It's time to make computing personal again
vintagecomputing.com
vintagecomputing.com
I will however observe;
None of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home.
Today, there are certainly options for personal computing for most everything- as long as network effects are not in play.
Those options may not be as convenient, as cheap, or as feature-rich as the invasive option. That's fair though - you decide what you want to prioritize.
Network effects are harder to deal with. To the extent that in order to be in community you need to adopt the software the community has chosen.
Not surprisingly, software producers that can build-in network effects, do so. It's excellent from a lock-in point of view.
The title of the article is perhaps then ironic. It's trivial to make computing personal. All the tools to do so already exist.
The issue is not Personal Computing. It's Community Computing.
In the past you could do almost anything on a personal computer, it was generally about as fast as mainframe or high end workstation.
Training large AI models is currently impossible for most home users. They just do not have the processing power.
video production, climate simulations, pdes, protein folding, etc etc
For all the examples mentioned in the parent article, PCs were significantly under-powered compared to workstations, much less main frames.
An explosion of hardware development between 2005 and 2020 has lead to an era where hardware outperformed software needs. Now software is catching up.
But there have always been use cases for high end hardware, and always will be.
If you chose to use iAnything then it's a bit late to start complaining about lock in now.
However, sure, lots of users chose Apple knowing exactly what it is. Apple's not going to change since their model clearly appeals to lots of people.
If you don't like Apple's model, then don't choose Apple devices. What everyone else chooses is somewhat irrelevant to you. (Other than network effects noted earlier.)
They are hardly irrelevant, especially if you like money.
I can hack up a "device" with a raspberry pi zero or whatever and call it "HaxyDeck" and claim it is all open to anyone who wants to tinker with it, but at the end it'd be irrelevant because only me (and perhaps a couple other people) would have it. The aspects you want to ignore (number of users, be something other than Apple, what others are using) would actually affect my use of HaxyDeck directly: since i'd be the only one (or one among a tiny number) using it, i'd be the only one having to make it do things i want, it wont have software from others, it wont support software other people may want to use for communication, software some services that theoretically have nothing to do with phones or computers (e.g. banks) wont work because HaxyDeck's userbase is irrelevant for them, etc. All of these have to do exactly with what others are doing.
Basically see how all the non-Android Linux phones (like PinePhone) are faring. You can't just ignore what effect having a large user base some platform (be it a device, an OS or even service) has and say "just use something different".
For example, the apps from Omni do this, as do obsidian, Linea…
Let’s assign the blame where it should be here.
Obviously the blame lies on Apple for locking away your device's contents from you. Developers should not be able to have more control over what you can access on your device than you do. Even if they make bad choices (like making accessing the files hard) it should be you who has the final say, not them.
Apple making it possible for developers to make bad choices and go against users' control over their own devices is to blame.
It's not the 2011 iOS anymore, if an app today hides its video projects from the user, it's entirely the app fault.
I imagine, for example, that if the internal project files for a popular video editing app were accessible, we’d see competing and/or open source apps emerge that could parse them, were the original app to become suddenly unavailable. Instead they’re just lost because your phone won’t let you access them.
while possible, it is fairly non-trivial for iOS apps to have read/write access to a shared folder where they can drop arbitrary files, which can then be accessed by other apps, or be discovered by the user. it often requires copious permission negotiation handling codepaths by the developer, and a fearlessness of scary permission-warning dialogs by the end-user.
even on modern (commercially popular flavors of) Android which no longer imbibes the "free software" ethos of the linux core the OS was built around, you can't access formerly accessible application sandbox folders without installing third party browsing tools or plugging into a desktop computer to mount the storage, and cross-application sandbox access is similar to iOS.
in the "personal computing way" mentioned by the article (even today on desktop environments, less so on MacOS) program outputs are default-visible, and developers have to go out of their way to firewall or obscure or encrypt it from being accessible by the user or other programs using OS-provided pathways.
i think this is 100% on the OS + hardware + application platform provider (with Apple as all three on iOS).
That's what's wrong with the various "federated" social networks. They lack a network effect that makes them grow.
On the other hand the pitch to get people to join is weak. I don't pitch it to my friends because (currently) its a pretty poor experience compared to what they are already using.
I don't pitch it to my friends because quantity invariably destroy quality, or at the very lease hide it behind a huge pile of dirt. I don't pitch it because people who are interested in a better internet already care and know how to find it. I don't want to ruin a nice well behaving network.
I personally switched to Lemmy from Reddit after the API debacle, and I've found it to be an extremely compelling platform exactly -because it was federated. I can curate my feed from hundreds of large and small instances with nary a corporation in sight! It's self-hosting as far as the eye can see, yet it has enough interesting content and discussions to keep me coming back, without any ads or algorithm trying to manipulate me.
It feels like 90's internet full of webrings, and it's glorious.
The federated networks I am part of are pretty small and we have a lovely time sharing diverse interests, getting to know each other and even disagreeing sometimes without the blind hate, persistent negativity and gotch'a seeking you typically find on places like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Too much growth too quickly would destroy that, turning those small federated networks into another cesspool of bad behavior.
However, I am open to hearing why people disagree. My personal experience drives my opinion, so ymmv.
That’s it. Both Open Source and Federated thinks that distribution gateway federation something is something a user must know and be fond of. The user not only couldn’t care less but actively refuses this complexity because they cannot trust their own uneducated decisions. They go for the nearest CorpThing that seemingly just works for everyone and decides everything for them after they tap “Next” a few times.
So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.
Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.
Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.
The federated stuff is unsuccessful not just because of protocol stuff (if people really wanted, they would find a way) but because it's not cool yet.
The only reason people go on those networks is to try their luck at popularity and find a way to cash out in various manners. Other than that, there is not much point going on there, why would you waste time broadcasting all kinds of things you do instead of just doing more...
We only think of computing as "personal" at all because of that brief period in the 70s when very simple toy computers, just powerful enough to run a spreadsheet and play some basic games, became affordable.
But computing was invented to solve wartime problems of various kinds, including ballistic calculations, warhead design, cryptography, and intelligence analysis.
Almost immediately it moved into corporate accounting and reporting, and commercial science and engineering.
It took thirty years for it become "personal." Its roots are corporate and military, and it was never - ever - suddenly going to give those up.
Worse, a lot of open/free/etc "solutions" are built by people who like tinkering, for other people who like tinkering. That's fine when you're making an OS for a web server, but a disaster if you want technology that's open from the POV of the average non-technical user.
You can just about, now, start to imagine an anti=internet which is distributed, secure, non-corporate, and controlled by ordinary non-technical people telling smart agents what to do.
That might, just about, with many caveats (it's not hard to think of them), become a technological solution that builds a true decentralised network.
But for now we're stuck with corporate centralisation. And that's not going to be fixed by going back to 8-bit micros, or with a Linux phone.
At some point of a network popularity, it feels like there is an influx of people who want to talk to you but lack reading comprehension to read your answers. Or maybe it's specifically that every "become popular fast" algorithm tries to repeatedly throw you to them.
Curating a corner of web for yourself takes time and effort, and if a social network popularity outpaces you, then you just can't do that.
If you don't want or need network effects then don't use them.
Yes, the point is, it's evil to do that.
Most people I know literally still to use the lowest common denominator of communications because corporates have managed to screw up interoperability in their land grabs to build walled gardens. The lowest common denominator in my area is emailing word documents or PDFs around. Same as we have been doing for the last 30 years. The network effect there was Word being the first thing on the market.
All other attempts have been entirely transient and are focused in either social matters or some attempt at file storage with collaboration bolted on the top. The latter, OneDrive being a particularly funny one, generally results in people having millions of little pockets of exactly what they were doing before with no collaboration or community at all.
