Indeed it’s much more similar to time sharing than cloud compute.
But time sharing was never as global and accessible. It was a group in a company or in a university sharing a specific machine.
The currency discussion is different too. Time sharing was just a local fee. Now people are talking about the tokens themselves can do for them.
HN is generally sleeping on the next big tech that is coming for running this stuff locally. Which is quite performant and will soon be in everything.