Hacker News

4 years ago by mcint

This wasn’t loading for me. Here’s an archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20210716183740/https://cheapskat...

4 years ago by zmmmmm

I read through several pages before giving up and jumping to the end ... but what I saw gave no objective reason that the war will be won, this is pure hope or maybe a "call to arms". I actually don't see any convincing reason why we'll "win" this war and in fact I feel like we are on the precipice of becoming permanently locked out from it ever being possible. The main reason is the complex web of laws interacting established platforms that make it effectively illegal for any new competitor to ever become established. All over the world governments are starting to regulate complex and specific requirements around security, surveillance, encryption, etc that are fundamentally incompatible with true "general purpose" computing. For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. But if it can't then by definition it is not a general purpose computer. Which is it going to be? I think governments will win and we will lose general purpose computing.

4 years ago by megameter

The thing that has always defanged authorities of the past is organizational inability to see where the game is changing. And the game has gone on for a long time - villages would do all sorts of things to operate outside of the vision of the local lords.

The probable source of disruption comes from people one step removed from the top who see an opportunity to shake up the system and turn an activist message into opportunistic gain. This is why we often see waves of "anti-corruption" campaigns, sudden policy shifts, etc. The politicians see a trend forming and jump on to it. When they get in power they walk some of it back, but they can't turn back the clock all the way.

The source of a trend towards GPC comes from a series of "small wins" like the recent breakthroughs in Right to Repair, from IP that has recently expired, and from nationalistic competition("world's free-est country" will always be a title up for grabs).

It only takes one little country that's a "hacker haven" to jump ahead of the rest for a clamor to erupt. The dominant players will conclude that the answer is to strongarm that country into the hegemonic framework; others in weaker positions will see opportunities in jumping on. Then the fight is waged economically, and if the resulting products and services are desirable, concessions are made.

4 years ago by Taek

I think we will win because locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms.

We are reaching a turning point where even the brightest minds struggle to generate major innovations on the locked down web. You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively.

Conversely, the dweb is flush right now with innovation and new ideas, with an ecosystem of builders that are excited to share and compound off of eachother's ideas.

I believe that at maturity, the dweb will run absurd agile circles around the lockdown web.

4 years ago by dasil003

I want to believe in dweb too, but I've been around since the truly distributed days of email/ftp/nntp/gopher and the birth of the web, and while I believe in open protocols, no distributed system has outcompeted a centralized one in terms of practical value to users. Even email, the most powerful protocol of them all, still requires hosting, people are never going to run their own email servers at scale. So inevitably you have centralized nodes, and at some point economies of scale kick in and there is a qualitative difference once consolidation achieves a certain critical mass. For instance, it's now very hard to run your own email server even if you want to, because if you get blacklisted by Gmail as a small operator you are unable to interact with a huge percentage of humans, with essentially no recourse.

Again, I truly want to be inspired here and will work to suppress my cynicism if you can just tell me why you think dweb will be different from Indie Web, Mastodon, or App.net.

4 years ago by Taek

The big step that dweb has taken in the past year is that it's now possible to build all the same protocols without requiring users or community managers to run servers themselves. Everything can be done in the web browser, and nothing requires user to have uptime anymore.

4 years ago by vineyardmike

> locked down platforms are fundamentally less powerful and less suitable for innovation than open platforms

Locked down platforms can iterate faster than open platforms.

Eg. Email vs. Slack. Email hasn't change fundamentally in decades but slack is growing and adding useful (to some) features.

Many HN crowd say they don't want/need change, but customer bases tend to disagree.

4 years ago by mastazi

And yet more people use email than Slack. My parents don’t know what Slack is but both have email. So does my teenage daughter. VCs like to see growth of course, so Slack until recently was the winner from a VC’s point of view, and I suspect here at HN we are a bit biased towards that viewpoint. But growth of one single product doesn’t tell you much about the grand scheme of things. Email is a very good example because no other messaging product has more adoption than it.

4 years ago by eyelovewe

I hate new features in familiar applications. I think it’s marketing you are referring to, not consumer demand. While I’m only positing an anecdotal personal reaction, I’m also not seeing data behind the premise you proposed.

Slack is puzzling to me, as it’s a terrible product, IMO, which I feel bandwagoned from a few top down decisions by some larger companies to risk their essential internal communications on a third party proprietary app. It makes no sense to me and I would never specify it’s use on any team I lead.

