We will win the war for general-purpose computing
cheapskatesguide.org
cheapskatesguide.org
We are reaching a turning point where even the brightest minds struggle to generate major innovations on the locked down web. You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively.
Conversely, the dweb is flush right now with innovation and new ideas, with an ecosystem of builders that are excited to share and compound off of eachother's ideas.
I believe that at maturity, the dweb will run absurd agile circles around the lockdown web.
I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?
In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.
Take WhatsApp: the technology behind it is ridiculously simple.
No it is not, when you serve over 100 billion e2e encrspted messages everyday all around the world, and groups and chat, ... and all of it in a way that people think it is instant.
Thats a problem with Signal. It is really really sluggish compared to whatsapp or telegram.
Yes, there's a lot of attention to detail and a lot of edge cases that WA covers better than most others, but there's not a lot of truly complex things. It's mostly doing a lot of simple things well (and some amount of picking the right structures to keep things as simple as possible). Often doing things simply means skipping current computing trends. And of course, sometimes doing things simply doesn't actually meet the needs, and may make changes harder later.
Of course, Signal has much harder to meet privacy goals and a smaller staff and they didn't build on Erlang, so they're playing on hard mode.
That's why it's going to win. You don't need every platform to implement every interesting feature, the open nature of the data allows the innovation to happen much more effortlessly.
People won't install another social media app if there isn't sufficient incoming social credit encouraging them to use it and the need falls into an existing category. Something sufficiently different can gain an “I couldn't have done this with” credit to overcome some stickiness with.
… maybe. Sort of. I think.
(I wonder what this means for e.g. Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, if it's true.)
But Facebook did beat MySpace. That’s what network effects are
Why bother with the suffocation then.
Acquiring WhatsApp was not cheap and required significant effort. Why bother.
Than answer to your question is no, IMO. Network effects may discourage competition from people with defeatist attitudes (who would give up before even trying), but network effects are not exclusive to Facebook. They can happen elsewhere.
One theory why Apple is letting iPhone users stop Facebook from tracking them is that Apple believes that iMessage is or will be competing with WhatsApp. It aligns with the theory that Facebook's move to change the WhatsApp ToS at this time is because usage of so-called "E2E" messaging apps is growing significantly.
TikTok and Zoom aren't exactly the next Facebook (yet), but they both compete effectively against the incumbent powers.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral...
I'm still not sure what it is but I kind of get the idea.
Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms.
Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features.
Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.
It’s a bad point from both of y’all tho since you’re ignoring what marketing verticals are. Email and slack are seen as pro tools, not everyday stuff
Slack is puzzling to me, as it’s a terrible product, IMO, which I feel bandwagoned from a few top down decisions by some larger companies to risk their essential internal communications on a third party proprietary app. It makes no sense to me and I would never specify it’s use on any team I lead.
Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.
A big problem of torrents (and IPFS, and most p2p technologies) is how to give proper incentive for people to contribute. There are "cheating" clients that don't upload back for example. And there are people that close the torrent as soon as it is downloaded. Well, you can sometimes rely on people's sense of belonging to a community; or you can sometimes shun noncooperating people from the community (as in private trackers).
I think dweb's main contribution is giving the option of monetary compensation for participating in the network. Perhaps such incentive wasn't needed when people were just seeding things they are passionate about, like movies and music, but it may enable more boring stuff to be decentralized as well. Hence, blockchain.
Most current p2p protocols are about sharing data in a decentralized way, but you can also execute algorithms on this data. That's what's being done with blockchain today (technically you wouldn't need a blockchain for this, but we already established we might want a way to give monetary incentive to peers, so, there's that)
This scheme may or may not work. I think it may have adverse effects, like when the web was taken down by advertising and commercial interests. But it also opens a path to a new kind of web.
About ddos: existing protocols have a big problem with scaling; an actual denial of service attack would make things much worse. That's why Lbry (which is a decentralized Youtube of sorts) is mostly accessed through a centralized site, Odysee - funnily enough, Odysee doesn't use any form of decentralization to serve the videos. It could make peers serve themselves using webtorrent or other protocol on top of webrtc, and it might some day just do it, but it doesn't at this time.
The probable source of disruption comes from people one step removed from the top who see an opportunity to shake up the system and turn an activist message into opportunistic gain. This is why we often see waves of "anti-corruption" campaigns, sudden policy shifts, etc. The politicians see a trend forming and jump on to it. When they get in power they walk some of it back, but they can't turn back the clock all the way.
The source of a trend towards GPC comes from a series of "small wins" like the recent breakthroughs in Right to Repair, from IP that has recently expired, and from nationalistic competition("world's free-est country" will always be a title up for grabs).
