It's tiny, clearly built with love for the user, doesn't do a heck of a lot, and has some interesting ideas that are just fun to mess around in. And unlike some of the similar retrocomputing OS's (which are also lovely but grounded in old fashioned design), genode feels like a glimpse into the good future.
That looks like the most radical/unusual operating system thing I have seen in recent memory. Not sure how practical it is, but kudos for trying something so different.
It's so cool, I could talk about it forever. It's practical enough for the devs to use it as a daily driver (though with linux in VirtualBox or Seoul for some things like running their builds) and theres a few businesses built on it.
But nowhere near as practical as Linux at the moment of course
I had not heard of Genode/Sculpt, but it looks interesting. These days, I feel like if I boot a new operating system, I have no idea what all it's doing and whether or not things are secure--I'm basically relying on the operating system to have good defaults. And then it's so easy to screw something up!
I like the idea of Qubes and it looks like Genode might be an even better idea...
It's a very similar philosophy to Qubes - one of their open challenges is to port the qubes infrastructure over since qubes is (in theory at least) hypervisor independent. https://genode.org/about/challenges Which would be nice since NOVA hypervisor is dramatically less code then Xen and Nitpicker/Dialog for the management console is dramatically less code than Fedora.
I've looked into it briefly but it seems like too much work for me right now.
The True Genode Way of course is that everything worth having would eventually be ported as a native genode component instead of a qubes style VM. They've put a lot of effort into making that as easy as they can with Goa (a nix-inspired package management and build tool) and adding to their C standard library and ports of popular 3rd party libs like SDL
Not sure! They have a system set up for porting drivers from Linux into userspace components so it bats above its size.
From their description: "It is tested best on laptops of the Lenovo X and T series (X220, X250, X260, T430, T460, T470, T490)",
200 isn't on the list but you'd probably have about as good a time as you can
I would argue that computing has never been more personal if you’re willing to put in a little effort. The advent of containerization, miniaturization of PC’s, and overall drop in cost of technology has allowed anyone to run there own personal intranet, homelab, whatever.
If you want to run your own little silo completely disconnected from your fellow human beings then it has never been easier. But that was never really all difficult in the first place. I don't think it's truly the problem that needs to be solved.
Buy-in from the community is indeed the hard part but I have friends running irc and phpbb we hang out in, and matrix is more or less viable to self host for a group chat, it’s just that 100x more people are using Discord and Signal because of network effects, your one account can give you access to a million communities.
I guess activitypub and matrix are meant to be similar in that regard but for whatever reason the learning curve is just a little steeper, so you have to be motivated by ideology to put up with the gaps in usability
Yeah, that network effect is always the hard part once you want/need to reach out past your personal circle. Even with a personal circle it can ha hard to make people use a better but smaller service.
I mean, the building blocks are there, but so much has moved into "the cloud". You can't run Just Photoshop anymore, you can only run CC that sends all your images to them, you can't run Word without running Office 365, you cant run most games without Steam, etc etc. And all of the exciting new software is -As-A-Service
So while there's more options now for homelab things the overall ecosystem has moved strongly away so there's a lot more to avoid
> you can only run CC that sends all your images to them
It doesn’t send all your images to Adobe, it only sends the ones you choose to save in the cloud.
If you want to complain about having to subscribe to the software instead of purchasing outright, then do that. Don’t complain about something that isn’t happening.
Aside from the Cloud bullshit, Photoshop's auto-update is a pain. After some regression I disabled updates right after they fixed it. But recently when I open Photoshop, it's started giving me a nagging popup about being out-of-date. It's done more-or-less the same thing for many years, just take my subscription money and leave me alone!
One of the aspects I've wondered about is the software bundled with either the OS or by the device manufacturer. When PCs (broadly, not just IBM compatibles) were penetrating into the home market they would often come with a suite of tools or demos to show what it could do, or let you create things even if they were the basic editions. Before the internet became part of the furniture, if you'd spent several hundreds on some hot technology there was a good chance you'd buy print magazines for it as well, and they would come with cover discs that exposed people to a lot of what was possible with computing.
Without wanting to sound like a stick in the mud, the focus of computing has definitely changed now. I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.
> I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.
That is a great way of thinking about it and I'm curious what you've come up with. I think it's a pretty hard sell for most people, especially for things like messaging that have become very central to daily life. Also, there's a big difference between convincing someone to try something a bit less mainstream and convincing them to reject the mainstream version. Like, you may be able to get someone to install LibreOffice but it's a lot harder to get them to uninstall Excel.
Anecdotally, I've found that people who have some other kind of retro/niche/subculture interest can be somewhat more receptive to the idea that the newest thing isn't necessarily the greatest. Like someone who's into hunting for vintage clothes, or woodworking, or whatever. Ironically such people are on average more tech-averse than a typical "normie", but they often understand the concept that it can be useful to actually put effort into getting something that's not just whatever's handed to you. In a way the insidious aspect of recent tech is the way it's conditioned people to expect that they shouldn't have to think much about how to do things, and to just want "smart" technology that reduces decisions.
My $dayjob involves lots of officework as in paperwork.
You bet your fucking ass I'm using Microsoft Office and reliant on it to a bloody fault. I literally and sincerely can't rely on LibreOffice to open and save documents in ways that everyone else would. If I use LibreOffice then at best I'll embarass myself, at worst I'll waste someone's time and either way I risk losing business for no good reason.
A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre. Nobody understands nor gives a damn about Libre in the real, professional world because the lingua franca is Industry aka Microsoft Office.
But corporate computing is also suffering from the deteriorating user experience.
I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.
The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.
Yup, anyone who suggests LibreOffice (or some other alternative suite) as a sufficient substitute for MS Office is someone who's never actually done real-world work with external stakeholders. Practically everyone else uses MS Office, which means you must too.
I learned this first-hand when I was a grad student and had to write a technical report to submit to our government funders (using their required MS Office templates and all). I used LibreOffice and saved it as DOCX and everything looked great. Then my advisor opened it on his computer running MS Office and asked me WTF was up with all the mangled formatting.
> A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre.
The subscription fee is only part of the cost though. Another cost is that if Office works in a certain way that causes you problems your only choice is to adapt your workflow (or more likely, live with those problems).
Your definition of "anyone" is pretty skewed toward the tech-savvy.
Spend some time in the tech support desk of a mobile phone store to get an idea of the general level of technical sophistication of the average person. Average folks are not running containers. They're not installing... anything... except maybe an app from an App Store. Half of them aren't sure what a file is.
But the hardware availability and affordability gives them the opportunity to learn and experiment if they want to.
Even tech-savvy people couldn't do that a decade or 2 ago. Not on a budget.
it is all about growing complexities/limitations and convenience.
even at the software level, you are reliant on the os makers allowing certain things to happen. i could not care less about homelab if at the end of the day you need to pay to get syncthing working [1] on your ios device and only sync certain files.
Also, looking at abandoned blogs and old photos of people lying next to their computers from the early 2000s is so interesting. It captures a time when people truly connected with their machines and made them part of their identity.
Hmm - rather than identity, I suspect it was more of a marketing trope.
I associate this genre of photo with the photo-shoots with Gates, Jobs and others. All the interviews and full page ads in the 80s 90s had variations of sitting/lying on desks, hugging CRT monitors or the classic folded-arms lean on a CRT from behind.
I don't recall old-school blogs doing this or really having author photos at all (photos on that bandwidth/hosting?!) but I imagine whenever a blogger was interviewed for print media they would lean on the "computer person" standards.
- legalizing DRM circumvention (repealing DMCA section 1201)
- comprehensive privacy legislation (US adopting GDPR+)
- right to repair legislation.
- antitrust action and enforcement against tech companies
As he notes, these are currently non-starters because of legislative and regulatory capture.
But even if they were implemented, laws and regulatory enforcement might not have the desired effect. Surveillance capitalism, adtech, and data brokers seem to be surprisingly GDPR-resistant, and California's CCPA seems to have had minimal effect. Right-to-repair is limited by miniaturization and component integration, and the result seems to be Apple's impractical and expensive repair kits. Antitrust seems to be ineffective (see IBM, Microsoft.) Even the DMA, carefully crafted to target Apple, Google, Meta et al. (and to extract billions from them for noncompliance) doesn't seem to be affecting the dominance of those companies just yet.
