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Even though this article is sarcastic(?) I can't help but get genuinely angry at these trillion dollar companies thinking they know what is better for us and tr

Even though this article is sarcastic(?) I can't help but get genuinely angry at these trillion dollar companies thinking they know what is better for us and trying to control and police everything. This is even worse than govt censoring porn and cuss-words back in the day thinking they know what is moral for the society. I was just talking to a friend the other day on how badly Apple and Google are trying their best to kill curiosity and creativity. I mean when I first got my 286 the machine was just full of possibilities. I think learning the ins and outs of it was more fun than doing anything productive. I used to hack away at it all day and night. Learning about interrupts, tinkering with the BIOS settings, hacking the serial port, irq, etc. Now everything is just locked down. In my latest phone I can't even run `fastboot` as that too has been locked down permanently because "security". Thank god we have Linux created before all this Bullshit started happening. If Apple, Google and Microsoft was in charge of things as they are now, we wouldn't even have any hardware to run anything else than Windows and iOS.

trustfundbaby 5y ago
Sounds like a business opportunity ...
- slver 5y ago
  Yes, just imagine the billions of people eagerly awaiting a blank smartphone that they can tinker the BIOS settings of.
  - prawn 5y ago
    Reminds me of the "women want pockets in all their clothes" angle. If it were vital, someone would be making buckets of money from that exact solution. That you don't hear about it suggests that fashion-first is king in the sort of clothing you wear out. Every year there's a new pitch from a modular laptop or a hackable smartphone. Never met anyone who uses one though.
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5
robinjfisher 5y ago
I don't think the article is sarcastic given the nature of their app. Where does one draw the line though? ESG[1] is becoming increasingly important to investors and I already see financial institutions instituting controls in their apps around gambling [2]. When should large companies with sufficient reach implement opportunities to address social harms? [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-and-governance-esg-criteria.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-an... [2] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/19/gambling-block-self-exclusion https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/19/gambling-block-self-exclus...
- camillomiller 5y ago
  It is not and it is worrying. I think Apple is doing a great job about privacy, but it’s a fine line the one between user advocacy and the ethical state model…
zuppy 5y ago
i started programming in 94, i've passed through all the phases. honestly, what i want now is a phone that just works, without needing to hack anything. i presume i'm not representing the miniroty of ios users here. i don't think it's possible to do both of those things (stability vs hacking) in the same time, without a compromise and i voted with my wallet for what apple did. there are options for everyone, if you want to hack it, good, there's android for that. there are even phones that you can customize. if you want a stable black box, there's ios, this is well known before you buy it. there are options for every one of us... i think you guys forget that this is an echo chamber and the real users out there are not tech savy. i
- int_19h 5y ago
  > I don't think it's possible to do both of those things (stability vs hacking) in the same time Why is it not possible, exactly?
  - zuppy 5y ago
    let me come back to you with a question: do you have an example where this works? being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability: you can change low level features and break things. if there is a chance to do it, people can be tricked to do it. of course, i'm excluding here people who have knowledge, as i continue to belive that they are a minority.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability Any computer with preinstalled Linux will "just work". Typical users will only install apps from the repositories, and those are more secure and private than App Store.
    - fouric 5y ago
      > do you have an example where this works? Yes. On my laptop, Linux is extremely stable, and yet extremely hackable. What, Linux doesn't work for you flawlessly? 99% chance it's drivers, which has nothing to do with stability and everything to do with the limited amount of effort that people have poured into drivers on that particular platform. > being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability False. "Stability" implicitly means "without modifications". There's no product or (human-made) system in existence that remains stable once you start making arbitrary modifications to it. > if there is a chance to do it, people can be tricked to do it Yes, and "freedom" (which is a core tenet of the United States Constitution, where most HN commenters are based) includes the ability to do things that will hurt yourself. "We know what's better for you than you do" leads to tyranny the majority of the time (as it does here, where Apple has full control of their devices and regularly makes decisions that hurt their users). Moreover, it's relatively easy to design a system that prevents the vast majority of users from shooting themselves in the foot (by making root(-adjacent) access difficult to acquire by accident and fairly difficult to be tricked into doing), and coupled with actual education would keep the levels of this particular kind of computer fraud (where someone convinces you to bypass your computer's security features) well below the rates of other computer fraud (such as falling prey to scam emails).
camillomiller 5y ago
Another peak self-absorbed Hacker News comment, in which we learn that curiosity only means tinkering with devices, learning how they work to the bits, plus some random Linux thrown in. This comment is ignoring that a device that does all that without you having to worry about how it works is a tool way more powerful than one in which you need to at least know how to build everything from scratch with an enormous learning curve. Curiosity can be about design, the arts, literature, drawing, composing music, making and editing videos. All of which you can do so much better and so much more democratically on these “opinionated” devices. So please, enough with this narrative, it’s really outdated and based on such a limited world view.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  You missed his point. BigTech is trying to make open computer hardware and software illegal, because "security". That is a loss for everyone, even if tinkering with computers is not your hobby.