It only takes one little country that's a "hacker haven" to jump ahead of the rest for a clamor to erupt. The dominant players will conclude that the answer is to strongarm that country into the hegemonic framework; others in weaker positions will see opportunities in jumping on. Then the fight is waged economically, and if the resulting products and services are desirable, concessions are made.
I think that reputation stems from both TPM and secure boot being a bit difficult to grok and I would agree about screwing users over if there was no end-user access/cryptographically locked by the vendor but both are fully accessible.
I invite you to read this
https://www.eff.org/wp/trusted-computing-promise-and-risk
or this
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A2065...
I don't think that problem can be attacked by blaming the underlying tech, that quickly heads into the same territory of thought governments use to try and justify weakening encryption because it can be used by bad actors. I think the options (and to be fair all of them are hard) are: competition from vendors that allow full control, regulation from governments forcing vendors to give users full access, or subverting the implementation to regain control.
Also forgot to mention with secure boot you are able to sign with keys you have generated.
All major manufacturers of modern processors are part of the "Trusted" Computing Group. There will be no meaningful competition in that space.
>regulation from governments forcing vendors to give users full access
This would be the best but also the most unlikely scenario. The status quo can only benefit from what will happen. Imagine the government standing up to big corporations to benefit the people. Yeah, I can't either.
>subverting the implementation to regain control
I think this is what will happen from time and time. Every 5 years we will have a brief time when people possessing certain hardware will have full control yet again, only for it to be patched out (like in the case of the Nintendo Switch)
>Also forgot to mention with secure boot you are able to sign with keys you have generated.
Oh sure you can. The question is whether will it make you fail hardware based attestation like in the case of android custom roms. Google effectively killed the custom rom scene by giving app developers a bulletproof way to block them.
I don't see this same scenario unfolding now... The articles about Pluton are basically the same copy pasted drivel... All of them fail to mention the extreme danger this poses to freedom of expression in the online world. Something changed in the last ~15 years.
Why? Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board and you have a general purpose computer that will boot any code you write for it. The Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. are examples of this. If you want an absolute guarantee of no third-party code not under your control, use an FPGA to custom implement your processor the way that Bunnie Huang's Precursor project does. FOSS fills the gap for software.
Sure, you might not get the performance you want for the price you want, you might not be able to connect to the sites you want, or run a specific proprietary software package but that has nothing to do with general purpose computing. In no way, shape, or form is general purpose computing endangered nor has it ever been.
Sure in a free market you could do that, be we aren't living in a free market. Both corporations and politicians wants you to use locked in devices where you are easier to monetize and control. And since those are the two powers controlling regulations chances are you will no longer be able to buy those chips legally without an active software engineering license and a business document stating what you will use them for.
It wont happen tomorrow, but what about 20-40 years? Compare todays market with 20 years ago and how much it changed, extrapolate 20 years in the future and it doesn't seem improbable at all.
I suspect those things will become regulated and require either constraints built in or license to be able to purchase them. Then likely aveneues for connection will be required to verify devices are trusted (so, cellular companies, ISPs) and they will do this by associating devices that try to communicate with government issued cryptographic signatures that are built into chips etc.
And yeah you could bypass everything but it will still be illegal. So a bit like you could build your own car but you won't be legally allowed to drive it on the road and you will incur huge liability if you try.
No. The user could still deliberately chooose to run a different back-doored encryption software on the same computer. The definition still holds.
The iPhone went there years ago. The situation on Android is tenuous. OSX and Windows both now both start from a secure boot mechanism. At this point it is still possible for a user to work around these things but this is now "at the pleasure" of the OS maker and not something the user actually controls. Removal of a couple of checkboxes is how far we are from losing user-controlled right to install software on any mainstream consumer supported OS.
So I am arguing that now that operating system manufacturers have forfeited their ability to say they cannot prevent the user from installing software, it is only a matter of time before it becomes legally mandated that they close off this capability, and deliver only software that is delivered from a verified (probably government licensed) channel.
i upgraded my home server few months ago. It was runing archlinux for 13 years. It was up-to-date, not some ancient codebase. Yet, the "new" 2y-old-tech motherboard/processor/memory combo did not even start / recognize the SSDs. Took me a week in debugging, and replacing the motherboard with another one. Exactly One check box in the BIOS/setup, yes, and your gone. The 2nd mb did have it. The 1st did not anymore.
have fun
There's all sorts of fingers that could be pointed in different directions across different industries of course (some being the same industry now due to consolidation of the stack) but the most fundamental failure of judgement in my opinion was that there was a romantic notion once upon a time that computers would be this great equalizer that could even allow clever enough eggheads to take on the world (literally, not with some fancy high value business idea) while simultaneously bringing real opportunity and equality to the common man ('anyone who can use a computer will be more valuable than a CEO').
