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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

I expect these comments to be full of agreement. Corporate behavior in the computer space leaves much to he desired.

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.

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Due to the way iOS apps are sandboxed together with their user created content a lot of users have video projects that are locked into CapCut without an easy way to access them following the ban of the TikTok suite of apps. Remind me how your iPhone is yours, when your creations on your device can be locked away from you.

An iPhone is a very non-typical device. Apple is a non-typical company which builds lock-in to every step of the process.

If you chose to use iAnything then it's a bit late to start complaining about lock in now.

When ‘not typical’ is actually the norm for a huge swath of users, perhaps non-typical is not the right term?

In a pile of devices, Apples are non-typical. The number of users is not terribly relevant.

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’re roughly 18% of the phone market (as percent of users), but 68% of the market as a share of revenue.

They are hardly irrelevant, especially if you like money.

The two things you brush over are the most important though - and feed into each other: network effects are relevant (and very much so because they affect all sorts of things you can do with something) and they are directly influenced by the number of users, which makes them incredibly relevant. What others choose are also relevant because of these network effects.

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".

Non-typical compared to what? It's not any better on Android, unless you root it. Google has been going out of its way to deny users access to data stored on their phone, by allowing and encouraging apps to claim sole ownership on data, as well as removing interoperability features (around which Android OS was initially designed), all in name of sekhurity.

Well, I have access in Files to a lot of content from my apps - that’s a decision of the app creator to not use this and keep the content created in the locked area of the app.

For example, the apps from Omni do this, as do obsidian, Linea…

Let’s assign the blame where it should be here.

> 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.

But all other platforms also make it possible for developers to make bad choices, so I’m not sure why Apple is being singled out here?

Try to hide the files on GNU/Linux.

That's easy, just store all the user-generated data in an encrypted file. You might be able to copy the blob but the vast majority of users won't be able to extract the files within.

This is much harder and can't be done accidentally, unlike on Android.

Because Apple invented this kind of walled gardens.

That's not iOS fault. Apps can store their files in a folder visible in the Files app, or can ask the user to open a file or folder from a file provider (also visible in Files app), or to save a file or folder in a file provider (always visible in the Files app).

It's not the 2011 iOS anymore, if an app today hides its video projects from the user, it's entirely the app fault.

Arguably this is still on Apple, because they don’t let you access the full filesystem as you can on other operating systems, and in particular because an app developer may rightfully want to create a class of internal-use files that are not explicitly exposed to the typical user, but would be available to users seeking them out.

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.

Blame can be shared. The OS vendor for providing a way for applications to hide files on the user's filesystem from the user, and the application for using it instead of making the user's documents available to the user. They are both working together in unison against the user.

Well, you can access them by using something like iMazing. I agree that there should be a way to see the entire file system, even if read-only.

imo it's the platform's choice to have default-visible or default-sandboxed program outputs and data.

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).

Extrapolating this point outward, I don't think there is really any community computing.

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.

I thought most folks had moved on to google docs and ms365?

If I understand what you're saying ... my music listening, magazine browsing, movie watching, are all offline these days (#fuckstreaming). I do 3D modeling in an offline app (FreeCAD), 2D "modeling" (Affinity Designer) in an offline app.

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.)

For the map app, OsmAnd+ is amazing. https://osmand.net/

> one of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home.

That's what's wrong with the various "federated" social networks. They lack a network effect that makes them grow.

Well yes and no. There's no existing network (for something new), so certainly there's no network effect making 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 think the fediverse experience is poor, I rate it as superior to the walled gardens.

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'm not sure what you mean by lacking a network effect, unless you mean they don't yet have sufficient users to draw in new ones?

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.

I would disagree with the implication that everything has to grow, but solely on the grounds that I am not convinced human beings are psychologically mature enough as a species to be that connected with that many other humans and still retain their capacity for acting like a a good human.

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.

The reason they don’t grow is much more trivial - they simply have no sign up funnels and are visibly technically complicated. Every step and choice there is arcane and ideologic.

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.

I changed phones, and tried to log back into my Fediverse/Mastadon accounts. The app asks me which servers I'm on—I can't find the accounts in my password manager, can't figure out which servers they were, and the ones I thought I was on maybe don't exist anymore? Or were accessible in one but not another app.

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.

You are way too nice on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. It's basically a giant narcissism enabler, just with different media.

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...

I've always feel like this is a fundamental weakness with these systems. They would do better having a monolithic namespace. Want the handle @jack? Too bad. Maybe it should be like a domain name you pay for but other than that I don't see a way for federated systems to get traction.

I tried to install Element messenger and even asked several of my family members to install it for communication. With default server, it turned out to be extremely slow - like hours to send a small video. Looked into installing my own server, but the complexity scared me away, and I have 40 years of coding experience behind my belt. So we are back to whatsapp now.