> "Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage."
...the quote, *AS A SOUNDBITE*, only sounds good on a surface level, but collapses under the slightest test. All products in some form or another increase the usage of resources in order to reach a certain goal.
The article, where the quote originates from, contextualizes the quote marking (a) the difference between products in service of an actual goal, (b) products that are only meant to look good on a balance sheet, and (c) how companies have morphed towards (b) in order to attract investor funds and increase share prices / company market values.
The quote, BY ITSELF AND WITHOUT CONTEXT, is a twisted Neo-luddist version of its original self.
I think a more generous interpretation of this is simply one that is critiquing planned obsolescence and addicting algorithm. Some things need to increase usage by nature, but how many services have you used that really needed a subscription as a necessary model to work?
My hot take is planned obsolescence doesn't exist.
It's a side effect of items being built to cost, and the marketing phenomenon that consumers follow fashion trends.
Your car doesn't have planned obsolescence: it has a warranty period. If you want a longer one, you'll pay more because that is not a free service to provide.
That’s a reductionist view. Have you read “Made to Break” by Giles Slade? A great book on this subject. Make no mistake, there’s a lot of deliberate planning and effort that goes into designing things to break after a point in time, for nothing else but profit, the environment be damned.
I think it means increase usage of the thing itself, and I think it's a good insight. While there is a natural supply and demand curve, unscrupulous growth-focused businesses optimize their products (unhealthy food) and services (gambling, social media, mobile games) for high levels of consumption (at least for a portion of vulnerable users), irrespective of harmful effects. It's the tobacco industry model reborn.
That's a side effect of the way we've educated the market to expect everything to be "free." That leaves the only option available being indirect monetization through ads or in-app purchases or something similar to that.
Once upon a time, it was illegal to discount something to gain market share and then charge extra once you've bullied out your competition. Technically it's still illegal, but good luck finding enforcement.
This is called dumping and yes it was and maybe still is illegal with things like commodities and manufactured goods.
It was never enforced with software or services. If it had the entire standard VC startup playbook would be different.
It’s also never been enforced internationally. China has arguably been subsidizing its industries and effectively dumping cheap manufactured goods for years to become the workshop of the world, and it works.
It was funny when the corporatists here blamed consumers for using free (or “free” or whatever) services, falling into the FB trap etc. As if that mattered at all? As if FB and its ilk wouldn’t use the Free strategy every time in order to grow humoungous or fail? Of course they would bet their money on network effects over getting money in the short term—there’s no point in a boutique social network. Those hypothetical consumers who wanted to pay upfront for a 2K user social network (patently irrational but okay) would have remained unserviced.
The author claims, "Internet surveillance, the algorithmic polarization of social media, predatory app stores, and extractive business models have eroded the freedoms the personal computer once promised, effectively ending the PC era for most tech consumers."
I'm not required to use social media and extractive business models. Intenet surveillance is lamentable but I don't see why he thinks app stores are predatory. The PC is still mostly a force for freedom. The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
> I'm not required to use social media and extractive business models.
Most people do use them though.
> The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
I completely disagree. Most people aren't actually communicating. At least not in any form that matters. The drastic increase in loneliness and depression that correlates with the increase in connectivity should at least show that more social media doesn't mean more happy.
Sadly relatable to a lot of real life. Modern people don't talk "to" each other some portion of the time. They talk past each other in this mimicry of discussion.
That's kinda what I was thinking too. There is a privacy loss for sure, but the average consumer also gained things for that loss.
Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :)
Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad.
Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.
> I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but...
Remember how its uptime was limited to 49.7 days because of a timer's numeric overflow (and in something like an audio driver, too, it shouldn't have been system critical). Good times.
A lot of computing in the 90s and earlier was terribly unstable. And that was without considering how prevalent viruses were in the 90s, too.
> Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping.
And that was absolutely okay and would still be okay. We don't need free same-day shipping. Free same-day shipping is basically a drug that people have gotten addicted to.
App stores are middlenen who dictate what users get to see and consume, while taking 30% from what's approved. I think thars eye predatory part.
Apple is the much more obvious offender, even for stuff not traditionally stigmatized against. Microsoft struggled to release Xcloud becsuse Apple didn't want a game streaming service on IOS. Meanwhile, steaming music, videos, and anything that works on its purposefully botched internet was fine.
>The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
Definitely a contentious take these days, given recent events.
You're equating avoiding mass-market social media with becoming a hermit on a remote island.
But you're here, saying that on HN.
I've seen people say similar things on Reddit, in IRC channels, on blogs, Gemlogs, Mastodon posts, and other similar venues, without realizing the irony of it.
The previous comment was complaining that we can't improve the situation, as there are no viable alternatives, in a discussion that is taking place on one of the alternatives. That's the irony.
Bizarre stretch of logic to extract an irony. Meta platforms in particular (facebook and whatsapp) are in many countries an almost exclusive intermediary to any online communication. You are basically incapacitated if you do not use them.
Thats true, but its theoretical. As an individual you frequently face a take it or leave it option. Have you ever tried to move an existing community e.g., from Whatsapp to Signal or can you do anything if an entire country has chosen to reside on Facebook? In the short term, you either accept defeat and learn to love the adtech bomb or you withdraw into the digital wilderness. In the long term... we are all dead.
> Have you ever tried to move an existing community e.g., from Whatsapp to Signal or can you do anything if an entire country has chosen to reside on Facebook?
What does an "entire country" have to do with it? People move online communities between platforms all the time -- and many communities have presences on multiple platforms.
> In the short term, you either accept defeat and learn to love the adtech bomb or you withdraw into the digital wilderness.
I'm just not seeing the argument here. Suppose you've got 50 users on Discord and would prefer to move to Matrix. So you post a link to the Matrix channel on your Discord server, lock stuff for further posting in Discord, and update external links and documents. People do this sort of stuff all the time without being "defeated".
yeah, thats pretty clear. Because you choose to focus on cases where you do have agency to do something, e.g. its my discord and I am moving us to matrix - and goodbye to those who will not migrate.
Now think about an established group where you are a simple member and you say, "hey folks, why don't we move to something that is better for us, no ads, no data collection, etc."? And they look at you with glazed eyes, and... shrug, and that is the end of the conversation. Now what Don Quixote?
> What does an "entire country" have to do with it?
In countries with high facebook/meta adoption if you want up-to-date information about an event or an establishment it may only exist on meta platforms. Only larger entities can afford to have an independent website, and many such sites are typically in a state of disrepair and neglect.
As an individual trying to go against so-called network effects most of the time you have very little leverage. Its really fighting against wind mills.
> Because you choose to focus on cases where you do have agency to do something, e.g. its my discord and I am moving us to matrix - and goodbye to those who will not migrate.
I guess I'm not sure of what scenario wouldn't align with this in terms of an extant community?
> And they look at you with glazed eyes, and... shrug, and that is the end of the conversation. Now what Don Quixote?
I think I understand what you're getting at now -- you're looking at it from the perspective of a user who doesn't manage the community or administer its technology.
But I'm not sure this is really on target. The relevant arguments, and the call to action that applies here, are for the people managing online communities. And one of the calls to action should be to listen to and consider what users are saying when they propose alternative technologies.
> Only larger entities can afford to have an independent website
I actually think going back is a good idea. Throw in an almost free Raspberry Pi Pico, install a 6502-based machine emulator, make it launch at startup and straight away go full screen and you are good to go.
I'm thinking about experimenting that with myself and my son when he is older. But he is of the impatient type so maybe this is a bad idea as vintage computers typically need more focus and research.
Maybe a DOS emulator then. It has better tools and games.
I always thought it would be cool to have a PC that you just turn on and in 200 milliseconds, you're at a Python REPL or something. Like the old Commodore 64 that booted you right to BASIC from ROM. No POST, no beep, no detecting this and initializing that. No fucking splash screen. Just power switch on and BAM, you're at the prompt.
According to a Google search, a typical C64 was on in 3 seconds. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about how long it took, because my recollection was that it was basically instant.