The former idea never quite managed to explain why these eggeads wouldn't be beholden to the limitations of the hardware at their disposal (Turns out computing hardware multiplies the effectiveness of the boogey men just as readily as it does the eggheads and the boogeymen do a lot more hiring). The latter notion was abandoned by the same people who dreamed it up in the first place not that they'll admit it (of course they wanted computing to empower the common man, it's surely a coincidence that every step of the way they focused on expanding only an egghead's ability to command computers with wider accessibility being an afterthought motivated primarily by profit incentives)
I think the ugly truth is that general purpose computing was more of a philisophical goal than a realistic one. It seems a lot more likely that from a technological perspective it's just a lot more efficient to have an expansive commons of innovative collaboration available for dueling giants to draw from on an as-needed basis.
=== No Smartphones
For all the threats of smartphones, I avoid them -- I don't have a smartphone. My phone is an old Bell touch tone desk set connected to essentially a land line.
I saw some threats of smartphones and didn't like the cost to buy, cost of usage, bad keyboard, small screen, and the general inability to write and run my software, old and new.
=== Digital Appliances
For threats of digital appliances, devices, from, say, Amazon, I don't have any. No way do I want some digital appliance listening to everything I say.
=== The Cloud
I don't trust the cloud. I make no direct use of the cloud. So the cloud is not a threat or cost to me. And I don't have to do mud wrestling with their poor or missing documentation on how their services work. What they are offering, no thanks. Not even for free. And whatever they say about reliability, security, or functionality, I don't believe it.
=== Encryption
For threats of encryption, if the situation gets serious, say, for my email, then I will make use of PGP (pretty good privacy). So, I will have encryption under my control that Apple, etc. can't do anything about. And I won't have to worry about back doors.
There was a reason PGP was open source -- to keep a big power, government, company, from getting control over encryption, putting in back doors, etc. I like the idea of being able to control my own encryption.
=== Text and Console Windows
To me, the main data I work with is just text, the standard ASCII character set. And my main user interface is text in console windows. A big reason is that it is easy to automate the use of text in console windows.
So, in particular, I make minimal use of the Microsoft user interface idea of on-screen direct manipulation graphical user interfaces (GUI). I never liked the idea of a GUI -- insults me as a user; is an interface I essentially can't program; gives output tough to process further.
In one sense, important to me, a GUI is nearly always a big step backwards; it has me do something once; but to do it 200 times I have to do it 200 times as I do it once. Instead, I want to automate doing that 200 times. E.g., I had a list of about 300 URLs and wanted to download them all. So I used my text editor KEDIT to develop a REXX script to call the program CURL 300 times and then ran the script in a console window and then processed the 300 downloaded files with KEDIT. No use of GUIs. For such work, usually GUIs are useless.
=== Files
I'm totally in love with Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system or some such) file system. I would like better documentation on the file and directory (I HATE Apple introducing the word folder) attributes such as system, hidden, archive, etc. and on locking and concurrency.
E.g., for handling those 300 files, do that in a subdirectory -- don't let other files get in the way and can copy, delete, etc. easily.
=== Manipulating the Text
Since I work with text, I need good tools for handling text, and my most important computing tools are the text editor KEDIT, its macro language KEXX, the scripting language REXX, the D. Knuth mathematical word processing TeX (I write TeX but no LaTeX), a spell checker ASPELL that comes with the TeX distribution I use, the .NET languages and object library, for some important work an old Watcom Fortran compiler (with the very nice IBM linear programming package OSL, optimization subroutine library).
So, I want good tools and if necessary write my own and don't want little apps doing things for and/or to me. Really, so far I have no apps at all.
=== Version of Windows?
Since I like text and console windows so much, the stuff Microsoft added to Windows 7 Professional to get to Window 10 Home Edition I don't want. I just like that version of Windows 7. I can think of some improvements I would like a lot, but none of those are in Windows 10.
For what Apple wants me to use, no way, not a chance, never.
=== Good Windows
To me, one of the best things about any of the versions of Windows is that they are still good to great places to run old command line software. E.g., KEDIT goes back to PC/DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, ..., Windows 7, Windows 10.
=== Typing for Developing
I used KEDIT with KEXX and REXX to develop the software for the Web site of my startup, 24,000 .NET programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing (lots of good comments with some little KEDIT macros to ease using documentation, etc.).
Visual Studio seems to be intended to do what I do with KEDIT -- so far I prefer KEDIT to Visual Studio. E.g., Visual Studio is part of the long standing Microsoft idea of GUIs, and I just reject that as a big step backwards. I had no trouble at all using KEDIT, etc. to develop that software. The problems were, e.g., bad documentation for SQL Server that made getting a connection string a solid week of mud wrestling. Finally someone in Microsoft's SQL Server organization solved the problem.