If we do anything now it's just personal computing with extra and annoying steps.
And no, 99% of the planet doesn't use github. They just email shitty documents around all day. Then they go back home and stare at their transient worthless social community garbage faucet endlessly until their eyes fall shut.
It's interesting there is a lot of agreement. In a way I'm surprised because I often get the impression a lot of people here have pretty well drunk the Kool-aid of corporatism.
What would be actually surprising is to read a full throated defense of modern tech and the companies that build it, and then see an HN thread full of agreement. It's certainly possible, I'd disagree with almost everything in the article. But the sort of people who disagree tend not to waste as much time on HN as me :)
"At its core, the PC movement was about a kind of tech liberty"
There was no such thing as the PC "movement". Personal computing was a market driven phenomenon in which competition drove the price of computing down far enough that people could afford to have one at home - that's it. It didn't represent any particular philosophy of society. A microcomputer in the 80s was one of a wide mix of competing manufacturers, all of whom were much more closed than a modern computer. Proprietary hardware and software ruled the day. DRM was widely used in this era, including "hardware" DRM like code books or oddly manufactured floppy disks.
By the mid 90s IBM has fluffed its control over the PC platform, so hardware is at least getting more open and interoperable and you can "control" your device in the sense of adding more RAM or extension devices. Pretty useless to anyone who isn't a HW manufacturer but nice in terms of better enabling a free and competitive market, continuing the downwards pricing pressure. It wasn't deliberate and lawsuits flew. So much for being a movement for tech liberty.
By this point Linux was just a few years old and nearly nobody had heard of it. Most PCs out of the box came with Windows 95 or 98, which if they were connected at all were connected via AOL, MSN or CompuServe: entirely closed networks that required both subscriptions and had advertising. DRM was still widespread, now with exciting things like USB dongles and garbled CD-ROMs.
The world this guy thinks existed never did. To the extent there was anything special about the microcomputer, it was that aggressive market competition made previously expensive devices cheap enough for people to buy at home. Nothing about this was a social movement though, and nothing about it came with any particular ideology of freedom or control. That's why words like "freedom" in the software context are indelibly associated not with the PC pioneers like Bill Gates or IBM but rather with RMS, who didn't develop for the PC at all. He was writing stuff like emacs and gcc for the existing proprietary UNIX big iron of the time, which were fully proprietary.
Arguably the modern computer is more open, more free and more hackable than any previous time in history. You can compile and run an open source web browser, run it on an open source OS that's booted by an open source BIOS, on an open source CPU, speaking openly documented protocols from A-Z. I don't remember any of that even being imaginable in the 80s or 90s.
It's just been so long we tend to forget, or some of us are too young to remember a time when digital computers were not available to individuals.
Not to go too Godwin here but that sounds like a "Hitler made the trains run on time" argument. There are all kinds of things that "deliver results" but with hidden costs that are unacceptable when brought into the light.
Wanting tech companies to be regulated more in this day and age of such extreme tech behemoth domination is left-wing activism in the same sense as (not being a Peter Thiel-style maniac) = left-wing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42769886
[2] A tech-specific offshoot of the half-a-century long propaganda campaign to associate “liberty” with “capitalism”
There were of course "home computery" phenomenons with network effects: IRC and Usenet, for example. There are several reasons why they've fallen out of fashion, but corporations shepherding new users into silos is surely a big one. It's a classic tale of enthusiasts vs. the Powers That Be, although the iteration speed and overall impact is perhaps most noticeable in digital technology.
Perhaps we were naïve to think we'd be left alone with a good thing. I too hope for a comeback of "personal computing", but in every scenario conceivable to me, we end up roughly where we are now - unless also re-imagining society from first principles. And if we do that, the question is whether personal computing would have emerged at all.
Most people's primary, if not only, computing device is their phone - which at the same time is probably the most restricted device.
And if you wanted to build your own and connect to the mobile network - it's considerably harder than doing the same for a traditional personal computer.
The internet is where I get ideas and news (and some of the above content — magazines as PDF for example).
So I guess the "network effect" I keep to as much of a minimum as I reasonably can?
(EDIT: oh, I don't really use my phone except as a camera and road navigator. I would love to have a completely offline map app that was decent.)
No problem at all.
Example of something I wrote then: https://lists.squeakfoundation.org/archives/list/squeakfound... "I guess I always saw Squeak's purposes as a bit broader still, relating more to "individual and group empowering transparent ubiquitous computing". For example, I see Squeak concepts as providing an OS neutral platform for various languages (Python, Lisp, Forth) [an open source .NET] and I don't see how that is going to fit into a mission statement that links to Squeak as is with a perception of a Smalltalk environment only. Granted, most people joining this list may have no direct interest in this, so that is not to say the purpose of the organization should necessarily incorporate that, especially if it has detrimental effect by making things too overly broad. Here's an alternative -- anchor the effort on one side by Squeak and have it open ended on the other. For example, "To assist the evolution of a individual and group empowering transparent open-source ubiquitous computing platform starting from the initial Squeak code base". I don't think this is out of character with for example where Alan Kay has wanted to go with Squeak in regards to a "Dynabook"."
Smalltalk (and Squeak and its derivatives) of course can empower groups like with, say, the Croquet project. What I was talking about then was mostly about emphasis around a common shared purpose (like the Chaordic Commons approach suggests) in the context of creating a formal "foundation" organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project
If I squint, it sort-of appears that JavaScript/asm.js (supporting a variety of transpired languages and running in every browser and communicating in a variety of ways) is a sort-of realization of part of that vision.
I also write this on a Mac, where I'm watching with sadness the formerly great company being run by bean-counters, who worry about profits, not user experience. The Mac is being progressively locked down and many things break in the process. Yes, it is still better than Windows, where apparently the start menu is just advertising space and the desktop isn't mine, but Microsoft's, but the path is definitely sloping down.
It's just sad.
I don't know what else to write. There isn't much we can do, as long as everybody tolerates this.
My prediction, is that, in the not too far future, perhaps 20-25 years, with the "blessing" of national security, ads business and other big players, devices will be further locked down and tracked, INCLUDING personal computers.
A lot of people already don't own a computer nowadays, except for the pocket one. In that future PCs, if they still exist, perhaps are either thin clients connecting to the vast National Net, where you can purchase subscriptions for entertainment, or completely locked down pads that ordinary people do not even have the tool to open properly. Oh, all "enhanced" with AI agents of course. You might even get a free one every 5 years -- part of your basic income package.
They won't make learning low level programming or hardware hacking illegal, because they are still valuable skills, and some people need to do that anyway. But for ordinary people it's going to be a LOT tougher. The official development languages of your computer system are some sort of Java and Javascript variants that are SAFE. You simply don't get exposed to the lower level. Very little system level API is going to be exposed because you won't have to know. If you have some issues, submit a ticket to the companies who program the systems.
We are already halfway there. Politicians and super riches are going to love that.
It's called secure boot and there's nothing magical about it. It's already here. You have it in "your" CPU. For now, you can still disable it after it boots the signed UEFI/bootloader. It won't be long until that option is gone forever.
Also, you cannot experiment in a safe environment. Safe environments are adequate if your are infantile. But you stay that way if you don't get freedom.
I know the usual comments will crop up but, now if ever is the best chance to give it a try, at least as a semi daily driver if you still want to play games or such.
I know Linux exists. In fact, I've been using it as my primary OS roughly from 1994 to 2006, and since then intermittently for some tasks, or as a main development machine for a couple of years. I wrote device drivers for Linux and helped with testing the early suspend/hibernate implementations. I'm all in support of Linux.