Hell, my monitor can't even turn on in 3 seconds. You hit the power button and it gets busy doing... something... who knows what... not turning on, that's for sure.
our brains adapt for "better" fast - faster feedback loops, crisper images, higher resolution, etc - and it's really hard to go back. I'd imagine it's something around the reward system of the brain. I grew up with Z80s and CRT monitors, and my brain remembers Enduro as a vivid and fast game. Reality is completely different when you try it out for a second, after having lived in an era of iPhones and 8k displays. It's crazy how uncomfortable even a device from 5 years ago feels...
This is what I'm afraid of. Back then I had the patience to tinker with a 8086 IBM PC (to no avail as my father wanted me to study for IOI which bored me out so he never taught me anything about computer) because it was the new thing and had some games I can play. Nowadays my 4 year old son is already hooked to my in-laws' Tiktok. We are trying to pull him off but unless they leave it's going to be difficult.
I don't know what the future lies. I'm fully prepared that my son is going to have zero common interest with me.
I'm thinking what is a best solution for quick game programming. Python still seems to be a little heavy. What do you think? I used to read a few magazines that have Python game program listings which is very cool, but sadly it stopped publishing a few years ago.
As you can see, it is currently written in Haskell, as a PoC. But I am re-writing it in Rust, for reasons that also include making it possible to do something like you ask for.
Pedantic, but the Pico is a microcontroller that'd be running a very thin emulator and would have no operating system, so no concept of applications, "full screen" or video output at all. A Pi Zero would be great for that purpose, though.
Might be a bit too bespoke, but there's a company that actually repurposes old industrial x86 motherboards and builds old DOS/Windows 9x PCs for modern usage.
> How many Nintendo Entertainment System games sustained themselves with in-app purchases and microtransactions? What more did the console ask of you after you bought a cartridge? Maybe to buy another one later if it was fun?
True, but unlike the Apple II, the NES was not an open system. The NES had hardware DRM, which allowed Nintendo to control what games were published for the system and to charge licensing fees (much as Nintendo, or Apple, do today). Nintendo also tried (unsuccessfully) to shut down Game Genie.
In 1992, you more options. Your friends could tell you for free, you could stumble on them yourself, or you could get them with a magazine or book (which you didn't necessarily have to buy, you could just flip through it at the store and memorize the cheats.)
> you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number
I remember the ads for that but I've never met a single person who did that. (Or whose parents would be okay with it.) Cheat codes were either shared by word of mouth among friends or in magazines. Or you bought a game genie, but that was more for messing around with a game's mechanics than actual, blatant cheating.
Tbf, very few Switch games "sustain themselves with in-app purchases and microtransactions". Especially relative to the number of games which is an order of magnitude greater.
Very good summary of all the things that have gone wrong with tech (and this is a long and growing list). The part on how to recover from this unfortunate mess is a bit handwavy though.
Not that there are ready made solutions that are being ignored, but if we are going to move beyond conceptual statements it will require some pretty potent medicines that can start fighting the cancer by taking it head on.
The enshittification is now in an advanced stage and the billions of addicted masses an enormous inertial weight. Witness e.g., the grotesque politics around the tiktok non-ban.
Imho a key ingredient is to ditch the focus on the "personal" and start thinking of "interpersonal computing" (just made that term up). Basically personal computing that is network-first, web-native. The owner-operator is empowered to join the matrix, find their way around without gatekeepers, connect with agency, exchange, filter, process with helpful and transparent algorithms and get on top of the informatiom firehose. Nothing radically new in terms of hardware or software, just rearranged furniture to serve citizens, not some digital oligarchy.
The huge success of social media is because it tapped into the immense sociability of our species. Somehow we need to reclaim that trait for the good side of technology, with devices and software that are actually desirable without being leeches that suck society dry.
This article really resonated with me. Unfortunately I think things aren't going back. What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet.
The market wanted growth. Early tech companies, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and then Google, went from zero to huge in a very short period of time. But companies like the FAANGs kept up the absurd levels of growth (20+% YoY growth in the case of Google) that Wall Street got hooked on, and it's been on a drug binge ever since. The result is that we have multiple trillion dollar companies that will...never not want to be a trillion dollar company.
The total amount of money in the PC market was miniscule compared to today, and the internet and its online retail plus ads bonanza even dwarfed that. The PC software market, the video games industry, everything--it was all so much smaller. As the internet swallowed the world, it brought billions of users. And those billions of users can only use so many devices and so many games and spreadsheets and stuff. They had to be made into cash cows in other ways.
The tech market just has to keep growing. It's stuck tripping forward and must generate revenue somehow to keep the monsters' stomachs fed (and their investors too). We will never be free of their psychotic obsession with monetization.
And advertising is soooo insidious. Everything looks like it's free. But it isn't. Because our eyeballs and our mindshare is for sale. And when they buy our eyeballs their making back those dollars of us--it's the whole point. So whether you like it or not, you're being programmed to spend money in other parts of your life that you wouldn't otherwise. It cannot move any direction but falling forward into more consumerism.
I'm afraid I'm a doomer in this regard. We're never going back to not being bothered to death by these assholes who want to make money off us 24/7.
I think it's easy to forget that computing technology is a tool. Of course it was bound to be huge today, because it's supposed to be a tool in the toolbox of every company. It wasn't as big back then because not every industry could incorporate it right away, knew how to, or was interested in doing so.
It's not bad that it's big. It only needs to grow because the rest of the economy needs to grow.
I am also afraid you're a doomer in this regard. You don't think the bigwigs with their fax machines in the 1980s wanted to make money off of us 24/7? Of course they did.
Tech is scary in the sense that it's now gone quite a bit beyond the understanding of the average joe. Even most of us on this site probably don't fully understand how much detail data can paint a picture of a person. There are companies that probably know something about me that I don't even know.
I guess I don't know how to alleviate that feeling, and maybe it's the correct default assumption to be a doomer. It certainly would be very helpful if the US treated the situation more like the EU treats the situation.
In some respects, I agree. Yet I don't think we have to put up with it all of the time. Most of the technology in our life is either frivilous or has a workable alternative. It is not as though we have to abandon technology in, or even current technology in pursuit of the personal. Yes, it involves making more careful decisions. Yes, it will likely be limited to people with technical knowledge. On the other hand, that was true of computing in the 1980's and largely true of computing in the 1990's.
In many respects, we are also better off than we were in the 1980's. There are more of us, we are connected globally, and the tools that we have access to are significantly better. We also have a conceptual framework to work within. Technically speaking, Free Software may have existed back then but few people even knew of it. People were struggling with ideas like public domain software (rarely with an understanding of what that meant). If you wanted to make money, outside of traditional publishing channels, you were usually toying with ideas like shareware (where you had pretty much no control over distribution). If you wanted to spend money of software, outside of traditionally published stuff, chances are that you had to send cheques or cash to somebody's house.
And then there is communicating with likeminded people. We may like to complain about things like Discord or Reddit, but they are not the only players on the block. Plenty of people still run small or private forums. Yeah, they can be hard to find. On the other hand, that has more to do with the noise created by the marketplace rather than their lack of presence.
The problem with the nimby/ecofascist/exclusionary perspectives is the obvious retort is always "okay, yes there are too many people in this domain. The solution then is for you to quit, not me." And substitute whichever group doesn't encompass you which usually falls along racial, gender, or class lines. At the end of it, no one wants to fall on their sword for everyone else.
The thing is the older I get, the more it does seem like at the very least we are not growing pie in a number of areas (the example at the top of my mind is academia) and sometimes it just seems like an easier solution is to decrease the numerator. But I don't know how you can do that and justify it morally, both to society and to yourself.
It is the legal system that hasn't caught up with how tech scales seemingly small damage.
What were small conflicts of interest before (a little trash here or there, a little use of personal information for corporate instead of customer benefit here or there, ...) now scales to billions of people. And dozens of transactions, impressions, actions, points of contact, etc., a day for many of us.
That not only makes it more pervasive, but massively profitable, which has kicked in a feedback loop for sketchy behavior, surveillance, coercion, gatekeeping, etc., driven by hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and trillions in potential market caps.
Things that were only slightly unethical before, now create vast and growing damage to our physical and mental environments.
It should simply be illegal to use customer information in a way not inherent to the transaction in question. Or to gather data on customers from other sources. Or share any of that data.