=== Documentation or Experiments
Part of the Microsoft, Apple GUI approach is no real documentation, e.g., nothing like what was written by Mike Cowlishaw for REXX or by D. Knuth for TeX, and, instead, learn just by experimentation. I don't like that experimentation -- e.g., Windows 10 has some huge number of special keystrokes that do things, and I still have no knowledge of what those keystrokes are or do. I encounter those keystrokes by accident; some windows pop up, and I work to close them ASAP since whatever they are I know I want nothing to do with them. I don't like undocumented tools.
=== No, I Don't Want That
Generally what the Apple, Microsoft people and their app developers have in mind to please me just makes me angry. What they are offering me, I don't want. To me their work just gets in the way of my work; I hate their work and their assumptions about my work.
So, on several points I agree with the OP on "universal computing". If Microsoft will keep console windows and let me run old software, I will be happy. To make me happier, they can do better on documentation and tools for common tasks in system management. E.g., I'd like better means of backup and restore. For more, they can have fewer bugs and security problems. For more, I would like some good documentation for Microsoft's Power Shell. For the rest of the industry, I wish I could get a keyboard as good as IBM shipped with their PC/AT.
The government can never effectively ban general purpose computing in an authoritative way because it’s just too easy to build a computer. You can build a computer using a bunch of fpgas connected together. If they ban fpgas, hackers will start using 80s-style 8 bit micros.
That is all to say, the people who care about general purpose computing will never lose it and the people who don’t care won’t even notice.
How much did a general purpose computer cost 30 years ago?
How much did it cost 20 years ago?
How much did it cost 10 years ago?
How much does a Raspberry Pi Zero W cost now?
> To a normal person the mere thought of figuring out how to use a raspberry pi (or increasingly even a windows PC) induces a stress response.
I’d argue that this has always been true—the only difference is that now, if you’re willing to push through that stress, you can get one for dirt cheap. And I’d also argue that the reasons that this is true are completely ignored by the article at hand.
There were no alternatives in the past. Now that locked down alternatives have been invented, general purpose computers will slowly but surely fall out of use
I never claimed they were expensive, not sure what you’re referring to there.
I spend 3-5 years getting the perfect PC setup only to have it knocked down again every time I get a new PC and all the settings have moved, half the programs that used to work now either wont or has a replacement that's not quite what I want.
I am not against progress but I just need to work so I now specifically keep the last two generations of my PC offline just so I can compile a clients firmware or modify a PCB with the same environment I developed it on. The next generations of development environments are going on-line so it may not be an option for me.
At one point I designed complex communications systems from ISO layer 1 to layer 7 but these days I dont have a clue how to use the top layers, they change daily and I the guy in the IT dept to fix any issues with my smart phone or connecting to a clients network so I feel everyones pain.
But what I do hate is taking away choice. A lot of these 'updates' have actually significantly removed configurability. "We removed this option because we don't think you need it" happens way too often. A computer exists to serve us. Not for us to bend to its will (or its manufacturer's).
My solution is... don't try to get the perfect setup.
Learn to just be happy with the defaults and get on with what matters - the work you're using it for. I change maybe 1 or 2 settings on a fresh macOS install and that's it. I don't even change the wallpaper.
> I just need to work
So don't distract yourself with trying to create the perfect setup! Worse is better.
The only war I'm fighting against is wasting my time with system setup.
1) constantly changing Willy Nilly
2) less than useable, né breaking functionality
A proprietary OS has no obligation to care about your needs, but more importantly, does not allow you TO do anything about it.
This is why I am moving everything to FOSS over the long haul
Their setup is really not working for me.
I want my desktop designed for me, from me. And if the OS thinks, it knows better than me, how to handle things and regulary rearanges or reconfigures, than screw this OS.
Right but when you write it out like that can you see how it doesn’t make sense to expect that from a company? Not reasonable to complain when you don’t get it.
"Designing the desktop" is also just aranging icons. That works since decades.
Well you could expect it but you probably wouldn’t like the price they quoted you.
To make the price realistic they have to design something which works reasonably well for millions of people, not perfectly for one person.
And I believe Windows for example has one. And windows still runs fine for me without cortana for example. But I have to resort to hacks, to make that change. So I do not demand more features here.
I demand just more control, what features I want to use. That was there and is getting removed for other purposes than complexity of developement.
This is my workstation, not a playground.
This is not a zero-sum game. We can have console-style computers and general purpose computers, and they can both exist simultaneously without one having to win and the other having to lose.
Up until the time you try to get your non-GP computer to do something the manufacturer didn't want you to, such as retrieving some data locked in your Android phone.