But when I need to get work done, I do it on MacOS, because it mostly works and I don't have to spend time on dealing with font size issues, window placement annoyances, GPU driver bugs, and the like. And I get drag&drop that works anywhere. All this makes me more efficient.
But I don't want to turn this discussion into a Linux vs MacOS advocacy thread: that's not what it's about. In fact, if we were to turn back to the main topic (ensh*ttification of everything around us), Linux would be there, too: my Ubuntu already displays ads in apt, as well as pesters me with FUD about security updates that I could get if I only subscribed. This problem is not magically cured by switching to any Linux, it's endemic in the world we live in today.
Consumer software has gone straight downhill for the last 20 years and while the FOSS alternatives have some rough edges I always at least try them first. The outcome has been that I am shielded from most of the industry's worst excesses. Bad things happen, the world gets worse, and I just read about it, it doesn't affect me. I am more of a radical than the post author, I say in your personal life, roll it all back 100%, return to history, modernity is garbage, computing has taken a wrong turn because we have allowed it to be owned by illegal monopolies and cartels. I do make compromises in the software stack we use for business simply because my employees are not as radical as I am and I need to be able to work with normal humans.
That becomes the problem. Not just in the business world either. Like if all your friends are communicating on platforms that are locked down and harvesting your data, how do you arrange to get together for a burger? If all the stores closed down and you can only buy things on Amazon, how do you clothe yourself? Obviously I'm exaggerating but the big problems of this situation arise precisely because most people don't realize it is a problem, and thus working "outside the system" requires an increasing amount of effort.
We can't personally be responsible for everything. So to bring it back home to enshitification, a free market, free from monopolies or duopolies, should be the solution. As one product gets shit, a hole in the market opens up and could be filled. That's not happening though, so what's going wrong? If it could happen anywhere it's Sillicon Valley, so much money and the culture of disruption and innovation, all the right skills are floating in the employment pool. But software keeps getting more and more shit.
Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions. Linux isn't much better than Windows for the semi-casual tinkerer either - at least on Windows you don't get told to just fork the project and implement it yourself.
I'm a bit hesitant to call this corporate greed as it's literally happening in the OSS ecosystem too. Sadly I don't have answers why, only more questions. No idea what happened.
Yes it is, through the power of choice.
>From the "don't theme my apps" movement,
Which anyone is free to ignore and actively do.
> to Wayland's "security above usability" philosophy...
1. wayland is super usable right now and has been for at least a number of years so your statement is mostly a lie. Only thing missing right now are color management and HDR. This impact a small portion of the users who can still fallback to xorg.
2. we are free not to use it. Distributions made it a default choice only recently and you can still install and run xorg, and will so for pretty much as long as you want, especially as some distros are targeted at people not liking the mainstream choices.
> Not to mention many projects refusing to add configurability and accessibility, citing vague maintainibility concerns or ideological opposition.
So you are saying having opinions is bad?
You are still free to use whatever desktop you want or patch your kernel. You have the source and the rights to do whatever you want with it.
> Another blatant example is the 6.7 kernel merging anti-user "features" in AMDGPU... previously you could lower your power limits as much as you wanted, now you have to use a patched kernel to lower your PL below -10%...
I don't think putting safeguards in a GPU driver to make sure users don't fry their expensive GPU inadvertently is an attempt against your freedom. The kernel and gpu driver are still under an open source license that expressly permit you to do the modifications you want.
> Everywhere you go, you can find these user- and tinkerer-hostile decisions.
What is more tinkerable than having the source available and the right to modify them and do whatever you want with it?
I think you are mistaking user and tinkerer-hostile decisions with your and users excessive entitlement mentality. Developers have finite resources and can't possibly agree and accept all users suggestions and desires, and have to put limits on the scope of their projects so they can maintain it, support it and not be overwhelmed by bugs/issues. This is not about freedom.
The obvious difference being that in Windows you can't even do that or (easily) apply a patch. Isn't this very ability to patch (or create a fork of) the kernel the opposite of being tinkerer-hostile?
As I see it, one way to phrase the problem is that Linux (along with its ecosystem) isn't really user-focused either. It's developer-focused. Tons of weird decisions get made that are grounded in developer desires quite removed from any user concerns. There are a lot of developers out there that do care about users, so often you get something decent, but it's still a bit off-center.
A great example is Firefox, which decided to break all extensions for developer-focused reasons (i.e., "too hard to maintain") and continues to make baffling UI changes that no one asked for. Another obvious example is the mere existence of various open-source software that is only distributed in source form, making it totally inaccessible to users who just want to click and install.
But mostly you just see it when you file a Github issue and a contributor/developer responds with something like "Sorry, that's not my priority right now". You see it when people reply with "PRs welcome". There is still a widespread mentality in the FOSS world that people who want features should be willing to somehow do at least part of the work themselves to make it happen. That's not user-focused.
Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of great open-source software out there and overall I think I'm happier with it than I would be with modern Windows (let alone MacOS; whether I'm happier than I was with Windows pre-10 is a tougher question). But basically what I mean is there are developers out there writing proprietary software who will implement features they actively dislike because they are told that users want them; that mindset is not so prevalent in the open source world.
That was only a problem for extension developers. Users weren't really impacted as developers built new versions of popular extensions.
> and continues to make baffling UI changes that no one asked for.
No one ever asked for the iphone/smartphones, yet people buy them instead of dumb phones. My firefox has evolved a bit over the year if I look at former screenshots, but everything happened so gradually it has never been a problem for users.
And all kind of software do, not only FOSS.
> Another obvious example is the mere existence of various open-source software that is only distributed in source form, making it totally inaccessible to users who just want to click and install.
There are so many apps available through the software repos and flatpak packages that users who aren't into building a software from source shouldn't even feel concerned.
> But mostly you just see it when you file a Github issue and a contributor/developer responds with something like "Sorry, that's not my priority right now". You see it when people reply with "PRs welcome". There is still a widespread mentality in the FOSS world that people who want features should be willing to somehow do at least part of the work themselves to make it happen. That's not user-focused.
Prioritization is happening everywhere, in proprietary software too. Dev teams work with finite time and resource constraints.
PRs welcome is a bonus, not a con.
> But basically what I mean is there are developers out there writing proprietary software who will implement features they actively dislike because they are told that users want them; that mindset is not so prevalent in the open source world.
Mostly only when they are paid for it. And some proprietary dev also don't implement stuff they don't like. I don't think you can generalize, this behavior is not based on the choice of license.
Some FOSS projects also do work on some features if users raise a bounty for it.
Sure, I agree. That's basically all I'm saying. FOSS gets rid of the tracking and dark patterns but it's still not what I'd call user-focused. It's like in proprietary software the decisions are made based on what the developer wants, and in FOSS it's made based on what the developer wants. But in theory with FOSS there could be people out there who are taking the opportunity of freedom from profit-driven orientation to actually figure out what users want and do that with the same level of drive that proprietary companies apply to seek profit. But it doesn't happen. It's not terrible, it's not even bad, but it's not what I'd call truly user-focused.
Hobbyist developers develop software because it solves a need they have first, and they have fun doing that. If they don't have any fun or interest to do it, they lose motivation. Hobbyist developers are the primary users of the app they develop usually.
Commercial FOSS developers do have to take users into account and I think they do but they also have to seek profit.
I don't think there is another way unless government starts employing developers to develop FOSS software based on tax payers wishes.