  - tommit 5y ago
    I mean, that point was in there, sure. But I get the comment you replied to regarding how the OP comment reads.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    > BigTech is trying to make open computer hardware and software illegal, because "security". I wonder what they stand to gain from this, since they wouldn't bother if there wasn't a benefit. Android I can possibly understand, what with Google being an ad-company and expecting to track users. But Apple doesn't seem to be doing that all that much anymore. For the tractor situation, John Deere & friends expect to capture the business of independent repair shops, so there's a gain in their locking down the devices. If I buy an iPhone to run myOS on it, how's this a loss to Apple? Especially since they don't charge for IOS updates, and they also support their phones for a long time, so if I don't buy a new iPhone every year it's not because I'm running some custom OS. My iPhone 7 still has all the latest updates and I haven't paid Apple one cent ever since I bought it used more than four years ago.
slver 5y ago
How many smartphone users want to use interrupts, tinker with firmware settings, hack the port, and so on? Exactly.
- RedShift1 5y ago
  The two things are not mutually exclusive. We can have hardware and software that's open to tinker with but still come ready to use out of the box.
  - slver 5y ago
    Apple's job doesn't end when you open the box. Unless you want a rootkit installed when you charge your phone with a public charger, it needs to be locked down. These restrictions are made for security and stability. If the average user doesn't need them, then don't enable them. Simple logic.
jb1991 5y ago
Your case of curiosity is a very very specific one, and while most people are curious in different ways, for those who are curious in the same way as you, anyone with an Apple device and an Apple computer can sit down and start tinkering with code and running stuff on their own iOS devices, it’s fun and pretty easy to get started. If I was just a child or a teenager today, I think I’d have just as much fun, probably a whole lot more, playing around with iOS and learning how it works and building really interesting applications using its extraordinary range of technologies, things that were never possible in the old days of tinkering.
drikerf 5y ago
I understand your point and yes, low-level hacking has become increasingly difficult due to both locking down and increased complexity. There's still many ways to be creative though and I think there's also more potential than before due to increased resources for developing other kinds of applications. It's not all bad.
BluSyn 5y ago
Using "security" in air quotes diminishes the significant effort Apple and others put into making devices secure, and this does have fundamental trade-offs for the end-user. Some of us actually care a great deal about security, and appreciate the trade-offs and effort put in to making that happen. I sympathize with the tinkerer mindset, but this mindset exposes serious lack of empathy in exposing REAL risk to REAL people by allowing anybody to hack devices simply to satisfy 0.01% of users who want to run a custom bootloader. This is not a valid engineering trade-off for a "trillion dollar company". The world doesn't revolve around you. There are other products on the market for tinkerers that don't involve exposing everyone from your grandma to politicians to serious security and privacy breaches.
- superasn 5y ago
  Sometimes one in that 0.01% end up creating a world changing operating system like Linux. I shudder to think what the world would have be if Andrew Tanenbaum/Linus/Wall/etc had to wait for a week long review after creating their software and got rejected every time because Apple support told them.. "Are you out of your freaking mind!? You possibly can't think we will let you do anything remotely like that on our hardware. P.S. Also your account is now permanently banned."
  - a_t48 5y ago
    The great news is that we had options then and we still have options now.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      I keep reading this. What alternative do we have today that is as open to tinker and invent on as x86 hardware that is also widespread enough that it actually makes any difference at all?
      - handrous 5y ago
        > What alternative do we have today that is as open to tinker and invent on as x86 hardware that is also widespread enough that it actually makes any difference at all? x86 hardware.
tarsinge 5y ago
Both can coexist, they are not for the same usage. When I want to do something creative (i.e. create music), I don't want to tinker with a computer, I just want an appliance that works. I spent decades toying with computers, but there are others creative endeavors in life for me now. Apple (at least Jobs) was always about the idea that the general purpose computer was a mean not an end. An iPhone is not locked down if you see it for the appliance that it is. I'm glad that Linux exists and use it everyday at work though, it's just not the same thing.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I mean when I first got my 286 the machine was just full of possibilities. When I got my first 286 very little was available to me because it all had a cost. Want to learn C then get your wallet out to buy a C compiler. Want to learn Pascal then get your wallet out for Turbo Pascal . Want to learn UNIX, well hard lines, that stuff is only available in ivory towers.
- NeoVeles 5y ago
  The 286 was a little before my time, although I did spend a lot of time in the early 90's hacking on a 8086. It is always amazing to me that even in the 80's, Unix used to be considered an astoundingly heavy handed OS. Now with it legacy mostly living on via Linux, it is considered the light weight alternative. Funny the path these things take.
quink 5y ago
“Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.“ Linus Torvalds, 1993 https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html If Linux hadn’t been created, 386BSD and its derivatives would be correspondingly more popular. Or Hurd would have happened. Or both. Maybe BeOS would be a contender amongst commercial OSes. If Linux hadn’t been created things wouldn’t be that different in all likelihood.
planb 5y ago
And yet you can get a raspberry pi (which is way faster than your 286) for less than the price of a mediocre restaurant meal and learn all this stuff. Or an Arduino microcontroller to go even deeper low level. There are so many ways to tinker with electronics right now - but my main computer and phone are not "games", they are tools that I expect to work in a secure way.
asauce 5y ago