There was a time when laptops had 4:3 screens. Then the market changed because of demand for HD-video screen ratios. Today, the only portable option for 13" 4:3 screens (vertical real estate for text editing) is iPad Pro.
Hyperscaler cloud vendors can now order custom CPUs that are simply unavailable to retail. There's an endless list of markets which have been altered as demand volume shifts from one segment to another.
So the meaning of "war on general computing" is closer to "war on ownership". Sure, owned and unowned computers can both coexist, but it's not clearly a good thing to allow someone else to control one's devices.
This is a really easy problem to fix though, we are already quickly moving in that direction. Every big provider is moving towards more and more hardware and software lockins, and since everyone is doing it slowly consumers aren't reacting. I'd be surprised if general purpose computers aren't seen as a niche market in 20 years and illegal in many parts of the world in 40 years.
Here is roughly how it will happen: As more people are locked in general purpose computing will get an increasing density of bad actors. Big tech will publish studies showing that almost all viruses, malware, scams, child porn etc comes from general purpose devices, and therefore push for regulations to ensure everyone uses a locked down device. Anyone who argues against that will be attacked with arguments such as "Are you really going to prioritize your hobby at the expense of children getting sexually abused? There is no need for anyone but criminals to own a general purpose computer!".
It requires the big powers to work together, and for every other actor to not contest it, for governments to accept and endorse the monopolies, and we're already seeing some fighting back in those fronts. I imagine the monopolistic orchestration will pull itself apart long before general purpose computing dies.
I suspect we'll see much ado about all of this in court at some point, it will be sad to even get to that point, but even if the consumers are happy campers I really doubt other businesses, and other stakeholders (nations included), will be.
No, we really can't, and you probably didn't read the article if you think we can.
Making general purpose computers and the software to support them is less profitable than making smartphone-ish locked down computers. It's just a fact. The corporations will gravitate towards the most profitable options, as they always do.
"But as long as there's a market, even small, someone will make them" you say. But you're forgetting that computers don't exist in isolation. They just don't work that well on their own. The main reason they're so useful is because of networking. You can be running a computer with 100% free software, but you will probably still use online services that are not free. You need to use them to live a normal life in the world of today.
But thanks to hardware DRM, you might not be able to use these non-free services on a free device for much longer. Do you know what happens when you try to open the McDonalds app on an android phone running a custom operating system? It doesn't run. The server tells you to fuck off. It sends a message to your device's TrustZone, a black box security chip that you have absolutely no control over, asking if the device is running an original locked-down OS. The chip signs the response with its own private keys that cannot be extracted and sends it back to the server, which can then decide to reject you if it's not the response it wants. This is the reality of smartphones. It's not a joke.
And now, with Windows 11 requiring a TPM chip which is just TrustZone for x86, this is coming to desktops. And everyone is eating it up, to the point where TPM expansion boards went up in price after the announcement. Nothing will stop it.
10 years from now you will try to open some random popular website on your linux computer and it will not work. It will detect that you are not running an authorized system and reject your request. Want to order food? Too bad, use a locked down device. Want to buy something and have it delivered to you? Too bad, use a locked down device. Want to access your bank's website to check your account, or even just spend money? Too bad, use a locked down device. The bank part is already a reality, many banks today require verification using their app before letting you make online purchases, and the app only works on locked down smartphones.
Eventually, when enough network services stop working on "general purpose computers", 99.9% of the population will not want to use them anymore and they will disappear.
The only thing that could stop is us. We are still creating the building blocks that make it all happen. It is not like we do not stand a chance, but it is hard not to feel pessimistic about the outcome since just about every communication from the power centers can be summed up with 'moar powah, moar'.
Perhaps they won't go so far as to kick Windows 10 computers off the internet, but they might at least restrict them to certain sites and protocols. They could also say that people running "unsafe" OSes must install a government-issued CA certificate, to allow TLS interception.
Also, of course there will be government-allowed Linux versions, which implement Secure Boot and have a package manager that only installs approved apps. Admittedly, I'm not sure if this theoretical government would stop people writing their own software, but they could demand that OSes only allow "approved" apps to send packets over the internet. This would also prevent people developing "piracy" apps.
Perhaps in some future time your hacker computer won't be useful for these things either, so you have to use your phone instead. This seems livable? Maybe we should aim at doing more interesting things than shopping and banking?
Mobile banking apps with check scanning started showing up before hardware DRM was common on Android devices, and not all current apps make use of the hardware DRM. I think it's therefore safe to conclude the UX rather than the DRM was the enabling factor here.
Is there information available on actual breaches involving banking on rooted Android devices? I smell BS when banks and the like claim it's an unreasonable security risk.
I'm techno-optimist, but there's going to be such a huge lag between the wins we start to make, the re-free-ing up of computing, & any significance or adoption. We need to re-liberate computing, make the technical victories, before we can even begin to fight the real general-purpose computing war. The dream of computing needs to be re-kindled.