Government employing developers would be just another form of doing it for pay. There is another way, which is the same way that various other kinds of charitable things happen: through a desire to meet the needs of others rather than having "fun" or "interest" for the person doing the action. There are people who donate their time and energy to do things like give food to the homeless, clean up trash, or whatever. Obviously they derive some kind of satisfaction from it but I think many people who do these kinds of things wouldn't say they do it because it's "fun"; they do it because they think it meets a need that other people have. There could be software like that, but there isn't much of it.
The same way there isn't much people giving food to the homeless or clean up trash compared to the general population size.
You are looking for a unicorn imho. Having said that hobbyist developers, regardless if they do FOSS or freeware, are likely to make stuff that is in line with your particular needs because more often than not people have common needs. They may not agree or have time to implement every single feature you want but in a sense this is use-focused if not user-focused.
I just want tools to be more accessible.
Maybe because I am tech-literate, but I find Linux so much more user friendly than OSX.
Linux Mint is what I have running in my personal computer, and I can't remember the last time it got in my way of doing anything I wanted. Amazing OS, that has no right of being that good and stable while also being free - reason why I make a yearly 20 bucks donation out of gratitude.
Meanwhile there's not a single day that I don't curse at the MacBook I am forced to use for work. I have no idea how Apple has so many fanboys with that shit OS. Maybe people really like to have a slick looking toy, no matter if actually using it is an awful experience.
I used KDE (24.04) for a while now. Also used Linux 2000-2008-ish. Have read APUE.
When I win-left/right a window and then resize it, then close it, now win-left/right always resizes it as previous one. There’s no way to reset it to 50:50 (unless logout).
Notification center is obnoxious. Regular “Program stopped working” with zero details. Why do I need this information. Copying a folder in dolphin pops up a progress notification that doesn’t go away when finished. You did something, expect a notification to pop up. You did nothing, still expect it.
Windows either steal focus or fail to steal it when needed, depending on your settings and astrology. Software update nags you to click update, then you click it, then it downloads something for a few minutes (you go doing your things), then a sudo password popup fails to get focus, and it all crashes after a timeout. Or things will pop up right in your face. VNC connection closed? Yes, bring that white empty window to front asap and tell “Connection closed” with an OK button.
Start menu was designed by an idiot, a wrong mousemove and you are in a wrong section. Sections reside exactly on the 80% of bezier paths from start menu to the section content and have zero activation timeout. So you have to maze your mouse around to avoid surprises. Logout, restart, shutdown, sleep buttons in the start menu all show the same fullscreen “dialog” that requires you to choose an action again. What’s the point of separate buttons even.
I could go on about non-working automatic vpn connections, mangled fonts/dpi/geometry if you vnc into a turned off physical display, console that loves printing ~[[A half of the times when you press an arrow. And so on and so forth, the list is so big I just can’t remember it.
Idk how Linux users are using Linux so that they do not meet any issues.
Go to window scaling and set it to 2x, this will cause the compositor to zoom in to each window 2x. Now everything will look obnoxiously big.
Then, go to the display settings, and set the display scaling to 1.5x or 1.7 or whatever it is that works for your DPI. (confusingly, this means zoom out)
So the zoom in/zoom out "cancel out" and you get a good balance.
Of course, it is rendering to a larger zoomed out canvas uselessly, but in modern CPU/GPU this doesn't cause too much of an extra hit on battery life.
This solution also has the benefit that if you use multiple different displays, you can as needed set different display "zoom out" levels for each one, and have it look good on both.
Where this falls over: - OpenGL/custom SDL apps like I said before that don't respect your scale factor. - Non Hi-DPI GTK themes (there are many hidpi ones available though)
You set the QT_SCALE_FACTOR env var for QT apps to also follow this, btw.
We open systemsettings and change things. We also use a launcher, not the start menu.
win-left/right: an unresolved issue in KDE tracker that seems to remain so.
notifications: enter every program in a long list and change settings (most realistic to change).
focus issues: tried all levels (named "low" to "extreme" without any explanation, none work as intended.
start menu vs launchers: I don't find creating a launcher for every app I have reasonable. Fix the menu then call it "a daily driver".
vpn autoconnect: is on, doesn't work.
mangled fonts/dpi/geometry: I'm all ears how to fix that.
~[[A: would love to know.
You can use xmodmap to remap any key to anything you want.
> I don't find creating a launcher for every app I have reasonable
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Just press alt+space and type like everyone else.
> mangled fonts/dpi/geometry: I'm all ears how to fix that.
Use a better font. For some reason they all use the android noto crap by default, so that must be changed if you want to see letters.
#!/bin/bash
taskbar_h=40
w=$(xdisplay_info | awk '/width/ {print $2}')
h=$(xdisplay_info | awk '/height/ {print $2}')
xdotool getactivewindow windowmove 0 0 windowsize $((w / 2)) $((h - taskbar_h))
Use a better font
I think you misunderstood this. While the physical display is "on", it all looks correct. When you turn it off and vnc into the main X display, it's all mangled, regardless of the font. The order of turn off / vnc into doesn't matter either.
Also, I don't want to globally disable notifications. Maybe I just have to globally disable graphics? That would indeed solve many issues with linux desktops.
Feel free :)
Cause Linux Desktop is very far from being ready to use, complete or bug/stupidity-free. Cause you didn’t address even a half of the issues here and was only picking on trivial functions that you understand and found coping workarounds for. “Reject any solution”, lol, I have yet to see any solution apart from “turn it off completely” or “don’t use”. I did all my due diligence, my complaints are not even remotely lazy.
And I want other people to know that, before they buy into fanboy advices from people who seem to either barely use anything in the OS beyond a browser, or are just lying to themselves. Answers like these speak even better than any of my complaints here could. Feel free to advise next time, I’ll be there as well.
Every discussion like this works the same. You mention a set of real use case issues and ask what to do, and all the advisors suddenly appear too busy to answer, with a rare exception of the most defensive deniers.
As if there is any bug free platform :) But as we've established, you're not interested in rationality or solutions :D
According to your criteria NO desktop is ready to use.
I’ve given up on Debian a dozen times but feel I might actually have a future with Fedora.
When you've win-left-ed a window, you've put it into a "zone", so what you're resizing is that zone not just the window. This is helpful when you've both win-left-ed and win-right-ed something so resizing via the split between them resizes both windows. (There's actually four of these zones with an up/down split too). You can reset it to 50:50 by resizing a zone-ed window again and your ratio with stay that way.
The problem is that KDE “zone” doesn’t reset even when you close all windows associated with it, which should remove all traces of zoning cause there’s no window class/name affinity anymore. But when you win-left a new unrelated window, it becomes that-sized again. There’s no “reset” except for trying to manually 50%-width it back. My workflow includes taking screenshots (automation) so this is not an option, not to mention triggering perfectionism on “is this 50 or 49.7?”. I can re-size it to be around 50, but not reset (logout helps). I’d just bind a key “like everyone else does” ©, but there’s no way to control it programmatically.
I think I’ve seen a different thread last time, but here’s a similar one: https://discuss.kde.org/t/kwin-the-state-of-tiles/18316/3
Notably, it’s not how it always worked, it just broke with an update last summer (also affecting virtual screens etc) and no one seems to bother that much, as if it was some fringe “feature”.
macOS has been very conservative in redesigning the user experience; it's aging slowly like fine wine. There are a few hiccups occasionally but I feel it's a lot more polished and elegant compared to the quirkiness of earlier versions. I don't get this common sentiment that it was better in Snow Leopard etc.
Stability is great, power consumption is awesome since the introduction of the M-series chips and I can still do everything (and more) that I did on my mac 20 years ago. Yes there are some more hoops here and there but overall you have to keep in mind that macOS never fell into the quagmire Windows did with bloatware, malware and all the viruses (although I think the situation is much better today).
macOS has been walking a fine balance between lockdown and freedom, there is no reason to be alarmist about it and there are still projects like OpenCore Legacy Patcher that prove you can still hack macOS plenty to make it work on older macs.
