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Me being a caveman who believes that technology is a hammer that still can be used to drive nails into building materials instead of our own heads, I'm longing

Me being a caveman who believes that technology is a hammer that still can be used to drive nails into building materials instead of our own heads, I'm longing for an Intermesh of simple networked 8-bit machines running on vanilla (no ARM core bonuses) FPGAs, with CPUs simple enough to be predictable and understood not by a select few superhumans in the world, but by a critical mass of people, and communication protocols built from scratch with privacy and security in mind, so that such device could represent a social node: here's some info that I chose to make public, and there's my protected data. A single pedestrian FPGA could host a swarm of such tiny CPUs, each dedicated to a single task or security domain: a CPU to talk to shared filesystem, a CPU to talk to the private one, one more to process input, one to Tx/Rx bytes over the wire etc.. Or, if that is too complex, there could just be a bunch of breadboarded ICs capable of networking. There actually are real-world examples of such machines exposed via telnet, e.g. http://www.homebrewcpu.com http://www.homebrewcpu.com And all the performance beasts, while surely indispensable, could just enjoy their air-gapped solitude. Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually?

pjc50 7y ago
> Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually? Video decoding? Games? You know, the major use cases for custom highly patented hardware design?
- guido_vongraum 7y ago
  Yeah, I know. The entertaining use cases. I understand that entertainment is the dominant use case for computers and networks globally. Well, if one can't live without gaming or video streaming, (s)he might just accept the security and privacy risks and indulge on. Gamers, for one, are already perfectly fine with installing invasive DRM clients and don't seem to care a slightest about that. And video, if that's a movie, still can be transferred to a cinema on film or a hard drive. Other legit use cases for video? Education? Well, books had been succeeding in that for hundreds of years until recently, when predigested visualization trumped imagination. And it's still possible to print and burn DVDs, BDs etc, but alas, the purchase is many clicks more involved and costs more money than a single youtube click.. I'm pretty sure that every other use case for powerful and complex machines to remain networked is an entertaining one. Which is OK as people seem to be bored to death these days and insatiable of their remedies, but then security is the least problem for them. Convenience and entertainment. Good intentions that pave the way to a well known place.

pjc50 7y ago

> Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually? Video decoding? Games? You know, the major use cases for custom highly patented hardware design?

guido_vongraum 7y ago
Yeah, I know. The entertaining use cases. I understand that entertainment is the dominant use case for computers and networks globally. Well, if one can't live without gaming or video streaming, (s)he might just accept the security and privacy risks and indulge on. Gamers, for one, are already perfectly fine with installing invasive DRM clients and don't seem to care a slightest about that. And video, if that's a movie, still can be transferred to a cinema on film or a hard drive. Other legit use cases for video? Education? Well, books had been succeeding in that for hundreds of years until recently, when predigested visualization trumped imagination. And it's still possible to print and burn DVDs, BDs etc, but alas, the purchase is many clicks more involved and costs more money than a single youtube click.. I'm pretty sure that every other use case for powerful and complex machines to remain networked is an entertaining one. Which is OK as people seem to be bored to death these days and insatiable of their remedies, but then security is the least problem for them. Convenience and entertainment. Good intentions that pave the way to a well known place.