It should be illegal, to force third party suppliers to pay a tax to hardware makers, for any transaction that doesn't require their participation. And participation cannot be made mandatory.
Etc.
One commonality here, is that there is often a third party involved. Third party gatekeeper. Third party advertisers. Third parties introduce conflicts. (This is different from non-personalized ads on a site they have relevance for, which are effectively two independent, 2-party transactions.)
Another commonality, is the degree to which many third party actors, those we know, and many we never hear of, who "collude" with respect to dossiers, reaching us, and milking us by many coordinated means.
> It is the legal system that hasn't caught up with how tech scales seemingly small damage.
Most administrations are squishy-soft on corporate crime. If there were regular antitrust prosecutions, violations of Federal Trade Commission regulations were crimes, wage theft was treated as theft, forging safety certifications was prosecuted as forgery, and federal law on warranties was strictly enforced, most of the problems would go away.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all that was normal. The Americans who lived through WWII were not putting up with that sort of thing.
The economy was also wildly different back then - there were massive, fundamental, competitive advantages the US was continuing to reap due to being on the winning side of WW2 (in every way).
For instance, nearly every country was paying the US loans back, in USD, or was having to depend on the US in some way.
Nearly every other country in the world had their industrial base (and often male population) crushed in the war.
Etc.
Those things cost money/effort, and require a consistent identity and discipline.
It's time we give up on the majority of people who don't care for freedom and focus on the few that do.
Unfortunately at the time we need them the most pretty much every pro-user organization is imploding because everyone and their grandmother wants to turn them into vehicles for whatever their pet cause is.
Also, even if they're not, they're getting squeezed out. It's hard to stay afloat trying to just do a thing without your eye on the "prize" of getting bought out by Google et al.
>What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet.
I understand it and know it. But I don't appreciate it either (in the sense of liking it).
Is the free thing really an issue? TV and Radio were free for decades and both still are. TV switched to cable, through broadcast still exists, but radio is still free. I'm not convinced advertising is insidious. Maybe because I grew up with it. I used to pay for ads. Magazines in the 80s and 90s had ads and we bought them not just for the article but to see what new products were being announced. You can go look through them on the archive. They're 70% ads and yet we loved them.
I mean, the solution is inside your definition of the problem. Infinite capital growth isn't possible. They will either finally make their products unusable or collapse. When they have collapsed enough and we have reached the plateau of innovation someone will make some basic device interoperable with everything and leave us be to count their millions instead of billions.
Its just another bubble, one predicated on mining the users rather than expanding the product.
1. They are doing a little bit of revisionist history, as the industry was fiercly capitalist and proprietary at that time.
2. This topic really does feel rather beaten to death and I think the target audience is not getting any new information.
Speaking specifically about the revisionist history part:
> At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment.
Was it? The PC has its roots in IBM, and it became the target product to clone because, since the project was something of a sidenote to IBM's main business, IBM was too cheap/lazy/wahtever to develop proprietary parts. They cobbled together a system that was easy to clone, perhaps entirely by accident.
The PC wasn't a universal compatible open standard because of tech liberty, it was a compatible standard because (among other reasons) Microsoft introduced a new OS business model where PC clones fighting each other over low margins benefitted Microsoft. Before Microsoft DOS, each PC was its own moat with its own hardware, its own operating system, and its own proprietary software. Microsoft made everything easy and wonderful as long as you kept using Windows.
Apple operated back with the OS/hardware/software moat back then and that's essentially how they continue to operate. They are the only company that survived after that era using that fully proprietary business model and still operates that way.
As another commenter pointed out, Nintendo was ruthless about hardware DRM and was a full blown monopoly in their heyday. That's why your parents always call it "Nintendo" instead of "video games," because there was no other vendor anywhere near as successful at that time.
Another example of a lack of tech liberty, "Don't Copy that Floppy" was all over the place, a phrase that I've heard injected into Computer Chronicles episodes. Companies were doing all kinds of things to try and prevent you from inspecting, modifying, and copying their software.
The Linux kernel didn't exist until 1991, and most UNIX flavors were proprietary.
The only reason that era didn't have invasive privacy and data extraction problems is because it wasn't feasible, not because it was an era and movement that had excellent tech liberty.
Compare that to today, and it's actually today that's much more of an era of personal computing freedom. I certainly wasn't using an open source web browser, open source IDE, open source server operating system, open source graphics driver, open source PDF editor/viewer, or much other open source software in the 90's. It would have been unthinkable back then to use an open source program to do something like 3D graphics rendering, that would have been reserved for 5-figure Silicon Graphics workstations. And good luck replacing Adobe with something open source.
Hosting a major commercial website for a fortune 100 company on an open source operating system? You would be laughed out of town.
Most older closed systems were vanquished by the end of the 80s, early 90s.
Unfortunately, the mobile revolution didn't work that way. Regular folks don't care about open, flexible, and cheap. Only convenient and cheap. The gravity of those folks has led us here.
The embrace of Apple’s ecosystem shows that many people, especially those in tech, prioritise this aspect less. I just wish people would stop doing mental gymnastics to "justify" their choice—not because I think it’s hypocritical, but because I believe there’s no wrong choice here, only personal preference. If you feel the need to justify your decision, it might be because it doesn’t fully align with your true values.
Personally, I feel passionately about being held back from innovating due to legal and corporate anti-competitive barriers. I feel that these artificial barriers contribute to a less competitive environment and increases the problem of e-waste.
# The barriers put in place by companies to prevent their hardware from being tinkered with
Locked bootloaders and the absence of hardware documentation to base the development of drivers on is an example of this.
This prevents the community from taking over when a device reaches end of life or expanding a device to be more useful/open than the company originally intended.
Examples of this are:
- Apple's M-series Macs/MacBooks. While the hardware is remarkable, Apple's anti-competitive practices manifest in MacOS holding the devices back from their potential. Asahi Linux is an indicator of demand and its success is remarkable given what they are up against. If Apple was compelled to provide reference documentation of their hardware sufficient for driver development then the resulting alternative operating systems introduces competition to an otherwise stagnant market.
- Microsoft's Surface laptops and broadly the new X-Elite hardware lineup shares the same criticism as Apple's platform
- Mobile phones. Imagine an iPhone running Android. Imagine a Galaxy, Pixel, etc running Linux where Android apps are executed within Waydroid containers? Not going to happen because we are either blocked by bootloaders or blocked by a lack of drivers (deliberately hidden by manufacturers)
- Better health trackers. Imagine buying a FitBit, installing an community maintained operating system that has no subscription fees and handles health inference through transparent algorithms that can be contributed to by academics around the world.
# No "right to repair" software as it's practically illegal
It's virtually illegal to repair software. Decompiling software and fixing it, even if it's end of life, can land you in court.
There are so many software projects out there that I would personally love to revive. Think of games like Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Anyway, I've been ranting too much on this topic but you get the idea. I wish governments would grant people protection to tinker/improve hardware AND software and compel corporations to provide sufficient documentation to practically enable that.
Good rant. The answer is decentralization technologies as much as it is anything else. Open protocols that create holistic but freely evolving systems without a central gatekeeper. That's how you compete with the technopolies.
Maybe legislation and culture or something can help also, but it will be most effective if part of that is adopting and spreading the right technology to facilitate those changes.
I think people are ready (if not yearning) for a much larger, personal web, built with a different set of incentives. The problem appears to be that the technical class currently lacks the imagination (or more specifically, a kind of epistemological hunger, a craving to deepen the mystery of their craft) to synthesize the new reality of the web with the freedom of the old. I see what the designers are working on, and there's clearly a very large gap of communication between what people want to see in the Web, and what the people in charge of the Web can be bothered to make.
I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p
There’s plenty of people with the imagination, skills, and doing their best. If you don’t see them you’re not looking hard enough.
The problem is that those people have families to feed and clothe and housing and utilities to pay for and you can’t expect them to work for free (or a pittance) when they’d need to be paid a high 5 figure/low 6 figure salary to be able to afford their basic cost of living.
Users broadly don’t want to pay and will turn up their nose at having to spend $50 a year on a service or $10 on an app built by honest people with privacy and respect of the user in mind (when they don’t have any issues blowing hundreds of dollars on much more ridiculous things that don’t respect them as customers, but that’s another story…)
And on top of that, how do you make your services known when trillion dollar companies will always beat you in ad spending while offering a free product they have hundreds of people working on?