4 years ago by TrainedMonkey

Counterpoint: closed platforms will continue to account to majority of users because innovation available to open platforms is counterbalanced by massive amount of capital available to closed platforms.

4 years ago by aaron_m04

> You can't build "the next Facebook" on the web as it is today because the incumbent powers suffocate you so effectively.

I don't doubt this suffocation is real, but isn't it really the strong network effects that Facebook benefits from which stops somebody from "building the next FB"?

4 years ago by Taek

Facebook refuses to let anyone else tap those network effects, that's what's suffocating. Remember when Facebook and Twitter and everyone else had these amazing robust APIs you could build entire startups on top of? Then when they killed hundreds of companies overnight by turning them off?

In the dweb, those APIs can't be shut off. Those hundreds of innovative companies would still be alive and adding value to the world.

4 years ago by 1vuio0pswjnm7

"I don't doubt that suffocation is real, but ..."

Why bother with the suffocation then.

Acquiring WhatsApp was not cheap and required significant effort. Why bother.

Than answer to your question is no, IMO. Network effects may discourage competition from people with defeatist attitudes (who would give up before even trying), but network effects are not exclusive to Facebook. They can happen elsewhere.

One theory why Apple is letting iPhone users stop Facebook from tracking them is that Apple believes that iMessage is or will be competing with WhatsApp. It aligns with the theory that Facebook's move to change the WhatsApp ToS at this time is because usage of so-called "E2E" messaging apps is growing significantly.

4 years ago by e7e6eydid8

I always see everything from national laws of various stripes to human apathy blamed for the slow decline of general purpose computing but I think the answer no one wants to admit is that the dream simply hinged on figuring out how to overcome certain practical hurdles that we have failed to cleae.

There's all sorts of fingers that could be pointed in different directions across different industries of course (some being the same industry now due to consolidation of the stack) but the most fundamental failure of judgement in my opinion was that there was a romantic notion once upon a time that computers would be this great equalizer that could even allow clever enough eggheads to take on the world (literally, not with some fancy high value business idea) while simultaneously bringing real opportunity and equality to the common man ('anyone who can use a computer will be more valuable than a CEO').

The former idea never quite managed to explain why these eggeads wouldn't be beholden to the limitations of the hardware at their disposal (Turns out computing hardware multiplies the effectiveness of the boogey men just as readily as it does the eggheads and the boogeymen do a lot more hiring). The latter notion was abandoned by the same people who dreamed it up in the first place not that they'll admit it (of course they wanted computing to empower the common man, it's surely a coincidence that every step of the way they focused on expanding only an egghead's ability to command computers with wider accessibility being an afterthought motivated primarily by profit incentives)

I think the ugly truth is that general purpose computing was more of a philisophical goal than a realistic one. It seems a lot more likely that from a technological perspective it's just a lot more efficient to have an expansive commons of innovative collaboration available for dueling giants to draw from on an as-needed basis.

4 years ago by ThrowawayR2

> "I actually don't see any convincing reason why we'll "win" this war and in fact I feel like we are on the precipice of becoming permanently locked out from it ever being possible. ... For example, if your computer can encrypt things without a backdoor then authorities cannot listen. ..."

Why? Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board and you have a general purpose computer that will boot any code you write for it. The Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc. are examples of this. If you want an absolute guarantee of no third-party code not under your control, use an FPGA to custom implement your processor the way that Bunnie Huang's Precursor project does. FOSS fills the gap for software.

Sure, you might not get the performance you want for the price you want, you might not be able to connect to the sites you want, or run a specific proprietary software package but that has nothing to do with general purpose computing. In no way, shape, or form is general purpose computing endangered nor has it ever been.

4 years ago by username90

> Buy an off the shelf processor chip

Sure in a free market you could do that, be we aren't living in a free market. Both corporations and politicians wants you to use locked in devices where you are easier to monetize and control. And since those are the two powers controlling regulations chances are you will no longer be able to buy those chips legally without an active software engineering license and a business document stating what you will use them for.

It wont happen tomorrow, but what about 20-40 years? Compare todays market with 20 years ago and how much it changed, extrapolate 20 years in the future and it doesn't seem improbable at all.

