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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Manufacturers are simultaneously pricing and locking us out of silicon. Computers are moving back to big iron tier mainframes, and it looks like remote attestation is the future so any non-corporate owned device will be essentially useless. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it, or if we're ostracized from digital society should we figure out how to run it.

Everything that everyone who believed in free software worked towards is being destroyed. There is no way to fight back unless we figure out how to fab computers in garages. It was all for nothing. The future is bleak.

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This is why I hope more people start to get behind the 'Perma computing' movement.

https://permacomputing.net/

Even if you don't agree with the exact political stances of the authors, the broad goals are notable.

I have said it for years now, perma-computing is the missing piece of the free software movement. There is no point in the software being complete free/open if you have hardware that is locked down.

Maybe one day, we will be fabing our computers, maybe not on a garage scale but on a much more local manufacturer scale. Similar to how you can get PCB's custom made but with open processor designs. Nothing too amazing but if you could pick or supply a chip design and have something made on a 300nm node or whatever, that is still a lot of power to the people. Chips that top out at a few million transistors not billion/trillions.

You can do computing up to the level of the mid 90's, which is neat but that is the big trade off you need to make.

I just got one of those M5 meshtastic things with a keyboard and screen. My kid is in love with it. We're just messaging each other for now, but there's a lot of nodes in our area, so we're going to get a few more devices for family/friends in the area.

Check also MeshCore - works on the same hardware as MeshTastic (just flash a different firmware) and has some nice new features and seems to scale better than MeshTastic in big meshes. :)

I'm happy to now know about perma computing.

> up to the level of the mid 90s

So pair this with back-to-basics tech (e.g. text files)... that can serve us extremely well.

From that link:-

"With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism."

They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that.

That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

Nothing in this list implies "post-modernist", and post-marxism does not imply "marxist".

The Venn diagram has a fat middle

This is doubly bad with, in some cases, governments, banks and other institutions pretty much forcing us to own those locked-in devices to run their apps.

Personally it is looking like I will have a device like that to do those few things, and another that I can actually control, well at least until the signal leave the device.

Regression to the mean of shitty monarchy bullshit in the grand scheme of things

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