As an example from just a couple days ago, Read.cv just announced they were shutting down and acqui-hired by Perplexity even though they were a lean 3-person team with a monetized product that their users loved. They were at it for 4 years and couldn’t make it work.
Very sincerely: good luck, I hope you succeed in your goals.
But just as sincerely, if you truly believe the real problem is that the technological class lacks an “epistemological hunger” and not the basic money/visibility issues I raised above, you’re in for a rude awakening.
yeah, tough times, taking home 6 figures with good benefits year after year, stock prices at historic highs, taking their picks from the housing bubble, voting for idiots while the world burns... I don't quite get why you're complaining to me about these things, but obviously I'm not talking about people who are struggling to "feed and clothe" their families?
> you’re in for a rude awakening
I've seen how techies spend their time, I'm not the one in for a rude awakening.
I appreciate your curiosity. The premise is simple: the Web of 2025 is still a primitive sketch that leaves 99% of the medium’s potential unrealized. Why? Because the technical 1% writes all the code, while the rest spend all their time merely navigating that code, generating user data. This rigid division between creator and user is built into every level of the software industry, yet it’s what limits the development of much more complex, massively collaborative, personalized applications based on an abundance of ideas and free exchange of code.
I started the work by recognizing that, in a world of LLM coding assistants, there is no longer a minimum bar for code literacy; it is now a spectrum, along which everyone is capable of unique creation, no matter their sophistication. The winning platforms of this age will be ones built from scratch to accommodate and leverage this new massive creative potential, by dismantling the professional class’ monopoly on software production.
While there are nice ideas in general, too much of it is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. And this makes the argument to go back to these ideals kinda icky. If we really want to do something, we should have a real critical look at why we're here in the first place IMHO, and this isn't it.
> For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place.
The nerds (dare I say "we" ?) made the world a different and more connected place, with clear evolutions in regarding finance, productivity and science.
Does it make the world a better place ? Did the productivity and finance improvements bring a better and more welcoming society for instance ?
It can be argued either way, but that question can't be glossed over as a given IMHO.
Then there is no reflection on how computing has become a commodity. It still needs more freedom and control, but these two ideals don't mean the same thing if you're a 30yo single DevOps engineer or a 50yo at home parent watching over 5 kids. Both need computing, but the purpose and intricate needs are completely different. Focusing only on one because it's easier kinda misses the point IMHO (and we're back to the role of technology and how exactly it makes the world better)
Things change. Some for the better, others for the worse, but not all these changes are bad and some are inevitable, and it's not s if the past was all roses anyway.
What is a coin in an arcade videogame if it's not a microtransaction?
Software as a service is just different, and it's not all bad. You have automated upgrades, a consistently funded developer that can better plan and deliver updates, if you only need the software for a short period of time it can be cheaper. Frankly the packaged software approach was a kludge due to the technical limitations of the time. Now if big releases make sense developers do that, if incremental updates over time provided as a service make sense, they can do that.
Most of the section on what we can do about all this is focused on stuff that didn't exist in the past. The internet and online services, social media. Going back to the past wouldn't be to do those in some ideal way that used to exist, it would mean not doing them at all. Sure.
There is no ideal past to go back to without pulling the online plug. However, that plug isn't going away, and we don't actually want it to. The "How we can reclaim control" bit at the end is mostly correct, but it's really about coming to grips with managing the new reality, not going back to a situation we've outgrown.
On my days those microtransactions were 20 escudos, 25 escudos, 50 escudos, 50 euros (great deal with this one, 1 euro == 200.482 escudos), 1 euro, eventually arcades died after this.
Yeah people often say "you love things that are invented before you're 35, and you hate the things after that".
But do young people really love this hyper-commercial internet these days? All the subscription services? The empty social media content?
I do see what they mean a bit because I'm pretty sceptical of AI, though I did set up my own server to experiment with it in a way where my stuff doesn't end up in the cloud.
Young people use social media as time-wasters, self-promotion avenues, or ways to boost their business and use group chats to do most of their actual communications. Techies really love to get angry about social networks but the reality is younger folks know how to treat social media the same way older people know to take random internet comments with a grain of salt.
The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone.
Well I don't really get angry about socials. Just don't use them.
> The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone.
Well in that way it's still there. It lives on here on HN and the other places you mention. Probably as big as it was in those days. I don't think it's really gone. Just the internet grew around it with all the commercial BS and big tech companies viewing users as products.
Also, us techies manage to avoid the worst of that with adblockers, pay wall blockers, pirate video downloads, self hosted services etc. I probably see only a handful of ads every day. Even my phone blocks most of them. I also have custom scripts for the sites I frequent the most to make them more info dense like hacker news (and remove most of the big photos)
Honestly, techies like us will always have an edge on how we produce and consume digital information. Folks who do home maintenance like jobs can often do repairs and customizations on their on homes or rental properties much cheaper than the average person. Plenty of other jobs give comparative advantages. These comparative advantages are IMO a fun output of human diversity.
We’ve been working on a new kind of home computer for a few years now based around microcontrollers. Unlike a traditional setup, it’s aimed at replacing the traditional light switch to provide environmental awareness and bring families closer together. Although the base OS is not open source, the SDK is totally scriptable, meaning as an owner you will be able to trace and understand the device fully.
Examples of what it can do
- Autonomous lighting with mmWave radar with 180 degrees fov and ambient light sensor
- Recording of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and VOX to onboard SQLite database at a chosen interval.
- Onboard web server, which serves as dashboard and configuration page.
- Communication platform with integrated microphone (hardware indicator light, off by default) and speakers. I’m also experimenting with talking to LLMs like this.
And many more things. If you’d like to reach us hello [at] sentionic.com
Yes. The thinking was: displays are all around you already. Why not build an ambient computing platform. If it replaces infrastructure in your home it needs to provide enough value. I think we’ve covered that now, but it’s taken a few years.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadIt's tiny, clearly built with love for the user, doesn't do a heck of a lot, and has some interesting ideas that are just fun to mess around in. And unlike some of the similar retrocomputing OS's (which are also lovely but grounded in old fashioned design), genode feels like a glimpse into the good future.
But nowhere near as practical as Linux at the moment of course
I think it'd be very cool to have a fully verified kernel...
I like the idea of Qubes and it looks like Genode might be an even better idea...
I've looked into it briefly but it seems like too much work for me right now.
The True Genode Way of course is that everything worth having would eventually be ported as a native genode component instead of a qubes style VM. They've put a lot of effort into making that as easy as they can with Goa (a nix-inspired package management and build tool) and adding to their C standard library and ports of popular 3rd party libs like SDL
They dont assume you want a RAM-Only filesystem. By default it starts out completely immutable with nothing being able to save anything anywhere.
If you want to save anything to a hard drive you have to enable that driver because they don't assume that you'd need one.
Copy and paste is an optional extra to install
It's wild :p
From their description: "It is tested best on laptops of the Lenovo X and T series (X220, X250, X260, T430, T460, T470, T490)", 200 isn't on the list but you'd probably have about as good a time as you can
I guess activitypub and matrix are meant to be similar in that regard but for whatever reason the learning curve is just a little steeper, so you have to be motivated by ideology to put up with the gaps in usability
While im willing to out up with it, its a hard sell to get your friends to use something worse
So while there's more options now for homelab things the overall ecosystem has moved strongly away so there's a lot more to avoid
> you can only run CC that sends all your images to them
It doesn’t send all your images to Adobe, it only sends the ones you choose to save in the cloud.
If you want to complain about having to subscribe to the software instead of purchasing outright, then do that. Don’t complain about something that isn’t happening.
They do use the images you upload to train their (non-generative) AI for things like background removal.
Without wanting to sound like a stick in the mud, the focus of computing has definitely changed now. I see it as an interesting thought exercise on how to get someone running around with what is usually a marvel of computing in their pocket to try and imagine that is not the apex of computing, whether to explore what other means of computing offer or what comes next besides a slightly better version of what we have now.