This comment fails to see the real reason that Apple, Google, and Microsoft lock down their hardware and software, ease of use. A vast, vast majority of the population could care less about learning about interrupts, tinkering with BIOS settings, etc. They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible. So companies therefore abstract away 90% of the "creativity-inducing" components because a computer is a lot less intimidating when the user clearly knows what they can and can't do with it. Apple and Google are not sitting in a meeting room pitching the best ways to stifle creativity. They are selling a product to a population that wants their highly complex device to be as simple as possible.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  > They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible. I'd add "reliable" or maybe more accurately "repeatable". When my mother runs into technical problems, she will literally get frustrated to the point of tears. She doesn't give a single fuck whether she can change the OS or install unapproved software to tinker, she just wants the stuff that was working yesterday to still be working today. When she wakes up and an OS update has broken some app she uses, she's never gone "Let me dig into why this happened, maybe I can fix it." and she never will. That's simply just something that has gone wrong in her life and ruined her day and now she needs to find a new way to do the thing that she wants to do. But you're wasting your breath. A very vocal segment of HN are effectively fundamentalists about this. The fact that there exists a market segment best served by devices which do not conform to their fundamental ideals because they have different priorities is simply unacceptable regardless of any other consideration.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_Understated_ 5y ago
This x 1000! I remember back in my DOS days as a kid tinkering with autoexec.bat, himem and all that just to get an addition 10Kb or memory to run a game. Now, with Windows in particular, they're slowly removing my ability to dick about and do what I want. The defaults are all pretty much set to "we know best" and you have to jump through more and more hoops to disable stuff (Windows update, I'm looking at you!). I'm moving to Linux (again) at the end of the month (got uni exams coming up... want to get them out the way). Had issues with it in the past but I will try and live with them this time as I want my freedom back.
- NeoVeles 5y ago
  This is why I ended up moving over to Linux many years back. I had run it on an off since about 1998 but about 5 years back there, I had blown away my install of Windows and for reason in particular I simply never reinstalled it. It is just one of those things were very rarely I realize that I am running (by ratio) a fairly rare OS as just a daily desktop. To that, don't try and force your self onto Linux, eventually you may just sit with it and never go back to Windows. If you do, that's fine if that works for you. If you stay on Linux, cool power to you. Happy hacking!
vasishath 5y ago
The lovely old 286 did not have a human's bank/card details and neither did it had any "sensitive" photographs. Devices nowadays have a lot of private information about their user and most of the people do not know how it keep it safe and secure.. to top it all, several bad actors are consistently after this private information.. hence the lockdown.
squiggleblaz 5y ago
Your comment entirely misses the point of the article, and your frustration is completely backwards. The current situation is that Facebook is not limited in their use of patterns that increase your engagement. The author of the comment is proposing some extensions to iOS that mean that Facebook is able to use patterns that increase your engagement, but you're also able to turn it off. From your perspective of wanting more control over your devices, isn't this a win? It isn't injecting javascript into a running webapp with an extension that monkeypatches it. But you gave that up by using a native app on iOS. It gets you back a huge amount of control. If you want more, there's LineageOS (self compile it with patched source code by using robotnix) and PinePhone. The jump from trusted to trustless is a big one now but it's not insurmountable.
user-the-name 5y ago
iOS alone has far, far more tools for creativity than Linux has ever had. "Creativity" doesn't mean "tinkering with kernel settings".
- megous 5y ago
  I doubt it. Every single time I have to do something more complicated on one of these GUI only devices, I get to appreciate how GNU/Linux ecosystem allows me to actually combine the power of multiple tools to achieve what I want quickly and my way. Combining simple apps together like lego building blocks to build something, is where it shines.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    That is not creativity, that is just wanting to do things your specific way, which is a way most people do not really prefer.
    - megous 5y ago
      There's no "my specific way". And people prefer to defer some things to me, because I can usually find some way to do tings in batches, rather than them doing those same things individually using common tools.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        Again, though, that is not "creativity".
        megous 5y ago
        "Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something somehow new and somehow valuable is formed." Not sure how this does not apply.
        user-the-name 5y ago
the_gipsy 5y ago
Exactly, I don't want to be at the mercy of a tech corporation to decide what's "healthy" for me or what exact degree of privacy I deserve. Allow real browser extensions, I just want to be able to use uBlock origin. Not some overengineered "system extension" that can only check the network.
dwighttk 5y ago
> Even though this article is sarcastic(?) I don’t think it is
unethical_ban 5y ago
What a weird take. It completely ignores the massive impact that addictive apps have on people, how incapable governments are at regulating malicious/predatory behavior by companies like Facebook and others, and those tradeoffs. This article is actually genius, and I truly believe they're good recommendations. Apple in these mockups wouldn't be forcing you to turn off addictive behaviors - it's just letting you know they exist, and giving YOU the power to help control it. The jist of your post is that you want the freedom to smoke cigarettes without the oppressive government health warnings on the packages.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
You're looking at the past through rose tinted glasses. I remember those times also. I remember when there was no internet, so your only source of information were these thick technical manuals, which often you had to pay a lot for. Developing software was also gated by expensive commercial compilers. Nowadays you get access to the wealth of documentation online and compilers for all major languages are available for free.
HeavyStorm 5y ago
To be honest, windows let you hack away a lot. It's the new OS that are incredibly locked down.

