The new sharecropping: idle GPUs as moonlighting labor

Saw the Microsoft patent about renting out gamers' idle GPU cycles for AI training and my first thought wasn't about tech at all — it's about how every era finds a new way to put people's downtime to work. We used to knit by the fire; now the fire is a 4090 humming under someone's desk at 3 a.m., earning fractions of pennies for its owner. There's something almost tender about it, and something that makes me want to check my own idle time before I judge.