

More like Mount Neverlast

First, before I get into what can be done with all these wasted devices, here’s a breakdown of the behind the scene bits happening which might cause even more undue confusion:

• Compute - this is how you generate dank feet pix; see also, RAM, GPU and CPU
• Storage - this is where your feet pix go when you click save. Used to be on a flat thingie that was called a floppy disk because it was floppy, then it was a hard disk that was called a floppy disk even though it wasn’t floppy anymore but is now the ubiquitous save icon (💾), then it was a disk that spun in circles, and now it doesn’t spin
• Network - so…the internet is a series of tubes and these tubes are connected by gaskets or something…to share feet pix with one another!

So, basically, when Amazon was busy dominating the retail industry back in the early 2000s a product manager was probably like “Hey, know how we need a whole bunch of this compute, storage and network? I bet other chumps do, too. How about we sell some to them?” and then some marketing fuckwit was probably like “And what if we call it THE CLOUD” to which a sysadmin was like “Wait, what….no!” but then the marketing fuckwit was like “Lalalala, I can't hear you!” and then they got a massive promotion while the technical team had to do actual work.