trustfundbaby 5y ago

Sounds like a business opportunity ...

slver 5y ago
Yes, just imagine the billions of people eagerly awaiting a blank smartphone that they can tinker the BIOS settings of.
- prawn 5y ago
  Reminds me of the "women want pockets in all their clothes" angle. If it were vital, someone would be making buckets of money from that exact solution. That you don't hear about it suggests that fashion-first is king in the sort of clothing you wear out. Every year there's a new pitch from a modular laptop or a hackable smartphone. Never met anyone who uses one though.
fsflover 5y ago
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5

robinjfisher 5y ago

I don't think the article is sarcastic given the nature of their app. Where does one draw the line though? ESG[1] is becoming increasingly important to investors and I already see financial institutions instituting controls in their apps around gambling [2]. When should large companies with sufficient reach implement opportunities to address social harms? [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-and-governance-esg-criteria.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/environmental-social-an... [2] https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/19/gambling-block-self-exclusion https://monzo.com/blog/2018/06/19/gambling-block-self-exclus...

camillomiller 5y ago
It is not and it is worrying. I think Apple is doing a great job about privacy, but it’s a fine line the one between user advocacy and the ethical state model…

zuppy 5y ago

i started programming in 94, i've passed through all the phases. honestly, what i want now is a phone that just works, without needing to hack anything. i presume i'm not representing the miniroty of ios users here. i don't think it's possible to do both of those things (stability vs hacking) in the same time, without a compromise and i voted with my wallet for what apple did. there are options for everyone, if you want to hack it, good, there's android for that. there are even phones that you can customize. if you want a stable black box, there's ios, this is well known before you buy it. there are options for every one of us... i think you guys forget that this is an echo chamber and the real users out there are not tech savy. i