We're eating good as mac users in 2025, I don't buy the slippery slope fallacy.
The new settings are half-baked and terrible. The OS pesters me constantly to update to the latest revision and I can't turn those messages off, not even close the notification without displaying the settings app. And I don't want the latest revision, because it is buggy, breaks a number of apps, and introduces the "AI" features that I do not want or need.
More and more often good apps get broken by the new OS policies (SuperDuper is a recent example).
The old style of system apps that did wonderful things is gone (think Quicktime player, or Preview), these apps are mostly neglected. The new style is half-baked multi-platform apps like settings, that do little, and what they do, they do poorly.
But it does a wonderful job at doing so.
Macs feel less like a personal computer and more like an appliance. Which works great if you do things that don't require tinkering, like office tasks or even webdev.
And I do love Linux, specially the more hobbyist OS's like Gentoo or Nix.
But at some point in my life I decided to spend more of my time (aside work) with other parts of my life. And in result, having to spend a weeken to solve some weird usecase, be it the package manager or the WM, is a pain.
I have never spent a weekend fixing a problem. The worst I can remember was when an update early version of Ubuntu broke X Windows and the update had run on multiple machines in a small office so needed to be fixed multiple time, and there was a delay while they fixed the problem IIRC. Still, it was a few hours.
Even now, using Manjaro which is relatively likely to have problems, I have had no major issues so far.
I have not used Macs so cannot compare, but IMO Linux compares very favourably with Windows.
Mac users I know rave about it, but every time they come up with a specific example of why they are better it turns out to be something like functionality other OSes have. Sometimes Macs have the advantage of being preconfigured (e.g. copy and paste between devices required installing software on both and pairing - but a 10 min one off when you buy a new device is acceptable to me).
Last attempt to try otherwise was a UEFI bios, without fallback to legacy BIOS, that just couldn't get along with whatever top distro from Distrowatch I would try to.
Apple, Google, Microsoft walled gardens are more confortable to stay on, and as long as I can have some kind of ISO C and ISO C++ support for everything else that depends upon them, I am good.
That said, my current laptop came with Linux preinstalled so I knew I would not have hardware issues.
I would also rather have one off issues to install than unpredictable issues later on. Subjective preference, of course. I have had lots of issues with Android. Never at the start, but with app upgrades.
It's the desktop space that annoys me.
- Virtual Desktop per monitor? Nope, because Xorg didn't support it back then. And now it's a 10 year bug on the Kde bugtracker.
- A Dock? It worked ok. Until Wayland came and everything broke. It's supported now, but you have to clone the latest git commit of the biggest dock project which is not almost abandoned. And it breaks while compiling. A lot.
- Global Menu? The support is all over the place.
- Fractional scaling? It works. But in MacOS (with the help of an app, I admit) I can have incredible granularity.
On top of that, add the generally inferior hardware revolving a laptop, aside CPU, storage and Ram.
The MacOS desktop feels like a Gnome2 in an alternate universe where the devs never made bad decisions, and things like Wayland (1) never occurred.
(1) Not because the project itself, but the act of breaking compatibility and passing blame to other people has sent decades of FOSS development and manpower down the drain.
- the oh-so-pretty GUI takes up too much white space, I have little left for actual content. I dont need massive icons with wide spacing since, I need the opposite.
- what is the deal with hiding folders from Finder (like ~/Libraries). Do I honestly need the command line to open this directory?
- every iteration after SnowLeopard I feel their “features” are going backwards and taking away “usability” from me.
- OpenGL stuck on 4.1, Vulkan (Molten) is a 3rd party hack. Seriously?
- its become a case of one step forward, 2 steps backwards.
- I can go on and on, but you get the gist.
never fell into the quagmire Windows did with bloatware, malware and all the viruses (although I think the situation is much better today).
Windows has 10:1 program ratio compared to Mac. You can usually choose from full-bloat gamified experience to a simple tool doing its job. Windows itself is crap by default though, but that’s at least fixable if you know what you want and where to look at.
Maybe people have been slowly boiled? I got my partner on a Mac 10 years ago but would not get her another Mac. Apple's push to make evetything e-waste, foxconn, and the general surveillance in the name of security ensure that. My observation is less that it has aged "like a fine wine" and more that Macs become prisons shaped like a computer.
(Edit: s/has/hasn't/)
I completely get this sentiment. MacOS since Big Sur has had a quite indeterministic UI, from scrollbars that only appear halfway of the time, to the new app toolbars that truncate filenames and hide the search bar in the overflow menu. The Settings app is still worse than what it replaced, the Mail app keeps randomly appearing, the random confirmation pop-ups are more common than in Windows Vista.
Snow Leopard was (and still is) a bliss, it didn't nag you with "this app is dangerous" bullshit, built-in apps that look and work like an intern's multiplatform UI practice, constant updates... It was an OS primarily designed to let people get work done, not to encourage them to spend all their time on Apple TV/Music/...
macOS has objectively getting worse in so many ways it would take a full day to compile a half serious list.
Every redesign has been a pretext for stupid "simplification" making looks airy but much less usuable. This is true both for the system and other Apple apps (iWork redesign is still a lesson on how to ruin things).
They also added a lot of restrictions and all kinds of nonsense in the name of "security" and "privacy".
The updates are slow to the point of making Windows look good, they also always force some sort of programmed obsolescence that you only find out later down the line.
They are unable to keep the development of their OS separate from their Apps (it's actually just a way to force hardware upgrade) and abandoned most local technology to favor their cloud offerings in order to increase their service revenue.
And no, if the axis you are measuring on is openness versus locked down then Microsoft is not worse. You have simply been brainwashed.
I don't know if this will be effective in any way, but I've decided to start hosting services for my friends and family out of my closet. It seems that money destroys everything it touches, so it feels nice to be doing something for reasons besides money.
My friends and family are not particularly influential people, but I think it'll be nice to create a little pocket of the world who knows what it was like to not be exploited by their tech.
1. If you were a bit more familiar with Apple history, you'd know that the Mac was actually Steve Job's push to make things more proprietary and locked down, not less. Make of that what you will.
2. If your ideological stance is in opposition to companies like Microsoft/Apple/etc. and you work in the tech industry, the most effective action you can take as an individual is to deny them your labor.
Yet he accidentally made OS X considerably more open than its predecessor by [I presume] pure accident?
Sadly, Tim Cook undid most of the work that had been done, in order to sell something close to a swappable appliance. So, you get both incompatible, uncompetitive hardware and locked down software.
For one though, you can support open source software, especially linux OS's. Similarly, ditch the Bambu. There are countless better and more open printers out there, and you can DIY excellent 3D printers that get great results.
I think that's the point of difference between now and the past, information has spread so far, and people have fought so hard for open source software and hardware, that we actually have a good defence against corporate greed. You accept some compromise and work a little harder for it, but it's really not that bad.
> The Mac is being progressively locked down
> There isn't much we can do, as long as everybody tolerates this.
So you should become the change you want to see, shouldn't you? Try switching to Linux until it works for you. Debian is rock-solid today; xfce is so good that my non-technical relatives use it every day with no complains. I'm using a GNU/Linux phone as a daily driver and I'm sick of iPhone and Mac users complaining that everything is going downhill without taking any actions. I'm also sick of articles without any suggestions of what to do, when all tools are available today. No, it's not trivial. But it's doable.
Bambu Lab never really had any goodwill. No one liked the fact they were proprietary in a previously very open market. They just made really good, affordable printers, and those who were more interested in making stuff than in supporting an open community got them, sometimes reluctantly.
