That $52000/year isn’t enough to pay for even a single full time IT person. So now you’re probably either spending dev time on server admin (which is wasteful of dev salary, and it’s a subject they aren’t experts in, so you’re literally paying more for worse results), or outsourcing to an entity that hires the cheapest employees it can.

Oooor, use a cloud provider. And if you’re a small company, you can probably get away with cheaper shared hosting.

or communicate with real people

You lost me.

If you run your own servers, it’s cheaper than in the cloud. The reason people choose the cloud is either they don’t want to, or can’t, run their own server farm.

Generally speaking, if it wasn’t cheaper for them to use the cloud, they probably wouldn’t. Owning infrastructure comes with costs that amortize better at scale. If infrastructure is not a big cost in serving your customers, then it’s probably cheaper to rent.

A lot of the problems and stupid glitches people had were from playing off of a hard drive. The game really needs flash storage, even if it’s SATA. That should’ve been a recommendation from the start, if not an outright requirement like it is now with 2.0.

Sign up for a month, binge, cancel, next.

That’s not going to last. As soon as they run the numbers and decide it’s worth it, they’ll create ways to lock you in.

I’ll be completely unsurprised when streaming companies start enticing or forcing us into term agreements.

Stopping math is never a good idea. By limiting your own constituents, you set their progress back from what other governments’ constituents can achieve.

Also, effectively replacing a CEO requires AGI level capabilities. We’re closer to that than ever before, but LLMs in their current state aren’t it.