int_19h 5y ago
> I don't think it's possible to do both of those things (stability vs hacking) in the same time Why is it not possible, exactly?
- zuppy 5y ago
  let me come back to you with a question: do you have an example where this works? being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability: you can change low level features and break things. if there is a chance to do it, people can be tricked to do it. of course, i'm excluding here people who have knowledge, as i continue to belive that they are a minority.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability Any computer with preinstalled Linux will "just work". Typical users will only install apps from the repositories, and those are more secure and private than App Store.
  - fouric 5y ago
    > do you have an example where this works? Yes. On my laptop, Linux is extremely stable, and yet extremely hackable. What, Linux doesn't work for you flawlessly? 99% chance it's drivers, which has nothing to do with stability and everything to do with the limited amount of effort that people have poured into drivers on that particular platform. > being hackable means exactly the opposite of stability False. "Stability" implicitly means "without modifications". There's no product or (human-made) system in existence that remains stable once you start making arbitrary modifications to it. > if there is a chance to do it, people can be tricked to do it Yes, and "freedom" (which is a core tenet of the United States Constitution, where most HN commenters are based) includes the ability to do things that will hurt yourself. "We know what's better for you than you do" leads to tyranny the majority of the time (as it does here, where Apple has full control of their devices and regularly makes decisions that hurt their users). Moreover, it's relatively easy to design a system that prevents the vast majority of users from shooting themselves in the foot (by making root(-adjacent) access difficult to acquire by accident and fairly difficult to be tricked into doing), and coupled with actual education would keep the levels of this particular kind of computer fraud (where someone convinces you to bypass your computer's security features) well below the rates of other computer fraud (such as falling prey to scam emails).

camillomiller 5y ago

Another peak self-absorbed Hacker News comment, in which we learn that curiosity only means tinkering with devices, learning how they work to the bits, plus some random Linux thrown in. This comment is ignoring that a device that does all that without you having to worry about how it works is a tool way more powerful than one in which you need to at least know how to build everything from scratch with an enormous learning curve. Curiosity can be about design, the arts, literature, drawing, composing music, making and editing videos. All of which you can do so much better and so much more democratically on these “opinionated” devices. So please, enough with this narrative, it’s really outdated and based on such a limited world view.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
You missed his point. BigTech is trying to make open computer hardware and software illegal, because "security". That is a loss for everyone, even if tinkering with computers is not your hobby.
- tommit 5y ago
  I mean, that point was in there, sure. But I get the comment you replied to regarding how the OP comment reads.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  > BigTech is trying to make open computer hardware and software illegal, because "security". I wonder what they stand to gain from this, since they wouldn't bother if there wasn't a benefit. Android I can possibly understand, what with Google being an ad-company and expecting to track users. But Apple doesn't seem to be doing that all that much anymore. For the tractor situation, John Deere & friends expect to capture the business of independent repair shops, so there's a gain in their locking down the devices. If I buy an iPhone to run myOS on it, how's this a loss to Apple? Especially since they don't charge for IOS updates, and they also support their phones for a long time, so if I don't buy a new iPhone every year it's not because I'm running some custom OS. My iPhone 7 still has all the latest updates and I haven't paid Apple one cent ever since I bought it used more than four years ago.

slver 5y ago

How many smartphone users want to use interrupts, tinker with firmware settings, hack the port, and so on? Exactly.

RedShift1 5y ago
The two things are not mutually exclusive. We can have hardware and software that's open to tinker with but still come ready to use out of the box.
- slver 5y ago
  Apple's job doesn't end when you open the box. Unless you want a rootkit installed when you charge your phone with a public charger, it needs to be locked down. These restrictions are made for security and stability. If the average user doesn't need them, then don't enable them. Simple logic.

jb1991 5y ago

Your case of curiosity is a very very specific one, and while most people are curious in different ways, for those who are curious in the same way as you, anyone with an Apple device and an Apple computer can sit down and start tinkering with code and running stuff on their own iOS devices, it’s fun and pretty easy to get started. If I was just a child or a teenager today, I think I’d have just as much fun, probably a whole lot more, playing around with iOS and learning how it works and building really interesting applications using its extraordinary range of technologies, things that were never possible in the old days of tinkering.

drikerf 5y ago

I understand your point and yes, low-level hacking has become increasingly difficult due to both locking down and increased complexity. There's still many ways to be creative though and I think there's also more potential than before due to increased resources for developing other kinds of applications. It's not all bad.

