Just goes to show, you can never stop fighting for Freedom, because they sure as hell will never stop trying to lock you in a [figurative/literal] cage.
It's at least some comfort how far ARM has come the last few years, first Microsoft and soon enough Intel will be, still around and making money certainly, but decidedly behind the curve.
Next time I read about Richard Stallman's laptop I'll probably be scoffing a bit less.
I fully expect ARM to take a huge chunk of Intel's sales over the next ten years. And not just in the mobile department, where they already dominate. I mean server rooms and even desktop PCs.
I think the answer is to move away from monopolies and centralized systems, or systems that depend on exclusive information or technologies.
And I think it has been shown that can happen. The most obvious example is the personal computer. For many years, computers were only available through large organizations. Eventually hobbyists found ways to make them affordable and distribute them to many homes.
I believe that the designs for some type of Intel processor and single board computer must be out there being used by quite a few people, say in certain areas of China. So they aren't really secret.
What we need is open source hardware, and personal fabrication systems.
Another example: move away from centralized ISPs to meshnets. If meshnets don't provide adequate latency etc., we just have to start coming up with our own alternatives to ISPs. Maybe just laying fiber strands on the street with some kind of glue or something crazy-sounding like that.
Heh.. can't speak any ilaksh or ithkuil just picked the name so people would Google it and because it is usually available as a screen name. Seems like ithkuil pretty much owns as far as conlangs and is interesting from a general knowledge representation standpoint but honestly I never really took the time to understand many of the details since even approaching that would take me a solid month or two. Thanks I will check out loper.. but can loper compete with Intel? We need advanced general purpose open source chips that we can use for gaming and everything else.
There's a surprisingly active community at /r/ithkuil with people doing translations.
The loper os thing is currently two guys playing with fpgas, but the one knows his lisp and knows what he wants and has supposedly written most of the OS code already, so I'm hopeful. I'm not sure if anything other than a networked lisp machine would work for the kind of verifiably-not-backdoored software/hardware that everyone wants. Aside from the obvious smell of a lisp hacker trying to do his own full stack, I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention.
Wow I actually have the username ithkuil on reddit (using runvnc now) Did not actually think to check for a subreddit. I wonder if he would want my username. Would probably have to delete my account first though if you can do that.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadIt's at least some comfort how far ARM has come the last few years, first Microsoft and soon enough Intel will be, still around and making money certainly, but decidedly behind the curve.
Next time I read about Richard Stallman's laptop I'll probably be scoffing a bit less.
And I think it has been shown that can happen. The most obvious example is the personal computer. For many years, computers were only available through large organizations. Eventually hobbyists found ways to make them affordable and distribute them to many homes.
I believe that the designs for some type of Intel processor and single board computer must be out there being used by quite a few people, say in certain areas of China. So they aren't really secret.
What we need is open source hardware, and personal fabrication systems.
Another example: move away from centralized ISPs to meshnets. If meshnets don't provide adequate latency etc., we just have to start coming up with our own alternatives to ISPs. Maybe just laying fiber strands on the street with some kind of glue or something crazy-sounding like that.
Re content: the loper-os.org guy is working on foss lisp-based hardware. Check it out.
The loper os thing is currently two guys playing with fpgas, but the one knows his lisp and knows what he wants and has supposedly written most of the OS code already, so I'm hopeful. I'm not sure if anything other than a networked lisp machine would work for the kind of verifiably-not-backdoored software/hardware that everyone wants. Aside from the obvious smell of a lisp hacker trying to do his own full stack, I'm surprised that it hasn't gotten more attention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7416110