4 years ago by zmmmmm

> Buy an off the shelf processor chip, buy memory chips, buy some interface chips to provide access to peripherals and storage, solder them to a board

I suspect those things will become regulated and require either constraints built in or license to be able to purchase them. Then likely aveneues for connection will be required to verify devices are trusted (so, cellular companies, ISPs) and they will do this by associating devices that try to communicate with government issued cryptographic signatures that are built into chips etc.

And yeah you could bypass everything but it will still be illegal. So a bit like you could build your own car but you won't be legally allowed to drive it on the road and you will incur huge liability if you try.

4 years ago by JetSpiegel

Can you buy a Qualcomm SOC to create a Pinephone with the state-of-the-art hardware specs? It's not a matter of money, they just won't sell them.

4 years ago by boznz

Spot on.

I spend 3-5 years getting the perfect PC setup only to have it knocked down again every time I get a new PC and all the settings have moved, half the programs that used to work now either wont or has a replacement that's not quite what I want.

I am not against progress but I just need to work so I now specifically keep the last two generations of my PC offline just so I can compile a clients firmware or modify a PCB with the same environment I developed it on. The next generations of development environments are going on-line so it may not be an option for me.

At one point I designed complex communications systems from ISO layer 1 to layer 7 but these days I dont have a clue how to use the top layers, they change daily and I the guy in the IT dept to fix any issues with my smart phone or connecting to a clients network so I feel everyones pain.

4 years ago by forgotmypw17

This is why I switched away from Windows, and then Mac, to GNU. I loved both of them, but I got tired of things changing without me asking them to.

This is my workstation, not a playground.

4 years ago by _abox

I personally don't mind rethinks. I do this myself often. New insights come up all the time, I'm especially enamored with tiling window managers right now.

But what I do hate is taking away choice. A lot of these 'updates' have actually significantly removed configurability. "We removed this option because we don't think you need it" happens way too often. A computer exists to serve us. Not for us to bend to its will (or its manufacturer's).

4 years ago by titzer

It gets tiresome at some point. My first PC was in 1993, with MS-DOS and some kooky custom GUI that Packard Bell cooked up on their own. I'm a bit jaded now because I got really good at several of the early UIs I used and they of course are in the dustbin now. Nothing like having your skills thrown in the trash every couple years.

4 years ago by pbourke

The Unix CLI skills that I learned in the late 90’s in university have had the longest staying power of anything in my career. They have extended their usefulness to Mac and now Windows with WSL. Pretty cool.

4 years ago by chrisseaton

> I spend 3-5 years getting the perfect PC setup

My solution is... don't try to get the perfect setup.

Learn to just be happy with the defaults and get on with what matters - the work you're using it for. I change maybe 1 or 2 settings on a fresh macOS install and that's it. I don't even change the wallpaper.

> I just need to work

So don't distract yourself with trying to create the perfect setup! Worse is better.

4 years ago by dane-pgp

"Just let Apple decide everything for you, they know best!" is exactly the sort of attitude that is causing us to lose this war.

4 years ago by chrisseaton

I don't know if Apple know best or not - I didn't say I thought that anywhere and I'm not sure who you're quoting - the point is the opposite - I don't care. As long as the system is usable, get on and use it and actually focus on your work rather than tinkering for the sake of tinkering.

The only war I'm fighting against is wasting my time with system setup.

4 years ago by hutzlibu

Defaults are designed for common users, who barely know how to copy and paste.

Their setup is really not working for me.

I want my desktop designed for me, from me. And if the OS thinks, it knows better than me, how to handle things and regulary rearanges or reconfigures, than screw this OS.

4 years ago by chrisseaton

> I want my desktop designed for me, from me.

Right but when you write it out like that can you see how it doesn’t make sense to expect that from a company? Not reasonable to complain when you don’t get it.

4 years ago by qq4

Ha, I stopped changing the wallpaper when I realized I would never be looking at it.

4 years ago by sokoloff

You were an outlier before in all likelihood. It’s vanishingly rare for one person to have the skills design at both the PHY layer and application layers above it. It may have been possible in the earliest days, with lower speed and more resilient comms protocols, but I’d wager it’s practically impossible now at 1G Ethernet or wifi.