BluSyn 5y ago

Using "security" in air quotes diminishes the significant effort Apple and others put into making devices secure, and this does have fundamental trade-offs for the end-user. Some of us actually care a great deal about security, and appreciate the trade-offs and effort put in to making that happen. I sympathize with the tinkerer mindset, but this mindset exposes serious lack of empathy in exposing REAL risk to REAL people by allowing anybody to hack devices simply to satisfy 0.01% of users who want to run a custom bootloader. This is not a valid engineering trade-off for a "trillion dollar company". The world doesn't revolve around you. There are other products on the market for tinkerers that don't involve exposing everyone from your grandma to politicians to serious security and privacy breaches.

superasn 5y ago
Sometimes one in that 0.01% end up creating a world changing operating system like Linux. I shudder to think what the world would have be if Andrew Tanenbaum/Linus/Wall/etc had to wait for a week long review after creating their software and got rejected every time because Apple support told them.. "Are you out of your freaking mind!? You possibly can't think we will let you do anything remotely like that on our hardware. P.S. Also your account is now permanently banned."
- a_t48 5y ago
  The great news is that we had options then and we still have options now.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    I keep reading this. What alternative do we have today that is as open to tinker and invent on as x86 hardware that is also widespread enough that it actually makes any difference at all?
    - handrous 5y ago
      > What alternative do we have today that is as open to tinker and invent on as x86 hardware that is also widespread enough that it actually makes any difference at all? x86 hardware.

tarsinge 5y ago

Both can coexist, they are not for the same usage. When I want to do something creative (i.e. create music), I don't want to tinker with a computer, I just want an appliance that works. I spent decades toying with computers, but there are others creative endeavors in life for me now. Apple (at least Jobs) was always about the idea that the general purpose computer was a mean not an end. An iPhone is not locked down if you see it for the appliance that it is. I'm glad that Linux exists and use it everyday at work though, it's just not the same thing.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>I mean when I first got my 286 the machine was just full of possibilities. When I got my first 286 very little was available to me because it all had a cost. Want to learn C then get your wallet out to buy a C compiler. Want to learn Pascal then get your wallet out for Turbo Pascal . Want to learn UNIX, well hard lines, that stuff is only available in ivory towers.

NeoVeles 5y ago
The 286 was a little before my time, although I did spend a lot of time in the early 90's hacking on a 8086. It is always amazing to me that even in the 80's, Unix used to be considered an astoundingly heavy handed OS. Now with it legacy mostly living on via Linux, it is considered the light weight alternative. Funny the path these things take.

quink 5y ago

“Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.“ Linus Torvalds, 1993 https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html https://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html If Linux hadn’t been created, 386BSD and its derivatives would be correspondingly more popular. Or Hurd would have happened. Or both. Maybe BeOS would be a contender amongst commercial OSes. If Linux hadn’t been created things wouldn’t be that different in all likelihood.

planb 5y ago

And yet you can get a raspberry pi (which is way faster than your 286) for less than the price of a mediocre restaurant meal and learn all this stuff. Or an Arduino microcontroller to go even deeper low level. There are so many ways to tinker with electronics right now - but my main computer and phone are not "games", they are tools that I expect to work in a secure way.

asauce 5y ago

This comment fails to see the real reason that Apple, Google, and Microsoft lock down their hardware and software, ease of use. A vast, vast majority of the population could care less about learning about interrupts, tinkering with BIOS settings, etc. They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible. So companies therefore abstract away 90% of the "creativity-inducing" components because a computer is a lot less intimidating when the user clearly knows what they can and can't do with it. Apple and Google are not sitting in a meeting room pitching the best ways to stifle creativity. They are selling a product to a population that wants their highly complex device to be as simple as possible.

nucleardog 5y ago
> They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible. I'd add "reliable" or maybe more accurately "repeatable". When my mother runs into technical problems, she will literally get frustrated to the point of tears. She doesn't give a single fuck whether she can change the OS or install unapproved software to tinker, she just wants the stuff that was working yesterday to still be working today. When she wakes up and an OS update has broken some app she uses, she's never gone "Let me dig into why this happened, maybe I can fix it." and she never will. That's simply just something that has gone wrong in her life and ruined her day and now she needs to find a new way to do the thing that she wants to do. But you're wasting your breath. A very vocal segment of HN are effectively fundamentalists about this. The fact that there exists a market segment best served by devices which do not conform to their fundamental ideals because they have different priorities is simply unacceptable regardless of any other consideration.