I feel like most people have no idea what tech is offering.
There have been some special purpose projects (FreedomBox, NextCloud, &c) that have specific ideas, but the relatively new YUNoHost is a fairly new breed of examples to create an easy to run way to get people started hosting their own stuff. https://yunohost.org/
Federated model is interesting, in that it means not everyone has to operate their stuff. Instead, we have protocols of interoperability, and lots of hosts. That gives people the experience faster, but yes, it's still currently sub-par. And most importantly, there's no Competitive Compatibility (ComCom, formerly called Adversarial Interopability), so most things we write will not interlace with & work with people's existing networks.
> Maybe you aren't going to re-kindle any dreams because you are not offering anything worth dreaming about.
You're welcome to your opinion on that. Indeed right now is a good time to question this. General purpose computing is a very nebulous header, with a lot of different ideas. Certainly there's the negative-liberties we can see slipping away, as DRM, as cloud-computing removes us from power over our systems. The appliance-ization of computing is indeed the forefront of what people think about when they think about general purpose computing, and I tend to agree, that a far more revolutionary outlook with much further reaching positive-liberties is what we ought to be dreaming about. The difficulty is that these endless open frontiers are still unsure: each of us has to carry our own little light, try to figure out who elses light to join with, where-as the big huge forces of the world & their snuffing-of-the-light is much more visible, apparent, easy to rally around. So we need to make some traction on the big dreams forwards, we need something encompassing, and bold that floods people's imagination with possibility & excitement.
This is just my 2c, but the ubiquotous & pervasive computing world, I think, spoke to a vector of computing as cross-system, as connected, that currently is almost entirely anti-General-Purpose. We don't have good open general systems for working cross system. This is one hub of capability that we need to encompass into our dreams, that needs to be part of the General, for the General to get far. But it's just one piece, just one aspect. The dream needs to immerse us fully.
I think work's like Karli Coss's data-liberation is basically the ground floor of where we need to start. This is still early prototype stage, basically, but we need wide-spanning access to a huge cross-section of the digital (in much easier to pull off manners) to even begin to allow the interesting dreaming to begin, to begin to inspire each other: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html
We tend to think everyone needs to do computing, and understand the technology they rely. But I don't understand the magic that goes into the medicine I take. Nor do I have an understanding of how the electricity grid operates. My computer just magically gets power!
The market for commoditized computing is just bigger than general computing. That doesn't mean GP will go away.
Steve Jobs realized that computing appliances (from computers that you couldn't open up to handheld music/game/app/phone devices) for people who typically had little or no interest in tinkering or engineering ("the rest of us") was a much larger market. Apple claimed the high margin section of that market and became one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.
I recall a story about Jobs being opposed to hardware - and software! - upgrades for the original Mac because "you don't upgrade your toaster." That's precisely the thinking behind the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple watch - except Apple now knows that you'll have to buy a new internet-connected toaster every few years if they stop producing security bug fixes for your old one.
Apple's officially supported repair lifetime for hardware lasts for 5 years I believe. I managed to squeak in a few repairs right before some devices became "vintage" by Apple's reckoning, though I think they may still offer repairs for some older devices if parts are available.
The question of market share is uninteresting to me, now. We have zero idea what the market is. The ecosystem is unhealthy, rotting, consumer dissent is skyrocketing (see the Freedom Phone yesterday as a rife example). Fixing this situation is not doable in 18 months though. We don't fix the war on general purpose computing with a product launch (although pinephone aloneight singlehandedly jump start the sea change). This market based mentality though I find so reductionist & off base, besides the point. We have so much pioneering to do in computing. so much freeing people to enable them to begin to think.
I don't think it is, people just don't care. They want to pull the device out of their pocket and take a picture or message a friend. If anything a more general purpose device would have less appeal because it may well get in the way of doing those things.
The purpose-specific computing is more profitable right now. If we make general-purpose computing more attractive, then we may have a chance. But even then, compatibility maybe difficult.
You can see how easy politicians can conquer minds, it's no surprise trillion dollar companies are able to sell anti consumer products at luxury pricing.
"convenience" is just marketing.
No, it isn't. This is intentional ignorance and if people keep believing it we will absolutely lose. This kind of thinking goes all the way back to the 1980s and 1990s when people said "GUIs are for wimps" and became increasingly irrelevant as everyone started using GUIs.
When I am driving and need turn by turn directions, if I have to take extra steps to get my maps app to work I might have to pull over or might try to do it while driving and crash. My map app must "just work."
If I'm about to give a talk and I plug in the projector's HDMI cable and my video driver crashes and I have to load up a config file, I look amateurish. My video subsystem must "just work."
