jns' recent post reminded me of something  Alan Kay said. In the US, you can
expect to pay something like $35,000 for a new car. But computers  cost less
than $2000.   Consumers think of computers  as being  the same as television
sets.  Kay would prefer to spend $35,000 on a computer  but doing that would
be obscure. Only people who know what a computer can do want a $35,000 one. 

My way around this is to apply the RAID idea to computing.  RAID stands  for
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. (Drive manufacturers/retailers  hiking
their prices have erroneously  changed this to Redundant Array of Individual
Disks).    A  trashy   online  VM for a year is comparable  in price   to  a
several-orders-of-magnitude-more-powerful/storageful low energy single board
computer at home. To the extent that you want something not physically  with
you, tildes fulfill that roll and   ex-90s clone corporations  x, y and z do
not  (but consumers  will just do what the sales  reps whose  jobs they envy
say). 

People  who have been bitten  by Google's  asps will say, without meaning  a
syllable   of  it  that they are interested  in  heterogeneous   distributed
computing; my understanding  is that the speaker is repeating something from
a similarly  unlettered native advertising  Kubernetes populariser  blog.  I
lodge this aspersion  because of how no one saying that can describe mpi/the
90s to me (which I also don't like). 

On  the  other  hand to the normalcy  of  distributed   computing,   cluster
computing   feels   kind of obscure  now.  If you have been in  an  academic
setting,  you probably know this ironically  unironic parallel  acceleration
story:   Using GNU parallel to start several concurrent  copies  of a python
script (in time booked on a supercomputer). 

tl;dr I would enjoin you to join me in stuffing our available processors  to
the gills with private key onion/i2p  personal bespoke streaming  algorithms
grinding through our universe.