4 years ago by boznz

You are basically correct but even today I can add a PHY 10/100MB Ethernet from a low spec microcontroller understand and compile a basic TCP/IP stack, and add some simple telnet or HTTP server on top, several of my projects do this and a lot of engineers have that basic understanding. Even humble AVRs and Casio calculators can run a basic TCP/IP stack but the difference between this and a gigabit ethernet on some massive multithreaded operating system is night and day and as you say well beyond most.

4 years ago by darklion

What bothers me is the idea that we can only have one type of computing--that for general-purpose computing to exist, we have to kill off every other kind of computing.

This is not a zero-sum game. We can have console-style computers and general purpose computers, and they can both exist simultaneously without one having to win and the other having to lose.

4 years ago by bakugo

>We can have console-style computers and general purpose computers, and they can both exist simultaneously without one having to win and the other having to lose.

No, we really can't, and you probably didn't read the article if you think we can.

Making general purpose computers and the software to support them is less profitable than making smartphone-ish locked down computers. It's just a fact. The corporations will gravitate towards the most profitable options, as they always do.

"But as long as there's a market, even small, someone will make them" you say. But you're forgetting that computers don't exist in isolation. They just don't work that well on their own. The main reason they're so useful is because of networking. You can be running a computer with 100% free software, but you will probably still use online services that are not free. You need to use them to live a normal life in the world of today.

But thanks to hardware DRM, you might not be able to use these non-free services on a free device for much longer. Do you know what happens when you try to open the McDonalds app on an android phone running a custom operating system? It doesn't run. The server tells you to fuck off. It sends a message to your device's TrustZone, a black box security chip that you have absolutely no control over, asking if the device is running an original locked-down OS. The chip signs the response with its own private keys that cannot be extracted and sends it back to the server, which can then decide to reject you if it's not the response it wants. This is the reality of smartphones. It's not a joke.

And now, with Windows 11 requiring a TPM chip which is just TrustZone for x86, this is coming to desktops. And everyone is eating it up, to the point where TPM expansion boards went up in price after the announcement. Nothing will stop it.

10 years from now you will try to open some random popular website on your linux computer and it will not work. It will detect that you are not running an authorized system and reject your request. Want to order food? Too bad, use a locked down device. Want to buy something and have it delivered to you? Too bad, use a locked down device. Want to access your bank's website to check your account, or even just spend money? Too bad, use a locked down device. The bank part is already a reality, many banks today require verification using their app before letting you make online purchases, and the app only works on locked down smartphones.

Eventually, when enough network services stop working on "general purpose computers", 99.9% of the population will not want to use them anymore and they will disappear.

4 years ago by dane-pgp

Unfortunately you are exactly right about what DRM/TPM is going to do to computers. Once Windows 11 reaches 50% marketshare, some Western government is going to demand that ISPs in their country not allow anyone online unless they are using a government-approved OS. Then they will require OSes and app stores to ban Tor and E2E encrypted chat apps.

Perhaps they won't go so far as to kick Windows 10 computers off the internet, but they might at least restrict them to certain sites and protocols. They could also say that people running "unsafe" OSes must install a government-issued CA certificate, to allow TLS interception.

4 years ago by KoolKat23

DRM standards yes, OS's no. The IOT market is huge and plenty rely on a Linux/Unix base.

4 years ago by acomjean

You can start to see the restrictions creeping in. It seems inexpensive tablets don’t play videos from the the major vendor (Netflix/amazon/hbo) if the hardware/os don’t support “Widevine” drm solution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine

4 years ago by A4ET8a8uTh0

I genuinely wish I could give more mod points. This is already happening. If there is going to be a war, its outcome is far from a given ( and I personally worry, general computing will be on the losing side ).

The only thing that could stop is us. We are still creating the building blocks that make it all happen. It is not like we do not stand a chance, but it is hard not to feel pessimistic about the outcome since just about every communication from the power centers can be summed up with 'moar powah, moar'.

4 years ago by skybrian

In the old days you couldn't do banking or shop on your PC because the web was young and these services didn't exist.

Perhaps in some future time your hacker computer won't be useful for these things either, so you have to use your phone instead. This seems livable? Maybe we should aim at doing more interesting things than shopping and banking?

4 years ago by smolder

Neither TPM, DRM, nor an app store was ever necessary for secure online banking, so I'm not sure what service you're referring to. TLS doesn't require those things.