If I'm trying to close a deal and can't share a document, the deal may fail and revenue could be lost. People might even lose their jobs. My collaboration system must "just work."
I could keep going.
Convenience is extremely important in the real world. It saves time, money, and even lives.
Haha I missed more streets with their map program, their music store is more complicated, and their podcast app is more buggy.
It's marketing.
Chances are that it’s intimately involved in your client, my client, and the HN services
Last I checked, both major mobile platforms have their OS roots in FOSS, Linux and BSD, respectively.
If people paid for open general purpose systems and software those would be more profitable because people use them more and use them for more serious things.
I am very close to deciding that the FOSS movement is partly responsible for this dystopia. More specifically it's the substituting of free "as in beer" for free "as in freedom." These two are actually at odds. Free "as in beer" is the bait on the hook for surveillance capitalism.
This has already happened with phones and tablets, after all. And Chromebooks. And Windows 365. And Windows S. And locked-down enterprise machines.
Which includes programmers.
If there is a new platform where this is the only kind of thing we can run on a walled garden device, then I'm not sure quite how general purpose you could call such a device.
Yes, but nobody has to program on them. FOSS is a thing.
No, it's always a side-effect of using GPCs for other things. Even, or really, especially when it's inconvenient.
Anecdotally, it is indeed getting harder to hire good people. I don't know that we've reached 'peak programmer', but the count isn't growing as fast as it used to.
And just like for weapons, none of the iphone and chromebook users will understand what the fuss is all about, who would want to use one of these anyways.
Joe soap is never going to do that or even want to do that. He doesn't even have a need for parts, after all he doesn't repair his stuff, he just throws it away and buys new stuff.
Perhaps he'll buy a 3D printer when he can go to Amazon and click "print" instead of "order". But we're a long way from there.
Why not have general purpose computing? Computers are vastly powerful machines that could be useful over very very long amounts of time. By allowing closed, proprietary locked down applianceization of computing, we create expensive high-tech consumer devices which seem to quickly (within 5 years) become unsupported, obsolete, unmaintainable, & unrepairable.
Computers have nearly endless uses & applications, until we artificially restrict that. Society ought to try to keep computing general, because it allows for us to adapt & update systems along with the times. Nothing but general purpose computing seems to be renewable. Why should we have other forms of computing?
One of the chief things I hope that home-cloud operators get to, quickly, is multi-tenancy. Given how easy it is to take some Raspberry Pi's & build a home Kubernetes cluster (or to spend $1000 & build a radically better version), the next question is: how do we scale that impact?
I'd love for my work to scale to my friends! I used to spend so long trying to build ldap into the ftp, http, xmpp, &c self-hosted systems I made, thinking one day it might help friends too. And I still think that way, but now that vision is less about building super-tip-top services to serve everyone, and more about building a platform that my friends could run their own services on easily, in a reasonable way. #selfhosted, I hope, begins to federalize somewhat, that we can selfhost each other, via some common, well known platforms that support these endeavours to help us build together.
Personally I like to imagine grade school having a half dozen servers, and kids getting their own virtual clusters to operate as they might, to learn about & immerse themselves in computing. This kind of feels like a maker-space sort of idea: a collectively owned means of production, an availability of tools that is community owned & operated. Ideally in my school server model, the kids themselves get the experience (at some point) of bootstrapping their own clusters, get the end to end experience (take one machine out, format the drive, compile a linux kernel, install os, install cluster/platform software, join another hardware unit to it). Similar to a rep-rap producing another one, sort of; creating the chain of knowledge to reproduce & understand.
There's plenty of semi-interesting existing examples to cite with regard to collective hosting: the SDF cluster, tilde.club, &c. I guess I hope that we can virtualize a little more, give more people something closer to their own sovereign little spaces on computing hardware, where-as historically these have been operated more akin to singular shared spaces.
tsmc could easily decide “we’re not gonna fab your RISC-V design” at any moment and you’d be more or less SOL. I mean, you could fall back to a 150 nm process, but that kills a lot of opportunities.
And if things continue — if Apple, Amazon and Google move further in the direction of custom silicon — this will happen. Apple already has a pretty big advantage with their custom silicon — which they don’t sell for use in non-Apple products. Now just imagine if they brought tsmc in-house and had exclusive access to the most advanced fabs on the planet. Your ability to compete, and the room for people to build GPC would constrict MUCH further.
We have this enormous, all-pervasive stack built upon a foundation of like 3 companies, in the midst of massive consolidation. I honestly don’t understand how so many people who think about that are comfortable with it.
My cellphone OS and web browser are FOSS.
My personal and side project server is FOSS.
I even used GIMP for 10+ years before finally giving adobe 10$ so I could knock out a flyer real quick.