deleted 5y ago

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_Understated_ 5y ago

This x 1000! I remember back in my DOS days as a kid tinkering with autoexec.bat, himem and all that just to get an addition 10Kb or memory to run a game. Now, with Windows in particular, they're slowly removing my ability to dick about and do what I want. The defaults are all pretty much set to "we know best" and you have to jump through more and more hoops to disable stuff (Windows update, I'm looking at you!). I'm moving to Linux (again) at the end of the month (got uni exams coming up... want to get them out the way). Had issues with it in the past but I will try and live with them this time as I want my freedom back.

NeoVeles 5y ago
This is why I ended up moving over to Linux many years back. I had run it on an off since about 1998 but about 5 years back there, I had blown away my install of Windows and for reason in particular I simply never reinstalled it. It is just one of those things were very rarely I realize that I am running (by ratio) a fairly rare OS as just a daily desktop. To that, don't try and force your self onto Linux, eventually you may just sit with it and never go back to Windows. If you do, that's fine if that works for you. If you stay on Linux, cool power to you. Happy hacking!

vasishath 5y ago

The lovely old 286 did not have a human's bank/card details and neither did it had any "sensitive" photographs. Devices nowadays have a lot of private information about their user and most of the people do not know how it keep it safe and secure.. to top it all, several bad actors are consistently after this private information.. hence the lockdown.

squiggleblaz 5y ago

Your comment entirely misses the point of the article, and your frustration is completely backwards. The current situation is that Facebook is not limited in their use of patterns that increase your engagement. The author of the comment is proposing some extensions to iOS that mean that Facebook is able to use patterns that increase your engagement, but you're also able to turn it off. From your perspective of wanting more control over your devices, isn't this a win? It isn't injecting javascript into a running webapp with an extension that monkeypatches it. But you gave that up by using a native app on iOS. It gets you back a huge amount of control. If you want more, there's LineageOS (self compile it with patched source code by using robotnix) and PinePhone. The jump from trusted to trustless is a big one now but it's not insurmountable.

user-the-name 5y ago

iOS alone has far, far more tools for creativity than Linux has ever had. "Creativity" doesn't mean "tinkering with kernel settings".

megous 5y ago
I doubt it. Every single time I have to do something more complicated on one of these GUI only devices, I get to appreciate how GNU/Linux ecosystem allows me to actually combine the power of multiple tools to achieve what I want quickly and my way. Combining simple apps together like lego building blocks to build something, is where it shines.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  That is not creativity, that is just wanting to do things your specific way, which is a way most people do not really prefer.
  - megous 5y ago
    There's no "my specific way". And people prefer to defer some things to me, because I can usually find some way to do tings in batches, rather than them doing those same things individually using common tools.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Again, though, that is not "creativity".
      - megous 5y ago
        "Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something somehow new and somehow valuable is formed." Not sure how this does not apply.
        user-the-name 5y ago

the_gipsy 5y ago

Exactly, I don't want to be at the mercy of a tech corporation to decide what's "healthy" for me or what exact degree of privacy I deserve. Allow real browser extensions, I just want to be able to use uBlock origin. Not some overengineered "system extension" that can only check the network.

dwighttk 5y ago

> Even though this article is sarcastic(?) I don’t think it is

unethical_ban 5y ago

What a weird take. It completely ignores the massive impact that addictive apps have on people, how incapable governments are at regulating malicious/predatory behavior by companies like Facebook and others, and those tradeoffs. This article is actually genius, and I truly believe they're good recommendations. Apple in these mockups wouldn't be forcing you to turn off addictive behaviors - it's just letting you know they exist, and giving YOU the power to help control it. The jist of your post is that you want the freedom to smoke cigarettes without the oppressive government health warnings on the packages.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

You're looking at the past through rose tinted glasses. I remember those times also. I remember when there was no internet, so your only source of information were these thick technical manuals, which often you had to pay a lot for. Developing software was also gated by expensive commercial compilers. Nowadays you get access to the wealth of documentation online and compilers for all major languages are available for free.

HeavyStorm 5y ago

To be honest, windows let you hack away a lot. It's the new OS that are incredibly locked down.