4 years ago by walterbell

The economics of mass-production don't work as market sizes shrink, you can observe this by comparing MP3 player prices and selection today vs a decade ago.

4 years ago by undefined

[deleted]

4 years ago by maxerickson

Looks like the 'usual' capacity went from 8 GB to 32 GB and anything over $50 disappeared, in lieu of dozens of inexpensive devices from Chinese manufacturers?

4 years ago by walterbell

For example, Sony Walkman price range is $45 - $8500, https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

4 years ago by rhn_mk1

The original essay about general purpose computing points out that it's the underpinning of the "special-purpose computing", and that the "general" part will always bubble to the surface, unless users' freedom to own their devices is taken away.

So the meaning of "war on general computing" is closer to "war on ownership". Sure, owned and unowned computers can both coexist, but it's not clearly a good thing to allow someone else to control one's devices.

4 years ago by username90

> unless users' freedom to own their devices is taken away

This is a really easy problem to fix though, we are already quickly moving in that direction. Every big provider is moving towards more and more hardware and software lockins, and since everyone is doing it slowly consumers aren't reacting. I'd be surprised if general purpose computers aren't seen as a niche market in 20 years and illegal in many parts of the world in 40 years.

Here is roughly how it will happen: As more people are locked in general purpose computing will get an increasing density of bad actors. Big tech will publish studies showing that almost all viruses, malware, scams, child porn etc comes from general purpose devices, and therefore push for regulations to ensure everyone uses a locked down device. Anyone who argues against that will be attacked with arguments such as "Are you really going to prioritize your hobby at the expense of children getting sexually abused? There is no need for anyone but criminals to own a general purpose computer!".

4 years ago by ehnto

There is an enormous amount of software being written every day, much of it outside of silicon valley, much of it outside America, there are far more forces at work here than the SV tech monopolies and while I absolutely find the picture you're painting to be believable I feel (hope) it might not survive reality.

It requires the big powers to work together, and for every other actor to not contest it, for governments to accept and endorse the monopolies, and we're already seeing some fighting back in those fronts. I imagine the monopolistic orchestration will pull itself apart long before general purpose computing dies.

I suspect we'll see much ado about all of this in court at some point, it will be sad to even get to that point, but even if the consumers are happy campers I really doubt other businesses, and other stakeholders (nations included), will be.

4 years ago by ur-whale

>We can have console-style computers and general purpose computers

Up until the time you try to get your non-GP computer to do something the manufacturer didn't want you to, such as retrieving some data locked in your Android phone.

4 years ago by rektide

My biggest fear isn't technical, it's cultural. Computing doesn't feel like it's winning hearts & minds. Computing gets further & further away, less and less personal, less intelligible, more mystical every year. We accept more magic into our lives, & the sense of engagement, the sense of ownership, the idea of personal computing feels like it's fading.

I'm techno-optimist, but there's going to be such a huge lag between the wins we start to make, the re-free-ing up of computing, & any significance or adoption. We need to re-liberate computing, make the technical victories, before we can even begin to fight the real general-purpose computing war. The dream of computing needs to be re-kindled.

4 years ago by jopsen

Perhaps the market for GP computing just is smaller than.. the market for magic smartphone.

We tend to think everyone needs to do computing, and understand the technology they rely. But I don't understand the magic that goes into the medicine I take. Nor do I have an understanding of how the electricity grid operates. My computer just magically gets power!

The market for commoditized computing is just bigger than general computing. That doesn't mean GP will go away.

4 years ago by musicale

Steve Wozniak wanted - and built - a pre-assembled computer for tinkerers and engineers; it also turned out to have some mass market appeal as a game and spreadsheet machine, and Apple made a fair amount of money selling it to hobbyists, gamers, schools, and businesses.

Steve Jobs realized that computing appliances (from computers that you couldn't open up to handheld music/game/app/phone devices) for people who typically had little or no interest in tinkering or engineering ("the rest of us") was a much larger market. Apple claimed the high margin section of that market and became one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.

I recall a story about Jobs being opposed to hardware - and software! - upgrades for the original Mac because "you don't upgrade your toaster." That's precisely the thinking behind the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple watch - except Apple now knows that you'll have to buy a new internet-connected toaster every few years if they stop producing security bug fixes for your old one.