That is a great way of thinking about it and I'm curious what you've come up with. I think it's a pretty hard sell for most people, especially for things like messaging that have become very central to daily life. Also, there's a big difference between convincing someone to try something a bit less mainstream and convincing them to reject the mainstream version. Like, you may be able to get someone to install LibreOffice but it's a lot harder to get them to uninstall Excel.
Anecdotally, I've found that people who have some other kind of retro/niche/subculture interest can be somewhat more receptive to the idea that the newest thing isn't necessarily the greatest. Like someone who's into hunting for vintage clothes, or woodworking, or whatever. Ironically such people are on average more tech-averse than a typical "normie", but they often understand the concept that it can be useful to actually put effort into getting something that's not just whatever's handed to you. In a way the insidious aspect of recent tech is the way it's conditioned people to expect that they shouldn't have to think much about how to do things, and to just want "smart" technology that reduces decisions.
Gog & itch & humble are great and as good as steam if they have what you want but the collection is a lot smaller
You bet your fucking ass I'm using Microsoft Office and reliant on it to a bloody fault. I literally and sincerely can't rely on LibreOffice to open and save documents in ways that everyone else would. If I use LibreOffice then at best I'll embarass myself, at worst I'll waste someone's time and either way I risk losing business for no good reason.
A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre. Nobody understands nor gives a damn about Libre in the real, professional world because the lingua franca is Industry aka Microsoft Office.
I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.
The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.
I learned this first-hand when I was a grad student and had to write a technical report to submit to our government funders (using their required MS Office templates and all). I used LibreOffice and saved it as DOCX and everything looked great. Then my advisor opened it on his computer running MS Office and asked me WTF was up with all the mangled formatting.
The subscription fee is only part of the cost though. Another cost is that if Office works in a certain way that causes you problems your only choice is to adapt your workflow (or more likely, live with those problems).
Spend some time in the tech support desk of a mobile phone store to get an idea of the general level of technical sophistication of the average person. Average folks are not running containers. They're not installing... anything... except maybe an app from an App Store. Half of them aren't sure what a file is.
even at the software level, you are reliant on the os makers allowing certain things to happen. i could not care less about homelab if at the end of the day you need to pay to get syncthing working [1] on your ios device and only sync certain files.
[1] https://github.com/MobiusSync/MobiusSync
I associate this genre of photo with the photo-shoots with Gates, Jobs and others. All the interviews and full page ads in the 80s 90s had variations of sitting/lying on desks, hugging CRT monitors or the classic folded-arms lean on a CRT from behind.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dd/97/ed/dd97ed2a239c725ebe57...
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/13/b1/3a/13b13a8c0bc7ee256b37...
https://wolfsheadonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Nolan...
https://alchetron.com/cdn/dan-bricklin-6a3581d7-0d8c-4413-91...
I don't recall old-school blogs doing this or really having author photos at all (photos on that bandwidth/hosting?!) but I imagine whenever a blogger was interviewed for print media they would lean on the "computer person" standards.
I feel like retaining control on a scale that effects the average person is basically impossible.
But even if they were implemented, laws and regulatory enforcement might not have the desired effect. Surveillance capitalism, adtech, and data brokers seem to be surprisingly GDPR-resistant, and California's CCPA seems to have had minimal effect. Right-to-repair is limited by miniaturization and component integration, and the result seems to be Apple's impractical and expensive repair kits. Antitrust seems to be ineffective (see IBM, Microsoft.) Even the DMA, carefully crafted to target Apple, Google, Meta et al. (and to extract billions from them for noncompliance) doesn't seem to be affecting the dominance of those companies just yet.
"Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage."
...the quote, *AS A SOUNDBITE*, only sounds good on a surface level, but collapses under the slightest test. All products in some form or another increase the usage of resources in order to reach a certain goal.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-anti-economy/
The article, where the quote originates from, contextualizes the quote marking (a) the difference between products in service of an actual goal, (b) products that are only meant to look good on a balance sheet, and (c) how companies have morphed towards (b) in order to attract investor funds and increase share prices / company market values.
The quote, BY ITSELF AND WITHOUT CONTEXT, is a twisted Neo-luddist version of its original self.
It's a side effect of items being built to cost, and the marketing phenomenon that consumers follow fashion trends.
Your car doesn't have planned obsolescence: it has a warranty period. If you want a longer one, you'll pay more because that is not a free service to provide.
We're seeing the "free" version of that.
It was never enforced with software or services. If it had the entire standard VC startup playbook would be different.
It’s also never been enforced internationally. China has arguably been subsidizing its industries and effectively dumping cheap manufactured goods for years to become the workshop of the world, and it works.
There never was a choice.
I'm not required to use social media and extractive business models. Intenet surveillance is lamentable but I don't see why he thinks app stores are predatory. The PC is still mostly a force for freedom. The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
Most people do use them though.
> The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
I completely disagree. Most people aren't actually communicating. At least not in any form that matters. The drastic increase in loneliness and depression that correlates with the increase in connectivity should at least show that more social media doesn't mean more happy.
Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :)
Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad.
Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.
Remember how its uptime was limited to 49.7 days because of a timer's numeric overflow (and in something like an audio driver, too, it shouldn't have been system critical). Good times.
A lot of computing in the 90s and earlier was terribly unstable. And that was without considering how prevalent viruses were in the 90s, too.
And that was absolutely okay and would still be okay. We don't need free same-day shipping. Free same-day shipping is basically a drug that people have gotten addicted to.
Why can’t we have both?
Apple is the much more obvious offender, even for stuff not traditionally stigmatized against. Microsoft struggled to release Xcloud becsuse Apple didn't want a game streaming service on IOS. Meanwhile, steaming music, videos, and anything that works on its purposefully botched internet was fine.
>The privacy losses are more than offset by the gains of communicating with everyone on the planet.
Definitely a contentious take these days, given recent events.
This is allowed on iOS and Xcloud is still not available.
Ofcourse you are not required. You also free to retire as a hermite in a remote island.
For anybody hoping to be a non-conspicuous part of society, refusing to condone abusive tech services extracts an ever growing toll.
But you're here, saying that on HN.
I've seen people say similar things on Reddit, in IRC channels, on blogs, Gemlogs, Mastodon posts, and other similar venues, without realizing the irony of it.
https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-we-sh...
What does an "entire country" have to do with it? People move online communities between platforms all the time -- and many communities have presences on multiple platforms.
> In the short term, you either accept defeat and learn to love the adtech bomb or you withdraw into the digital wilderness.
I'm just not seeing the argument here. Suppose you've got 50 users on Discord and would prefer to move to Matrix. So you post a link to the Matrix channel on your Discord server, lock stuff for further posting in Discord, and update external links and documents. People do this sort of stuff all the time without being "defeated".
yeah, thats pretty clear. Because you choose to focus on cases where you do have agency to do something, e.g. its my discord and I am moving us to matrix - and goodbye to those who will not migrate.
Now think about an established group where you are a simple member and you say, "hey folks, why don't we move to something that is better for us, no ads, no data collection, etc."? And they look at you with glazed eyes, and... shrug, and that is the end of the conversation. Now what Don Quixote?
> What does an "entire country" have to do with it?
In countries with high facebook/meta adoption if you want up-to-date information about an event or an establishment it may only exist on meta platforms. Only larger entities can afford to have an independent website, and many such sites are typically in a state of disrepair and neglect.
As an individual trying to go against so-called network effects most of the time you have very little leverage. Its really fighting against wind mills.
I guess I'm not sure of what scenario wouldn't align with this in terms of an extant community?
> And they look at you with glazed eyes, and... shrug, and that is the end of the conversation. Now what Don Quixote?
I think I understand what you're getting at now -- you're looking at it from the perspective of a user who doesn't manage the community or administer its technology.
But I'm not sure this is really on target. The relevant arguments, and the call to action that applies here, are for the people managing online communities. And one of the calls to action should be to listen to and consider what users are saying when they propose alternative technologies.
> Only larger entities can afford to have an independent website
Well, that's just preposterous.
I'm thinking about experimenting that with myself and my son when he is older. But he is of the impatient type so maybe this is a bad idea as vintage computers typically need more focus and research.
Maybe a DOS emulator then. It has better tools and games.
According to a Google search, a typical C64 was on in 3 seconds. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about how long it took, because my recollection was that it was basically instant.
