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Comment by dedicate | Hacker News Reader

I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom.

But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.

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Apparently we need to be doing more LSD

I wish safe, tested sources were generally available. I’m 55 this year and would like to try it, but I’m not going to buy street drugs nor am I capable of producing it. Is there a pharmaceutical version of LSD available somewhere in the world through legitimate channels?

Not exactly LSD, but psilocybin clinics have been legalized in certain locations, such as the US state of Oregon. Psilocybin is of the same psychedelic class (tryptamines), so it is not an entirely dissimilar experience, although for me it's less stimulating than LSD, so YMMV.

I understand though that clinics aren't the ideal for many (they are for some), since you aren't allowed to have the trip at home or leave the clinic until it is over.

I actually think I would be more comfortable in a clinic.

Then that may be an option for you. It just needs ... a diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression and a prescription for psilocybin therapy by a specially licensed psychiatrist...

Not sure about "safe and tested" but LSD prodrugs (substances that metabolise into LSD which then works as usual) are available in many places. One example is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1D-LSD .

Eventually they are made illegal but new ones appear.

If you haven't done it by 55, you probably aren't going to do it. There are easy ways to get safe LSD if you want it. But you do not actually want it.

It's possible to want something but not enough to break the law and risk your safety for it. I use LSD regularly, but that doesn't mean sourcing it is for everyone.

LSD can be quite helpful to the right mind and when used with the right mindset. It can also be quite harmful if used improperly. Still wish it were legal though.

What's worse, in context here, is Apple's distinguished primary role in bringing this about.

Idk 2003-2009 was very much the days of the sort of malware and spyware that showed developers in a company didn’t deserve rights anymore

I don't see what that has to do with Hypercard. If anything, Hypercard (or modern HTML) is living proof that you can create and share a secure software runtime with the world.

If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did with that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the hook for PRISM compliance and backdoored Push Notifications.

HyperCard is completely insecure by any reasonable security/privacy standard.

It's like they remembered their 1984 advert, and decided they wanted to be the baddy in it.

Swift Playgrounds is very much in the spirit of HyperCard, but also gives access to the same APIs the professional developers are using.

It's also designed to be usable and educational for kids.

Yeah, Hypercard or MacPaint (really a demo for Quickdraw). Had he done only one of those two he would still rank as a genius.

From a particular POV, they’re it’s the same evolutionary chain. QuickDraw -> MacPaint -> HyperCard.

It's really hard to extract computing from the capitalistic, consumerist cradle within which it was born.

Every other human creative practice and media (poetry, theater, writing, music, painting, etc) have existed in a wide variety of cultures, societies, and economic contexts.

But computing has never existed outside of the immensely expensive and complex factories & supply chains required to produce computing components; and corporations producing software and selling it to other corporations, or to the large consumer class with disposable income that industrialization created.

In that sense the momentum of computing has always been in favor of the corporations manufacturing the computers dictating what can be done with them. We've been lucky to have had a few blips like the free software movement here and there (and the outsized effect they've had on the industry speaks to how much value there is to be found there), but the hard reality that's hard to fight is that if you control the chip factories, you control what can be done with the chips - Apple being the strongest example of this.

We're in dire need of movements pushing back against that. To name one, I'm a big fan of the uxn approach, which is to write software for a lightweight virtual machine that can run on the cheap, abundant, less/non locked down chips of yesteryear that will probably still be available and understandable a century from now.

Part of the problem trying to isolate computing is that it's fundamentally material. Even cloud resources are a flimsy abstraction over a more complex business model. That materialism is part of the issue, too. You can't ever escape the churn, bit rot gets your drives and Hetzner doesn't sell a lifetime plan. If you're not computing for the short-term, you're arguably wasting your time.

I'm not against the idea of a disasterproof runtime, but you're not "pushing back" against the consumerist machine by outlasting it. When high-quality software becomes inaccessible to support some sort of longtermist runtime, low-quality software everywhere sees a rise in popularity.

you can only blame capitalism so much for the unpopularity of hypercardlike things vs instagram/facebook/twitter etc

on some level it is just human nature to want to consume than create. just is. its not great but lets not act like people havent tried to make creative new platforms for self expression and software creation and they all kinda failed

> is just human nature to want to consume than create

That may be true.

But it doesn't really explain why the tools for simple popular creation are not there. There are a lot of people in the world who would use them, even if its only 1%.

They were there, but nobody used them.

For a long while, Apple computers came an entrie creative suite of programs to make your own content and publish it on the Internet via iWeb.

For a variety of reasons, hardly anyone took advantage of it.

You must be too young to have experienced the time when it was expected that you would build your own computer at home, and either write your own software for it, or get it for free (or just a duplication beer) from the local computer club.

I totally agree

> feel we've gone backwards

The word you are looking for is enshittification.

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