Which is related to the fact that OP doesn't understand that you can't fix a social and political problem with technology. Technology is always downstream of the establishment, whatever that looks like.

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.

> They lack a network effect that makes them grow. Isn't lack of fast growth a good thing? I swear, I left every social network in the two years after my mom joined.

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.

wouldn't "growth" have to be reinterpreted for such technology? cause part of its appeal is to _not_ grow unchecked. you don't want everybody on there and you want the setup to be a little difficult. about as difficult as it was to hook up with the web in the 90s.

I'd largely agree that most of the components are there, however one thing I think that's very important but is perhaps missed with the focus on the PC is the phone.

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.

I agree- though I think the problem is more that the focus of attention is not on making personal computing better, so it's withered. And some programs you could get as a buy once works offline experience are now subscription based -as-a-service

Recently there's been another shift - processing power.

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.

That’s not true in many domains where doing it on a personal computer would be either too long or too long in asfar as you are are skillful as using faster memory as cache.

video production, climate simulations, pdes, protein folding, etc etc

I agree with you; all of those needed vastly more computing than was available in a PC. If anything, the power of modern hardware has made a lot of it more available in personal workstations. Though it is true that hyped-for-the-masses personal computing devices are not optimized in that direction. You get what you buy.

Likewise it made neural nets trainable on home PCs, at sizes that weren’t in the past. Unfortunately for GP as well as for many people in disciplines I quoted, problem sizes grew farther, esp now that compute+electricity directly translates to cash.

I feel like the "past" is a shorter timeline for you than it is for me.

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.

Yes. Vast majority of computing is still under powered. Chromebook for example. Apple Silicon fanless MacBook Air only arrives in 2021. And I would argue if we want AR or latency sensitive applications our computing power is still off by at least an order of magnitude.

More than

The part that is especially annoying there is that it's not just about speed, but about AI tools being closely tied to a specific architecture. Lots of them only work on Nvidia cards, but not on AMD. A fallback to CPU is often not provided either. If you don't have enough VRAM a lot of them won't work at all, not just run slower.

> I expect these comments to be full of agreement.

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.

It's the least surprising thing in the world! The article is a totally standard bit of left-tech activist writing of the sort that has been widely found online for decades. It used to be a staple of Slashdot, a staple of USENET and it's a staple of HN too. RMS made a living giving talks exactly like this.

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 :)

I'm curious what you disagree with! Personally I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing that stuff get's more locked down. I've delved deep into custom roms and linux, riced my desktop and advocated for FOSS and discussed privacy concerns with friends and colleagues. But at some point you also need to work and be productive. Use the technology that's available. I need Office for my work, and I'd like to point my partner to a nice restaurant with Google Maps when we're on holiday. The Microsofts, googles and Apples of this world excel in actually delivering results. And it can be argued that that's more important than you really "owning" a device or a service.

The article is nearly pure ideology. For example:

"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.

Interesting, thanks!

No, you missed a big part of the desire for liberty. The liberty to run programs without regard to timesharing limits, without need for permission from folks in labcoats. The fact that FLOSS took another decade+ to become viable does not take away from this more fundamental liberty.

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.

> The Microsofts, googles and Apples of this world excel in actually delivering results. And it can be argued that that's more important than you really "owning" a device or a service.

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.

Yes I understand, but all I’m saying is that there is an argument to be made there. And luckily the transgressions of Microsoft pale in comparison to the Nazi regime :-)

Where do left-tech activists tend to hang out? I would be interested in joining...

The unsurprising thing is that people here think that this is left-tech activism. The true cool-aid[1] is this particular tech ideology which is all about “liberty” on the surface but is either agnostic of or embraces privatization.[2] Yeah, unsurprisingly the author explicitly embraces “the tech industry”. It’s just gone wrong or too far. It’s not like the good old privatization in the old days.

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”

Indeed, when a network effect can be monopolized, it'd be bad business not trying to become the monopoly.

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.

Society doesn’t exist according to the extreme version of liberal ideology. We’re all just individuals with some negative freedoms. So yes, accoarding to that mindset nothing is wrong. Because we can all just individually opt out of these networks.

No problem at all.

Reminds me that back in 2001 I was suggesting the Squeak (Smalltalk) Foundation's purpose should include supporting collaborative software and the community around it -- beyond supporting just personal development. There were a bunch of interesting discussions related to that although ultimately the focus still ended up moving towards the narrower traditional Smalltalk culture idea of empowering the user rather than the community.

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.

Yeah, but I think part of the point is people don't actually want or need network effects for a lot of things. Even where connection is needed, companies have used it to wedge in stuff that doesn't benefit users.

Of course they have. They want network effects. It's good for lock-in.

If you don't want or need network effects then don't use them.

> Of course they have. They want network effects. It's good for lock-in.

Yes, the point is, it's evil to do that.

The challenge is making community computing ethical

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