Hell, my monitor can't even turn on in 3 seconds. You hit the power button and it gets busy doing... something... who knows what... not turning on, that's for sure.
I don't know what the future lies. I'm fully prepared that my son is going to have zero common interest with me.
It has a graphical stack. Still a bit underpowered, but enough to implement uxn[2], which many people use for writing fun little games.
[1]: http://duskos.org/
[2]: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
It probably took several seconds for your CRT to get bright enough. At least that is my guess. (I had a similar recollection.)
That is where I plan to go with SPADE, https://hackage.haskell.org/package/spade
As you can see, it is currently written in Haskell, as a PoC. But I am re-writing it in Rust, for reasons that also include making it possible to do something like you ask for.
https://pixelx86.com
True, but unlike the Apple II, the NES was not an open system. The NES had hardware DRM, which allowed Nintendo to control what games were published for the system and to charge licensing fees (much as Nintendo, or Apple, do today). Nintendo also tried (unsuccessfully) to shut down Game Genie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)#10NES
If you wanted to cheat in 1992, you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number and they'd give you cheat codes.
It's the same thing, just a different medium and middleman.
I remember the ads for that but I've never met a single person who did that. (Or whose parents would be okay with it.) Cheat codes were either shared by word of mouth among friends or in magazines. Or you bought a game genie, but that was more for messing around with a game's mechanics than actual, blatant cheating.
Not that there are ready made solutions that are being ignored, but if we are going to move beyond conceptual statements it will require some pretty potent medicines that can start fighting the cancer by taking it head on.
The enshittification is now in an advanced stage and the billions of addicted masses an enormous inertial weight. Witness e.g., the grotesque politics around the tiktok non-ban.
Imho a key ingredient is to ditch the focus on the "personal" and start thinking of "interpersonal computing" (just made that term up). Basically personal computing that is network-first, web-native. The owner-operator is empowered to join the matrix, find their way around without gatekeepers, connect with agency, exchange, filter, process with helpful and transparent algorithms and get on top of the informatiom firehose. Nothing radically new in terms of hardware or software, just rearranged furniture to serve citizens, not some digital oligarchy.
The huge success of social media is because it tapped into the immense sociability of our species. Somehow we need to reclaim that trait for the good side of technology, with devices and software that are actually desirable without being leeches that suck society dry.
Not convinced the average user cares enough to accept the compromises though and the marketing budgets of big tech is a force to reckon with too
The market wanted growth. Early tech companies, like Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and then Google, went from zero to huge in a very short period of time. But companies like the FAANGs kept up the absurd levels of growth (20+% YoY growth in the case of Google) that Wall Street got hooked on, and it's been on a drug binge ever since. The result is that we have multiple trillion dollar companies that will...never not want to be a trillion dollar company.
The total amount of money in the PC market was miniscule compared to today, and the internet and its online retail plus ads bonanza even dwarfed that. The PC software market, the video games industry, everything--it was all so much smaller. As the internet swallowed the world, it brought billions of users. And those billions of users can only use so many devices and so many games and spreadsheets and stuff. They had to be made into cash cows in other ways.
The tech market just has to keep growing. It's stuck tripping forward and must generate revenue somehow to keep the monsters' stomachs fed (and their investors too). We will never be free of their psychotic obsession with monetization.
And advertising is soooo insidious. Everything looks like it's free. But it isn't. Because our eyeballs and our mindshare is for sale. And when they buy our eyeballs their making back those dollars of us--it's the whole point. So whether you like it or not, you're being programmed to spend money in other parts of your life that you wouldn't otherwise. It cannot move any direction but falling forward into more consumerism.
I'm afraid I'm a doomer in this regard. We're never going back to not being bothered to death by these assholes who want to make money off us 24/7.
It's not bad that it's big. It only needs to grow because the rest of the economy needs to grow.
I am also afraid you're a doomer in this regard. You don't think the bigwigs with their fax machines in the 1980s wanted to make money off of us 24/7? Of course they did.
Tech is scary in the sense that it's now gone quite a bit beyond the understanding of the average joe. Even most of us on this site probably don't fully understand how much detail data can paint a picture of a person. There are companies that probably know something about me that I don't even know.
I guess I don't know how to alleviate that feeling, and maybe it's the correct default assumption to be a doomer. It certainly would be very helpful if the US treated the situation more like the EU treats the situation.
In many respects, we are also better off than we were in the 1980's. There are more of us, we are connected globally, and the tools that we have access to are significantly better. We also have a conceptual framework to work within. Technically speaking, Free Software may have existed back then but few people even knew of it. People were struggling with ideas like public domain software (rarely with an understanding of what that meant). If you wanted to make money, outside of traditional publishing channels, you were usually toying with ideas like shareware (where you had pretty much no control over distribution). If you wanted to spend money of software, outside of traditionally published stuff, chances are that you had to send cheques or cash to somebody's house.
And then there is communicating with likeminded people. We may like to complain about things like Discord or Reddit, but they are not the only players on the block. Plenty of people still run small or private forums. Yeah, they can be hard to find. On the other hand, that has more to do with the noise created by the marketplace rather than their lack of presence.
Why is this good?
The thing is the older I get, the more it does seem like at the very least we are not growing pie in a number of areas (the example at the top of my mind is academia) and sometimes it just seems like an easier solution is to decrease the numerator. But I don't know how you can do that and justify it morally, both to society and to yourself.
What were small conflicts of interest before (a little trash here or there, a little use of personal information for corporate instead of customer benefit here or there, ...) now scales to billions of people. And dozens of transactions, impressions, actions, points of contact, etc., a day for many of us.
That not only makes it more pervasive, but massively profitable, which has kicked in a feedback loop for sketchy behavior, surveillance, coercion, gatekeeping, etc., driven by hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and trillions in potential market caps.
Things that were only slightly unethical before, now create vast and growing damage to our physical and mental environments.
It should simply be illegal to use customer information in a way not inherent to the transaction in question. Or to gather data on customers from other sources. Or share any of that data.
It should be illegal, to force third party suppliers to pay a tax to hardware makers, for any transaction that doesn't require their participation. And participation cannot be made mandatory.
Etc.
One commonality here, is that there is often a third party involved. Third party gatekeeper. Third party advertisers. Third parties introduce conflicts. (This is different from non-personalized ads on a site they have relevance for, which are effectively two independent, 2-party transactions.)
Another commonality, is the degree to which many third party actors, those we know, and many we never hear of, who "collude" with respect to dossiers, reaching us, and milking us by many coordinated means.
Most administrations are squishy-soft on corporate crime. If there were regular antitrust prosecutions, violations of Federal Trade Commission regulations were crimes, wage theft was treated as theft, forging safety certifications was prosecuted as forgery, and federal law on warranties was strictly enforced, most of the problems would go away.
In the 1950s and 1960s, all that was normal. The Americans who lived through WWII were not putting up with that sort of thing.
For instance, nearly every country was paying the US loans back, in USD, or was having to depend on the US in some way.
Nearly every other country in the world had their industrial base (and often male population) crushed in the war.
Etc.
Those things cost money/effort, and require a consistent identity and discipline.
Unfortunately at the time we need them the most pretty much every pro-user organization is imploding because everyone and their grandmother wants to turn them into vehicles for whatever their pet cause is.
I understand it and know it. But I don't appreciate it either (in the sense of liking it).
https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_09-10_1984-09_Computer_...
Its just another bubble, one predicated on mining the users rather than expanding the product.
1. They are doing a little bit of revisionist history, as the industry was fiercly capitalist and proprietary at that time.
2. This topic really does feel rather beaten to death and I think the target audience is not getting any new information.
Speaking specifically about the revisionist history part:
> At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty—–which I’ll define as the freedom to explore new ideas, control your own creative works, and make mistakes without punishment.
Was it? The PC has its roots in IBM, and it became the target product to clone because, since the project was something of a sidenote to IBM's main business, IBM was too cheap/lazy/wahtever to develop proprietary parts. They cobbled together a system that was easy to clone, perhaps entirely by accident.