And BTW, Macs have always been locked down and backwards compatibility is not their priority (which means stuff broke). They cared a lot about their user experience though, I don't know the situation now, but I don't think it can be worse than Windows.
As for operating systems, I’ve been daily driving Fedora 40 and now 41 with gnome environment and it’s been the best OS experience I’ve had yet, I haven’t had to open terminal once to configure a single thing, all my apps are installed from the software “store” GUI and I’ve got the sleep and wake behavior all dialed in the way I like.
It runs equally well on a 2014 Intel Mac mini and a 2024 Mac Studio via Asahi Linux, which was also a super simple install process (uninstalling it and reclaiming the disk space required me to reset the whole drive but pretty sure that was my fault for deleting the asahi partition the wrong way)
Anyway maybe give it a shot, and self hosting things is only getting easier, Jellyfin and Immich have changed my life, at least the virtual side of it :)
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.
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.
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
As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition.
Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.
Google was revolutionary when it launched. It was clean, super fast, and had way superior search results. It blew the competition away. Within weeks of Google's launch techies started scolding people for using AltaVista or Yahoo, when they should be using something better.
So easy to game the system before Google. (Now easy again judging by the shitty results I've been getting for years now.)
Back in 1998, Google's algorithm ("pagerank") of weighting href backlinks using linear algebra was revolutionary compared to the other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, AltaVista, etc that were built on TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency)[1].
The more simplistic TF-IDF approach of older search engines suffered from "keyword stuffing" such as invisible words at the bottom of the HTML page for SEO. Google's new search engine was an immediate improvement because it surfaced more relevant pages that beat the useless pages with keyword stuffing. At the time, Google Search results were truly superior to the junk Yahoo and AltaVista was showing.
> the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever
Not following the thread here. Do you think the web would be less monopolized if Altavista or Yahoo had won?
I don't believe it makes any difference at all. The transition from a free web, made by people for the people, to the collection of corporate walled gardens we have today would have happened regardless, it was simply the natural progression of things - that we failed to recognize and avert in time. Initiatives like making computing personal again are exactly what's needed if we want to go back.
The braindead hordes accepting things they couldn't really understand did have a negative effect on overall quality.
Just before someone argues against the misanthropy in my comment, some of my most loved family members belong to the braindead horde. I love them, but their failure in education makes the landscape worse for everyone. And it is also very visible and not something imaginary.
Today we accept our OS spying on us, showing us ads, paternalizing its users with updates and the whole mobile catastrophe is a dilemma in itself. Smartphones are powerful devices but the software landscape disabled a whole dimension of software and is responsible for unnecessary waste.
Yes, it got worse on the software department. A few less driver issues because a lot of companies and hardware suppliers were consolidated is not a win.
And honestly, it isn't really hard to notice these changes at all.
Google is a good example. It didn't have better search, but its site wasn't plastered in ugly advertising from top to bottom. This was quite a factor in its success. Clean, fast, good. Not the nightmare it did on Android, where every app onboarding is a horror story in a thousand popups. There are profound differences in quality, intelligence and ability.
The company had a legitimate business model, was innovative, agile and profitable from early on. It rightly earned a lot of respect.
But something went wrong at some point. It's debatable when, why or how, but it happened.
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.
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.
So, as far as a corp can understand anything, it can't understand this human article. I don't know if one can write articles that a corp can understand, maybe it cannot understand medium in the same way we can.. It seems to act based on information it sees in "markets" and "consumer behaviour", and we don't yet know how to write an article with those (even if "vote with your money" was once believed to be it, until we discovered that mankind as a whole is not an individual that can make a decision)
Please reconsider whether continuing to do the same (simple and easy) thing we've always done, that we've already seen does not work.
Take a step back, re-evaluate the problem in a new context, even if you don't end up agreeing with my perspective, attempting to think about the situation in a new light might be helpful.
It might be that something in the way corps grow up, maybe their environment (regulations, lack of same, incentives, consumerism, trade, markets) may influence them to grow into the immoral unethical monsters they often become.
Maybe we should consider them too dangerous and harmful, and simply destroy them, I'm not convinced that's better, but maybe there's a way to understand them at a different level, that allows us to "write articles" they understand well enough to actually adjust their behavior (and not just try and circumvent whatever "obstacle" has been put in their path).
I will counter this with: The argument that the humans that make up a corp are in control over it, and that the corp behaviour simply results from their flawed and greedy characters, is just a convenient way to blame someone because the real problem of understanding what kind of entities corps are, and how to influence and control them is too hard.
When dealing with people, we tend to view them as as distinct entities from their individual cells and neurons when we argue about their behavior. We don't talk about this or that individual neuron causing a human to take an action, if anything, we may discuss a group of neurons, but often, we argue about the entire "brain chemistry", even if it's strictly true that some group of distinct neurons are "responsible" for the action the human takes, then so is the bones in their hands, the fibres in their muscles, because they didn't refuse (to refuse, is to no longer be part of that body). Maybe it's the moral thing to do, for a cell to refuse to be part of the immoral human, but it does not absolve the human from responsibility, and it does not put all the responsibility on the indvidual cells that make it up, humans are complex organism, corps are made out of humans, they are even more complex. Treating them as a collection of humans is what we have done so far, and while we've gained some satisfaction seeing a (too few) very disgusting people getting what they deserved, it's not changed the overall behaviour of the companies, because, killing or changing one neuron won't change a brain, replace neuron with human and brain with corp.
On a higher level of abstraction, the corp as a form of life, maybe a cancer, maybe a rat, or something that could potentially be a positive thing, we may start a new way of reasoning about and with them.
After all, I can talk to you, I know how to do that, but I can't talk to your neurons directly, I don't understand their modes of communication, it's on a different level from me.. This is why psychiatry is behind, we don't know how brains work well enough, we can give medications to take the worst out of them, like treatments for adhd, or schizophrenia, but they don't work on the brain in a coherent way, they work on the individual neurons in a very crude way, and so, the effects are nowhere near perfect, and the side effects can be almost as bad, or in some cases worse than the decease.
What I’m saying is that culture isn’t its own uncontrollable entity independent of influence from the people that run the corporation. A company’s culture is dictated by the people who lead and make decisions for that corporation. A culture is driven from the top down.
The problem isn’t understanding what type of entity a corporation is, it’s fining people who are both motivated to make the change but also has the power to make any changes.
The real hard part is working against the rigged system. People who can enact change won’t because it’s not profitable. Whether you’re the MP bribed, sorry I mean “lobbied”, by corporations, or you’re the corporate director that had to navigate the cutthroat ranks to reach your position, there’s literally no personal interest to do the right thing. Literally everyone who can control these beasts suffer from massive conflicts of interest.
So the problem isn’t understanding the problem. We already know what the problem is. We just don’t care enough to change it.
At the very leaset everyone inside the coporation can choose to quit. Yes that may not be an easy choice but that doesn't mean there isn't a choice. More often than not the choice is not nearly as costly as people want to pretend. And yes we should hold individuals accountable for making immoral choices just like "I was just following orders" should never be a valid excuse.
And they are the product of a fluke of legal-economic history.
As society keeps forcing them into pretend empathy they know every detail about it. They can exploit it and imitate it but they cant hide how precious their ego is to them. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Corporate creatures are similar, they simply don't share our emotions. That doesn't mean they don't understand or wont cater to them.
I agree, in many ways corps exhibit the same behavior as psychopaths, after all, people is the thing they subside on.
I think their way of cognition is even more alien to a normal human than that of a psychopath is to a normal human.