4 years ago by Google234

You probably meant to say 6+ years instead of a “few years”. Apple is excellent compared to everyone else in this respect.

4 years ago by rektide

I run into this all the time. but medicine doesn't get called "bicycle for the mind".

The question of market share is uninteresting to me, now. We have zero idea what the market is. The ecosystem is unhealthy, rotting, consumer dissent is skyrocketing (see the Freedom Phone yesterday as a rife example). Fixing this situation is not doable in 18 months though. We don't fix the war on general purpose computing with a product launch (although pinephone aloneight singlehandedly jump start the sea change). This market based mentality though I find so reductionist & off base, besides the point. We have so much pioneering to do in computing. so much freeing people to enable them to begin to think.

4 years ago by tonyedgecombe

>consumer dissent is skyrocketing

I don't think it is, people just don't care. They want to pull the device out of their pocket and take a picture or message a friend. If anything a more general purpose device would have less appeal because it may well get in the way of doing those things.

4 years ago by user-the-name

Maybe you aren't winning hearts and minds because you aren't actually offering something people want. Maybe you aren't going to re-kindle any dreams because you are not offering anything worth dreaming about.

4 years ago by rektide

> Maybe you aren't winning hearts and minds because you aren't actually offering something people want.

I feel like most people have no idea what tech is offering.

There have been some special purpose projects (FreedomBox, NextCloud, &c) that have specific ideas, but the relatively new YUNoHost is a fairly new breed of examples to create an easy to run way to get people started hosting their own stuff. https://yunohost.org/

Federated model is interesting, in that it means not everyone has to operate their stuff. Instead, we have protocols of interoperability, and lots of hosts. That gives people the experience faster, but yes, it's still currently sub-par. And most importantly, there's no Competitive Compatibility (ComCom, formerly called Adversarial Interopability), so most things we write will not interlace with & work with people's existing networks.

> Maybe you aren't going to re-kindle any dreams because you are not offering anything worth dreaming about.

You're welcome to your opinion on that. Indeed right now is a good time to question this. General purpose computing is a very nebulous header, with a lot of different ideas. Certainly there's the negative-liberties we can see slipping away, as DRM, as cloud-computing removes us from power over our systems. The appliance-ization of computing is indeed the forefront of what people think about when they think about general purpose computing, and I tend to agree, that a far more revolutionary outlook with much further reaching positive-liberties is what we ought to be dreaming about. The difficulty is that these endless open frontiers are still unsure: each of us has to carry our own little light, try to figure out who elses light to join with, where-as the big huge forces of the world & their snuffing-of-the-light is much more visible, apparent, easy to rally around. So we need to make some traction on the big dreams forwards, we need something encompassing, and bold that floods people's imagination with possibility & excitement.

This is just my 2c, but the ubiquotous & pervasive computing world, I think, spoke to a vector of computing as cross-system, as connected, that currently is almost entirely anti-General-Purpose. We don't have good open general systems for working cross system. This is one hub of capability that we need to encompass into our dreams, that needs to be part of the General, for the General to get far. But it's just one piece, just one aspect. The dream needs to immerse us fully.

I think work's like Karli Coss's data-liberation is basically the ground floor of where we need to start. This is still early prototype stage, basically, but we need wide-spanning access to a huge cross-section of the digital (in much easier to pull off manners) to even begin to allow the interesting dreaming to begin, to begin to inspire each other: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html

4 years ago by marcodiego

I'm not so hopeful. To have some guarantee of rights and freedoms today, some sacrifice in convenience is needed. Most people I know who can understand what is at play are not willing so sacrifice even a bit of convenience.

The purpose-specific computing is more profitable right now. If we make general-purpose computing more attractive, then we may have a chance. But even then, compatibility maybe difficult.

4 years ago by api

> The purpose-specific computing is more profitable right now.

If people paid for open general purpose systems and software those would be more profitable because people use them more and use them for more serious things.

I am very close to deciding that the FOSS movement is partly responsible for this dystopia. More specifically it's the substituting of free "as in beer" for free "as in freedom." These two are actually at odds. Free "as in beer" is the bait on the hook for surveillance capitalism.

4 years ago by deregulateMed

Swap all that with "big marketing budget"

You can see how easy politicians can conquer minds, it's no surprise trillion dollar companies are able to sell anti consumer products at luxury pricing.