The PC wasn't a universal compatible open standard because of tech liberty, it was a compatible standard because (among other reasons) Microsoft introduced a new OS business model where PC clones fighting each other over low margins benefitted Microsoft. Before Microsoft DOS, each PC was its own moat with its own hardware, its own operating system, and its own proprietary software. Microsoft made everything easy and wonderful as long as you kept using Windows.
Apple operated back with the OS/hardware/software moat back then and that's essentially how they continue to operate. They are the only company that survived after that era using that fully proprietary business model and still operates that way.
As another commenter pointed out, Nintendo was ruthless about hardware DRM and was a full blown monopoly in their heyday. That's why your parents always call it "Nintendo" instead of "video games," because there was no other vendor anywhere near as successful at that time.
Another example of a lack of tech liberty, "Don't Copy that Floppy" was all over the place, a phrase that I've heard injected into Computer Chronicles episodes. Companies were doing all kinds of things to try and prevent you from inspecting, modifying, and copying their software.
The Linux kernel didn't exist until 1991, and most UNIX flavors were proprietary.
The only reason that era didn't have invasive privacy and data extraction problems is because it wasn't feasible, not because it was an era and movement that had excellent tech liberty.
Compare that to today, and it's actually today that's much more of an era of personal computing freedom. I certainly wasn't using an open source web browser, open source IDE, open source server operating system, open source graphics driver, open source PDF editor/viewer, or much other open source software in the 90's. It would have been unthinkable back then to use an open source program to do something like 3D graphics rendering, that would have been reserved for 5-figure Silicon Graphics workstations. And good luck replacing Adobe with something open source.
Hosting a major commercial website for a fortune 100 company on an open source operating system? You would be laughed out of town.
Unfortunately, the mobile revolution didn't work that way. Regular folks don't care about open, flexible, and cheap. Only convenient and cheap. The gravity of those folks has led us here.
# The barriers put in place by companies to prevent their hardware from being tinkered with
Locked bootloaders and the absence of hardware documentation to base the development of drivers on is an example of this.
This prevents the community from taking over when a device reaches end of life or expanding a device to be more useful/open than the company originally intended.
Examples of this are:
- Apple's M-series Macs/MacBooks. While the hardware is remarkable, Apple's anti-competitive practices manifest in MacOS holding the devices back from their potential. Asahi Linux is an indicator of demand and its success is remarkable given what they are up against. If Apple was compelled to provide reference documentation of their hardware sufficient for driver development then the resulting alternative operating systems introduces competition to an otherwise stagnant market.
- Microsoft's Surface laptops and broadly the new X-Elite hardware lineup shares the same criticism as Apple's platform
- Mobile phones. Imagine an iPhone running Android. Imagine a Galaxy, Pixel, etc running Linux where Android apps are executed within Waydroid containers? Not going to happen because we are either blocked by bootloaders or blocked by a lack of drivers (deliberately hidden by manufacturers)
- Better health trackers. Imagine buying a FitBit, installing an community maintained operating system that has no subscription fees and handles health inference through transparent algorithms that can be contributed to by academics around the world.
# No "right to repair" software as it's practically illegal
It's virtually illegal to repair software. Decompiling software and fixing it, even if it's end of life, can land you in court.
There are so many software projects out there that I would personally love to revive. Think of games like Heroes of Might and Magic 3
Anyway, I've been ranting too much on this topic but you get the idea. I wish governments would grant people protection to tinker/improve hardware AND software and compel corporations to provide sufficient documentation to practically enable that.
Maybe legislation and culture or something can help also, but it will be most effective if part of that is adopting and spreading the right technology to facilitate those changes.
I've been working to build a company on my own hoping to fill that gap - I tell the career SWEs in my social circle "I want to give people the true freedom of creating whatever you want on the web," and I just get blank looks, ha :p
The problem is that those people have families to feed and clothe and housing and utilities to pay for and you can’t expect them to work for free (or a pittance) when they’d need to be paid a high 5 figure/low 6 figure salary to be able to afford their basic cost of living.
Users broadly don’t want to pay and will turn up their nose at having to spend $50 a year on a service or $10 on an app built by honest people with privacy and respect of the user in mind (when they don’t have any issues blowing hundreds of dollars on much more ridiculous things that don’t respect them as customers, but that’s another story…)
And on top of that, how do you make your services known when trillion dollar companies will always beat you in ad spending while offering a free product they have hundreds of people working on?
As an example from just a couple days ago, Read.cv just announced they were shutting down and acqui-hired by Perplexity even though they were a lean 3-person team with a monetized product that their users loved. They were at it for 4 years and couldn’t make it work.
https://read.cv/a-new-chapter
> I've been working to build a company on my own
Very sincerely: good luck, I hope you succeed in your goals.
But just as sincerely, if you truly believe the real problem is that the technological class lacks an “epistemological hunger” and not the basic money/visibility issues I raised above, you’re in for a rude awakening.
> you’re in for a rude awakening
I've seen how techies spend their time, I'm not the one in for a rude awakening.
I started the work by recognizing that, in a world of LLM coding assistants, there is no longer a minimum bar for code literacy; it is now a spectrum, along which everyone is capable of unique creation, no matter their sophistication. The winning platforms of this age will be ones built from scratch to accommodate and leverage this new massive creative potential, by dismantling the professional class’ monopoly on software production.
While there are nice ideas in general, too much of it is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. And this makes the argument to go back to these ideals kinda icky. If we really want to do something, we should have a real critical look at why we're here in the first place IMHO, and this isn't it.
> For a while—in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s—it felt like nerds were making the world a better place.
The nerds (dare I say "we" ?) made the world a different and more connected place, with clear evolutions in regarding finance, productivity and science.
Does it make the world a better place ? Did the productivity and finance improvements bring a better and more welcoming society for instance ?
It can be argued either way, but that question can't be glossed over as a given IMHO.
Then there is no reflection on how computing has become a commodity. It still needs more freedom and control, but these two ideals don't mean the same thing if you're a 30yo single DevOps engineer or a 50yo at home parent watching over 5 kids. Both need computing, but the purpose and intricate needs are completely different. Focusing only on one because it's easier kinda misses the point IMHO (and we're back to the role of technology and how exactly it makes the world better)
What is a coin in an arcade videogame if it's not a microtransaction?
Software as a service is just different, and it's not all bad. You have automated upgrades, a consistently funded developer that can better plan and deliver updates, if you only need the software for a short period of time it can be cheaper. Frankly the packaged software approach was a kludge due to the technical limitations of the time. Now if big releases make sense developers do that, if incremental updates over time provided as a service make sense, they can do that.
Most of the section on what we can do about all this is focused on stuff that didn't exist in the past. The internet and online services, social media. Going back to the past wouldn't be to do those in some ideal way that used to exist, it would mean not doing them at all. Sure.
There is no ideal past to go back to without pulling the online plug. However, that plug isn't going away, and we don't actually want it to. The "How we can reclaim control" bit at the end is mostly correct, but it's really about coming to grips with managing the new reality, not going back to a situation we've outgrown.
But do young people really love this hyper-commercial internet these days? All the subscription services? The empty social media content?
I do see what they mean a bit because I'm pretty sceptical of AI, though I did set up my own server to experiment with it in a way where my stuff doesn't end up in the cloud.
The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone.
> The techie web isn't coming back and wishing it so won't do so. You can always just drop into an IRC network or Mastodon server with other nerds, but the days that everyone on the web was a techie nerd with general-purpose computing interests is long gone.
Well in that way it's still there. It lives on here on HN and the other places you mention. Probably as big as it was in those days. I don't think it's really gone. Just the internet grew around it with all the commercial BS and big tech companies viewing users as products.
Also, us techies manage to avoid the worst of that with adblockers, pay wall blockers, pirate video downloads, self hosted services etc. I probably see only a handful of ads every day. Even my phone blocks most of them. I also have custom scripts for the sites I frequent the most to make them more info dense like hacker news (and remove most of the big photos)
Examples of what it can do - Autonomous lighting with mmWave radar with 180 degrees fov and ambient light sensor - Recording of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and VOX to onboard SQLite database at a chosen interval. - Onboard web server, which serves as dashboard and configuration page. - Communication platform with integrated microphone (hardware indicator light, off by default) and speakers. I’m also experimenting with talking to LLMs like this.
And many more things. If you’d like to reach us hello [at] sentionic.com