I think we all know who the devil in the room is. FOSS fans know who the sinners are.
Also why go with adobe when there are better companies out there like Affinity or Pixelmator?
Combination of support and shaming?
That sums up a lot of open source software for me.
Could be that the popularity caused tons of support and unrelated to FOSS. Or maybe leadership.
Gimp has always sucked.
Yeah, right, forced.
> And just as websites constantly change
Good ones [almost] don't.
And how can Apple's practice of blocking web functionality on purpose and then disallowing different browsers be defined if not forceful?
Really don't want to argue, but there you have it
Moore's law is reaching the end. We are already at the point that most computers from 10 years ago are perfectly adequate.
If this were the situation in 1998 before the Gigahertz wars, then we'd be in trouble.
Anyone have lessons learned from that experiment?
https://www.androidauthority.com/xiaomi-apple-europe-report-...
My configuration: Ubuntu with a QEMU/KVM Windows 10 GPU Passthrough. I also have my [Ubuntu] desktop configured to look like a Mac. It looks amazing! :-D See: https://ibb.co/WV97vnj
But before I did all of that: When I would set up a new OS, one of the first steps I do is install a screen recorder with webcam recording. I would record the setup process with the screen recorder and the webcam going and I would also talk through the setup. But, the key is to put (copy/paste) all of your executed scripts that you used during setup into a text file--and then email it to yourself prior to abandoning the setup process). Also, I upload the video to my NAS for later review, to help with making more refined setups, and also to add notes/comments to the bash setup script.
With regards to my setup: the Ubuntu is the primary operating system, but in reality, it works in tandem with the Windows 10. I basically use Ubuntu and Windows 10 in tandem, and it works much better than WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2).
In fact, I can even play games in virtual reality with this setup! (But, in reality: I only truly need Windows 10 for heavy reading as I have a print-related disability known as severe convergence insufficiency. The screenreaders in Linux just do not cut it. Also MacOS screenreaders also do not cut it for STEM work.)
Anyways, here is a good rudimentary "guide" which illustrates the thought process needed to create the QEMU/KVM Windows 10 Passthrough. See: https://pastebin.com/5tuvWTMH
As for making Ubuntu look like MacOS, see this (ignore the dashboard part--as there is a better guide): https://medium.com/@shahriarazizaakash/make-your-linux-ubunt...
Here is the best guide for the MacOS dashboard (go to the "plank" part and follow the instructions from there to create the best and most realistic MacOS dashboard for Ubuntu): https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-macos-theme-on-ubuntu...
And with this hyperbole I stopped reading.
The government doesn't have this control, nor do any of the FAANG companies. I know quite a lot of people who are online without the use of any of FAANG equipment or resources. If you granted these entities this power then you did so of your own choosing. Whether that was wise or not is an entirely different question. Whether it might weaken liberal democracy, I argue no. Liberal democracy is being attacked by our long-term enemies. They're using new tools and our ignorance to have us rot from within but it's a mistake to blame technology for what was done by the hands of our enemy. Lenin turned out to be correct, the capitalists really did sell them the rope they would hang us with. Perhaps I see this in a different perspective due to my being a cold war kid.
That's correct, they don't have complete control yet, and I agree that right now liberal democracy is being attacked by illiberal authoritarian regimes, as it has been for a long time.
However, I think the point of this article is that we are also in the middle of a war for general-purpose computing, and that war might end with governments and/or corporations in a much stronger position than they are now in terms of censorship and surveillance.
Already we are seeing isolated incidents of people being rendered less free because of the control that modern platforms grant to authorities, and I don't think it is helpful to blame the victims for choosing to use mainstream operating systems or social media sites that end up destroying their livelihoods, for example.
I'm a big supporter of free and open source software but this article is way over the top.
The article misses how much of a golden age we're in. There's tons of devices available where the operating system and full app suites are open source! Desktop Linux and even an un-Googled Android smartphones are the best they've ever been. Good dev software stacks are FOSS and competitive! The web is built on open interoperable vendor-agnostic CPU-agnostic OS-agnostic standards! We no longer face the threat of a closed-source OS (Windows) eating all computing with no alternatives, open or not, as we used to. Programming becoming a very lucrative career path has insured that there's a strong "computing culture" and no shortage of resources available to get started. Newer programming languages that are much more beginner-friendly than C yet still powerful have taken off shortening the on-ramp for people to competently contribute to software they use. The computing world has changed in the last few decades, and some people have failed to notice the many huge positives. Almost every sentence in this paragraph represents a predicted doomsday we avoided.
Sorry for nitpicking but... Climate change is an indirect consequence of industrial revolution. Industrial revolution has saved orders of magnitude more lives and fed more people than climate change is likely to affect.