They may share a fundamental, that we can't make them truly understand why something is wrong, but we may be able to come up with consequences that deter them from undesired behavior.
One difference though, is that we can't make it illegal to be a psychopath, only make some of the actions that only a psychopath would perform illegal.. We could make it illegal to be a corp (I'm not saying this is going to be a better idea.. But we could make it legal to kill corps, if only we can find out how to kill them so they actually die of it [1]).
There is nothing to understand. Our ancestors, over billions of years, experienced quite a few things. The most important parts transferred from generation to generation by various means. Some parts even got hard coded into our brains firmware. Empathy for example is a fantastic idea. We know that if everyone would live up to those expectations we could create a truly wonderful society. It's not something we've learned or even understand. We just trust our feelings.
It's in err to expect others wired differently to mimic our emotions. The psychopaths developed over billions of years too! When our civilization of abundance fails, like so many before, they will step over the corpses and enjoy robbing some prepper while we won't even be able to string a thought together.
Until that time they will be this weird out of place artifact trying to fit in in a world stacked against them. It's much easier to just learn their logic and apply it only to them. Give them places to fit in. Fewer carrots, more stick.
We keep putting them in charge of the nursery, cry wolf when they ate all the babies and then we kill them. Who's fault is it really?
"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.
Today, I look at those same companies with absolute derision over their completely unethical and hostile approaches to the world, the economy and dealing with the people that use or rely on them.
Worse, my ability to get excited about new companies, products, services and innovations has been completely blunted by the expectation that anyone working on something I think is "cool" will inevitably be co-opted by people who have the worst instincts: those who actually have no respect for technology or computing and view people as less than human, simply entities from which maximum value must be extracted at any cost.
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.
Hard to ignore the signs that the US is an empire in decline, heading towards collapse.
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.
> 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.
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.
Nobody fears a toothless dog.
The most infuriating part is that this is perfectly doable with 90s web technology. Even encryption was already available in the form of SSL, and that's arguably the only thing which has improved since then. The majority of technological "progress" has merely been the reinvention of existing technology in more inefficient ways.
In the name of a "better experience".
I know, because that is exactly what many of our customers did on the agency I worked during those days.
> "We need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States that enshrines individual privacy as a fundamental right. We need Right to Repair legislation that puts control of our devices back into our hands—and also DRM reform, especially repealing Section 1201 of the DMCA so we can control the goods we own and historians can preserve our cultural heritage without the need for piracy."
Laws alone won't be enough - there's a need for new design approaches for production devices and systems. For each of the above:
-Expanding high-speed internet to all regions of the country is a positive, but privacy is limited because metadata is visible, and if we assume all nations are tapping into the trunk of the internet and collecting everything that transits their systems, this means strong encryption should be the concept around which all communication systems are built, so that at least the content of the messages can't be read.
-Right-to-Repair should extend to device design goals in which maintenance and replacement of components is intended and user alterations and upgrades aren't actively blocked. Batteries should be relatively easy to replace, etc.
-For cultural history preservation, allow archivists to bypass DRM and store offline backups of materials. Also make it easy to become an archivist and build communities of archivists.
If people dislike exploitative SaaS and content platforms, stop using them. No one is forcing anyone. Plenty of people use home servers and Linux. Go for it. There are also tools like Chris Titus’s UWU to make Windows more tolerable, and MS still sells an office suite that can be installed locally. You don’t even have to “sign in” with it, though you can.
I’ve lived through several distinct eras of computing. This one may not be the most exciting, but it’s by far the best. You can use SaaS or locally installed stuff, and emulators (both hardware and software) exist to keep the older stuff alive. Even better, I don’t have to panic save every 5 seconds, reboot my computer every hour, and my computer can come with me. I don’t get disconnected when someone places a call, and while some software is expensive, it’s cheaper than it used to be when inflation adjusted.
Go fire up an Apple II, an H89, a TRS-80, or a PET without any modern supplementation and tell me that those are preferable. You may groan about Google, but go back to purchasing tons of manuals that may or may not be specific to your machine, read through them only to find no answer and proceed to play detective for a few weeks. How much more productive is your time with a dang search engine?
But how do we sell to the layman that he is missing something, which he never experienced in the first place? Sadly, I believe we are doomed to be niche.
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/
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.
The government is not going to save you.
If you want that better future, you need to build it. Look at the Steam Deck for example that goes against the grain on all these matters (right to repair, mostly FOSS, unrestricted, etc.) and it's been a huge success.
We need a mobile platform like PinePhone / Librem to have the same level of success and reliability.
The Steam Deck is cool, but it's not a success because of its repairability or hackability. Valve is just a rare example of a privately owned corporation with enough profit to indulge in such things. Need I remind you Steam earned said profit by essentially denying you complete ownership of video games you purchase?
What we have is a problem of incentives, and the government is the only power that can alter those at scale. The only reason the Fortune 500 don't sponsor televised gladiatorial bloodsport is that it's illegal, which means the government will send guys with guns to stop it and arrest those responsible if/when it occurs. The government is "saving" us from that, just as it "saves" us from having chalk in our flour and lead in our water.
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.
> <...> corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, <...>
Second, computers are cheap now. They are no longer for the financial and/or intellectual elite.
Third, there is an overall culture/intellecual/value decline in the Western world. Probably because life after the Cold War was too easy. Now many(?) young people, at least in America, can't write by hand, and men who cut their genitals are not considered to be in need of very serious therapy, and Harvard students support HAMAS, and so on.
> I’m not calling the tech industry evil.
Well. . . why not? I think at this point the tech industry is evil. Not in the sense that water is wet, and maybe not even in the sense that mammals birth live young, but sort of in the sense that ice occurs near the Earth's poles. There are some bits and pieces here and there that don't follow the pattern but they are the exception and they're getting smaller.
That doesn't mean that technology is evil, but the ways its being used and developed often are.
And that gets to another aspect of this that I feel like people in the tech world sometimes overlook when talking about this: enshittification is not a technological phenomenon. It's a social phenomenon that is driven by our socio-legal apparatus which allows and encourages high-risk pursuit of sky-high profits. Corporate raiding a la the Sears debacle, consolidation in grocery stores, even something like tobacco/health or oil/climate-change coverups, all these are forms of enshittification. Tech is the most prominent venue, maybe because it's especially suited to certain forms of vendor lock, but it's by no means the only one.
Enshittification happens because we are not willing to take a sledgehammer to the idea that making businesses bigger and bigger is a good thing. Timid reforms focused on things like data privacy are woefully inadequate. Large companies need to be directly dismantled, wealth needs to be directly deconcentrated, and broad swaths of behavior that are currently happening left and right need to become the kind of thing that will land you in prison for 10 years.
I'm not optimistic this is going to happen without some kind of "hitting bottom", though, whatever form that may take.
Just by the by, ironically, I've heard, from my tenuous connections into ideological spheres outside my own, that a decent number of people voted for Trump out of a similar desire to shake the foundations of the system. Of course they've likely been hoodwinked, but I think the opportunity is there for a Bernie Sanders-esque person on the other side to make some change by whipping up a frenzy of rage at the status quo and promising to get out the pitchforks. The question is whether such a frenzy can be accompanied by enough cool-headed calculation to be effective.
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.
The PC movement of the 90s, where it feels like this author is reminiscing, was about arbitraging the delta between what the tech could do and the literacy and expertise in government.
> But over the past decade in particular, the Internet and digital rights management (DRM) have been steadily pulling that control away from us and putting it into the hands of huge corporations.
This period of computing was notable for how a bunch of nerds figured out how to use new networking technology to stretch/abuse/violate/break copyright and fair-use laws around media.