"convenience" is just marketing.

4 years ago by api

> "convenience" is just marketing.

No, it isn't. This is intentional ignorance and if people keep believing it we will absolutely lose. This kind of thinking goes all the way back to the 1980s and 1990s when people said "GUIs are for wimps" and became increasingly irrelevant as everyone started using GUIs.

When I am driving and need turn by turn directions, if I have to take extra steps to get my maps app to work I might have to pull over or might try to do it while driving and crash. My map app must "just work."

If I'm about to give a talk and I plug in the projector's HDMI cable and my video driver crashes and I have to load up a config file, I look amateurish. My video subsystem must "just work."

If I'm trying to close a deal and can't share a document, the deal may fail and revenue could be lost. People might even lose their jobs. My collaboration system must "just work."

I could keep going.

Convenience is extremely important in the real world. It saves time, money, and even lives.

4 years ago by simonh

I agree, things people don't value themselves is often dismissed as 'marketing'. No these are just things other people value more than you do, and convenience is massively important. Without a lot of effort put into convenience there are lots of technologies many, even most non-technical people would never be able to even use.

4 years ago by undefined

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4 years ago by deregulateMed

Are you implying the heavily marketed alternative works better?

Haha I missed more streets with their map program, their music store is more complicated, and their podcast app is more buggy.

It's marketing.

4 years ago by Karrot_Kream

This is the kind of thinking causing FOSS or other grassroots movements to fail. Convenience is extremely important. Much like you don't wake up every day taking pride in understanding every aspect of the electrical and water distribution to your house or how your car engine works, most people don't want to understand how their software works. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be easy for folks who _want to understand_, but unfortunately a lot of grassroots software just gatekeeps this way. The result is the slow death of GPC as users use the thing that's easy and there's no privacy or freedom-respecting alternatives that non-technical users can actually use.

4 years ago by eyelovewe

FOSS failed?

Chances are that it’s intimately involved in your client, my client, and the HN services

Last I checked, both major mobile platforms have their OS roots in FOSS, Linux and BSD, respectively.

4 years ago by undefined

[deleted]

4 years ago by Animats

I can see the day coming when few people will have general-purpose computers. Those will be the people who make things, and also have a good set of tools and maybe a milling machine.

This has already happened with phones and tablets, after all. And Chromebooks. And Windows 365. And Windows S. And locked-down enterprise machines.

4 years ago by nonameiguess

I'm really not sure I see this. Enterprise devices are more portable than they used to be, not less. Gone are the days of science relying almost exclusively on supercomputers that could only run specific proprietary Unixes and basically required proprietary compilers. Connection hubs and DSPs doing signal translation from various industrial devices and military and space communications networks to IP networks have gone from almost exclusively ASICs manufactured by one of two companies to FPGAs, fully reprogrammable blank slates you can do pretty much anything with. Phones and tablets are certainly less general purpose than desktop and laptop PCs, but much more general purpose than earlier incarnations of phones and tablet-like devices such as Palm Pilots, digital address books, graphing calculators, flip phones, land lines, things that could only do one thing and couldn't have any type of extension application installed at all from anyone, whether it was part of a walled garden or not. If the average American teenager today has nothing but an iPad and iPhone, that isn't completely general purpose, but it's a huge improvement on when I was a teenager 25 years ago and the closest thing my family had to a computer at all was a word processor, not a software suite like Word or Lotus but a specialized typewriter with some proprietary embedded firmware and no writable memory at all.

4 years ago by wallacoloo

You make good points: the barriers to entry have dramatically decreased across a huge portion of the stack. With one notable exception: the cost and complexity of modern fabs increases every year while the companies involved consolidate or die out.

tsmc could easily decide “we’re not gonna fab your RISC-V design” at any moment and you’d be more or less SOL. I mean, you could fall back to a 150 nm process, but that kills a lot of opportunities.

And if things continue — if Apple, Amazon and Google move further in the direction of custom silicon — this will happen. Apple already has a pretty big advantage with their custom silicon — which they don’t sell for use in non-Apple products. Now just imagine if they brought tsmc in-house and had exclusive access to the most advanced fabs on the planet. Your ability to compete, and the room for people to build GPC would constrict MUCH further.

We have this enormous, all-pervasive stack built upon a foundation of like 3 companies, in the midst of massive consolidation. I honestly don’t understand how so many people who think about that are comfortable with it.