So many ways to get ripped content then. It was fun for a teenager and felt like a victimless loophole. It both opened a bloom of interesting new creative works, but also decimating existing markets and systems, so that eventually new monopolists Netflix and Spotify could take over.
But the conditions and tools available then never went away, and private personal computing is more available today than ever before. In a few hours someone can read a few tutorials and buy/build and run a whole redudant content serving service for all of their personal needs, while writing or conglomerating a whole system of tools and capabilities to automate or agument nearly anything they could think of.
Yep, earlier eras of computing were characterized by more user control, less surveillance and fewer predatory business models. Yet it’s important not to overlook the progress we’ve made. Modern tech is vastly more powerful, accessible, and interconnected than what came before. And in a case of a tech world nostalgia should inspire action for improvement
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
Just as your iPhone or Android sends GB of data back and forth without your knowledge or approval, our dear friends in Microsoft want a piece of that pie.
Most people are already consumed by the 'machine'. Those who resist will stick to Win10 as much as possible (I got a 2014 laptop that runs Win10Pro and runs perfectly) and my gaming desktop doesn't need an upgrade for another 10 years.
All we need is selective updates, run privacy/blocking tools, change our hosts file, run a firewall (WindowsFirewallControl) on MediumFiltering, etc.
Unfortunately only few can do such fine-tuning to their PCs (a few thousand people in the 8bn people).
The rest will be consumed by the 'machine'. I've mentioned on another topic/comment. We are cattle. We push back very rarely and on very few topics.
I am a Gibson-kinda-guy. Take the $200. Give me the OS. Stay away.
I don't have a problem with lock down, repair etc. At least not with the current iteration of computing.
While they are bad, these lock down means less competitions. And having less competition means less choices, etc, all of that leads to my final point which in my view is perhaps the most important, these company create crap products, software and services.
If they had continue to innovate and push I would have less of a problem. Look at Microsoft, and now to a less extend Apple as well. In the pursuit of more revenue they now make crap.
Therefore the more personal computing in my view isn't the benefits listed. It is to keep the company itself honest. To make them aware they need to innovate. To give a damn, to make something better.
> And there’s another problem. Very soon, we might be threatening the continuity of history itself with technologies that pollute the historical record with AI-generated noise. It sounds dramatic, but that could eventually undermine the shared cultural bonds that hold cultural groups together.
> That’s important because history is what makes this type of criticism possible. History is how we know if we’re being abused because we can rely on written records of people who came before (even 15 minutes ago) and make comparisons. If technology takes history away from us, there may be no hope of recovery.
So noise has always been there as well as methods do deal with noise.
# 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.
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
When people with that kind of worldview roll their eyes at empathy, or scoff at any need to see beyond their own opinions[0], they are all but guaranteed to seal themselves inside.
FOSS, decentralized, et al. attract a lot of people with those worldviews, and that story is the story of them failing with consumers over and over and over, doubling down on what failed every time.
Yeah sure BlueSky uses Mastodon and it’s more successful but that’s because it’s BlueSky which is not mastodon.
When I go out for a walk in the forest, I see maybe one or two people walking a dog. Where is the rest of humanity? Watching TV, playing a mobile game, whatever...
I feel like retaining control on a scale that effects the average person is basically impossible.
- legalizing DRM circumvention (repealing DMCA section 1201)
- comprehensive privacy legislation (US adopting GDPR+)
- right to repair legislation.
- antitrust action and enforcement against tech companies
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.
How about the price?
A quick googling suggests that it cost ~6,500 USD (in today's money) to buy an Apple II when it launched. Obviously it was a different time, but that sort of price today would likely be called predatory by at least some people.
We may as well follow Steve Martin and get small again.
The balanced NPU/GPU/CPU with close cache ram, such as the recent Lunar Lake chip, coupled with better integrated GPUs in consumer class laptops, and a nice web GPU webgl api .. make for a lot of capability for problems that are well solved by Monte Carlo simulation ... and RL generally.
3D apps are now really doable in browser on current devices... and the browser is a great delivery device for applications, avoiding platform specific installs and dependency hell.
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.
I like the GitHub collected archives of "awesome" that is lists of things that persons have created or done
Until a lot of people start questioning their habits as consumers, companies won't change.
The Californian Ideology is either pro-corporate or corporate-naive. Either technology itself is deterministically going to democratize things (like the Internet was an auto-democratic force, they thought—or now AI is going to help liberate everyone, hah) and/or you just don’t need to worry about private interests.
But private (corporate) interests didn’t just come out of nowhere. The Internet was created by the US state (federal) sector and then handed over for commercialization around the Clinton era. Should anyone be surprised about the turn of events?
Now the author, just as naive as the rest, talks about reigning in corprorate interests by enacting laws. And who is gonna make the politicians do that? The rich control the government. Many of them are the tech-rich.
Biden said in his farewell address that he was worried about a rising Tech Robber Baron era. Yikes. Someone should have done something about that. Like the departing president, perhaps?[1]
All of this was mainly done by the rich. Not by nerds (because not all nerds are rich). But the less wealthy California nerds who bought into the Californian Ideology helped it along.
[1] It’s not that he did nothing. It’s that he did a half-spirited job of it. If he really meant and was motivated by his own words he would have done more.
That is, some people might see it as a lesser of two evils situation where you're choosing the domestic monopolist rather than the foreign one. I think there are certain worldviews where this is worth enough to sacrifice privacy, competition, etc.
One must stop seeing things from a technical tradeoff perspective and start perceiving them from a political stable due to hostages perspective. The arguments make sense because they must.
In the 2020s I can do both of those things from walled garden OSs with DRM. The option to use an offline OS is still here too, although I can't do those things with it. That's a step forward?
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.
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)
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)
I remember taking my Atari 400 on family vacations, reading Compute magazine by the pool and learning a shitload about programming just by reading. Oh and yes, I did ride my bike and have friends and play baseball and go to the beach. Computers were just another fun thing to do. And eventually I put what I learned to use at Apple and several other big-name companies.
Today, the dominant platform (Windows) is an execrable, intolerable shitshow of anti-user arrogance and aggression and abuse. Apple's platforms are better, but I have little confidence in how long that'll last. In the end, I guess we're going back to "nerds" using real computers running Linux, and pigeons pecking at big colored buttons on touchscreens to get their reward pellets.
- Nintendo Switch games don't have microtransactions now
- VHS are unplayable now because people no longer have the machines. You can still buy anything on Blu-ray and own it forever but most people prefer the convenience of not needing a machine and disc collection.
- On Amazon now, nearly literally anything you could find in a box store is available, and you can have most of it in 1 day. Just buy from reputable brands or Amazon itself and you will be fine.
- There are so many benefits of a smartphone -- maps, internet browser for emergencies, music streaming, audiobooks, 2-factor. Flip phones are still around but no one uses them
- Google search is barely even needed now because of chatgpt, which also doesn't have ads and seo trash
- Ubuntu is better than Microsoft 95 and doesn't track you
- Social media is worse now, I'll concede here.
2. The article seemingly champions personal liberty and then has a section titled "How we can reclaim control". How about we let consumers decide what they want? If you don't like microtransactions don't buy games with microtransactions, eg.
3. It's ironic that the community run by the premier tech vc seems so against capitalism.
Wow, incredible progress in just 30 years!
operating systems aren't where most innovation happens, obviously, nor should they be, but they have made progress in usability, security, performance, etc. technology has certainly made incredible progress in 30 years
cynicism and denigrating everything is easy but it stops being cool after about age 16
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.
Don’t forget Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos were nerds - don’t blame everything on „corporations”. That is also nerds after they got ahold of influence and money - that is how the story ends.