4 years ago by rektide

> Those will be the people who make things, and also have a good set of tools and maybe a milling machine.

One of the chief things I hope that home-cloud operators get to, quickly, is multi-tenancy. Given how easy it is to take some Raspberry Pi's & build a home Kubernetes cluster (or to spend $1000 & build a radically better version), the next question is: how do we scale that impact?

I'd love for my work to scale to my friends! I used to spend so long trying to build ldap into the ftp, http, xmpp, &c self-hosted systems I made, thinking one day it might help friends too. And I still think that way, but now that vision is less about building super-tip-top services to serve everyone, and more about building a platform that my friends could run their own services on easily, in a reasonable way. #selfhosted, I hope, begins to federalize somewhat, that we can selfhost each other, via some common, well known platforms that support these endeavours to help us build together.

Personally I like to imagine grade school having a half dozen servers, and kids getting their own virtual clusters to operate as they might, to learn about & immerse themselves in computing. This kind of feels like a maker-space sort of idea: a collectively owned means of production, an availability of tools that is community owned & operated. Ideally in my school server model, the kids themselves get the experience (at some point) of bootstrapping their own clusters, get the end to end experience (take one machine out, format the drive, compile a linux kernel, install os, install cluster/platform software, join another hardware unit to it). Similar to a rep-rap producing another one, sort of; creating the chain of knowledge to reproduce & understand.

There's plenty of semi-interesting existing examples to cite with regard to collective hosting: the SDF cluster, tilde.club, &c. I guess I hope that we can virtualize a little more, give more people something closer to their own sovereign little spaces on computing hardware, where-as historically these have been operated more akin to singular shared spaces.

4 years ago by nathanaldensr

I hope the software that blocks us from using computers doesn't block enough people to where there are no more programmers.

4 years ago by Filligree

I don't know anyone who got into programming who didn't do it on a computer they had for other reasons. Nobody buys their kid a $2000 device just in case they might want to be a programmer, especially since the kid isn't going to play with that device -- there won't be any games for it.

No, it's always a side-effect of using GPCs for other things. Even, or really, especially when it's inconvenient.

Anecdotally, it is indeed getting harder to hire good people. I don't know that we've reached 'peak programmer', but the count isn't growing as fast as it used to.

4 years ago by stan_rogers

Your "nobody" scenario is basically the whole beginning of the personal computing era. "Useless" machines that cost a fortune, had no available software (to within statistical error) and booted to BASIC. Without that era, we wouldn't have this one.

4 years ago by pdonis

> Those will be the people who make things

Which includes programmers.

4 years ago by dane-pgp

As long as you have paid for your annual "software development licence" from the government, and they haven't revoked it after finding you breaking "best practices" like producing or using encryption software without a government backdoor.

4 years ago by pdonis

I am a programmer, and I have had no such problems.

4 years ago by deregulateMed

I do my part by using FOSS. My only sin is using Windows at work because it's what the Engineers use.

My cellphone OS and web browser are FOSS.

My personal and side project server is FOSS.

I even used GIMP for 10+ years before finally giving adobe 10$ so I could knock out a flyer real quick.

I think we all know who the devil in the room is. FOSS fans know who the sinners are.

4 years ago by novok

What is your cellphone OS? Is it kind of 'open source' like android or something else entirely? How well does it work day to day?

Also why go with adobe when there are better companies out there like Affinity or Pixelmator?

4 years ago by LinuxRocks

Not OP but I use LineageOS with microG as my phone OS

4 years ago by tonyedgecombe

>I even used GIMP for 10+ years before finally giving adobe 10$ so I could knock out a flyer real quick.

That sums up a lot of open source software for me.

4 years ago by deregulateMed

Linux is pretty perfect. Definitely superior to other OS.

Could be that the popularity caused tons of support and unrelated to FOSS. Or maybe leadership.

Gimp has always sucked.

4 years ago by Karrot_Kream

Cool. Now how do we scale this to everyone else?

4 years ago by deregulateMed

Do what we did to fight tabacco addiction?

Combination of support and shaming?

4 years ago by petermcneeley

"You think you have won! What is light without dark? What are you without me? I am a part of you all. You can never defeat me. We are brothers eternal!"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089469/characters/nm0000347

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