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Keep that feeling in the pit of your stomach for a few years. Watch as a multitude of forces (mostly related to surveillance capitalism) foist billions of such

Keep that feeling in the pit of your stomach for a few years. Watch as a multitude of forces (mostly related to surveillance capitalism) foist billions of such devices on unsuspecting consumers. Tell anyone who'll listen, how shortsighted this is, how much of a fall it's setting us up for. Watch it happen anyway. Watch it accelerate. Watch the devices grow in complexity, capability, connectivity, and vulnerability. Watch innumerable manufacturers go out of business with no software-update succession plan, no code escrow, no upgrade path for victi^H^H^H^H^H end users. The pit of your stomach gets pretty damn sick of the state of things.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Cyberpunk used to be fiction. It disgusts me when I realize I'm already living in it.
- bigiain 5y ago
  That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've been _building_ it hurts. I still feel complicit. I worked for a hardware startup in 2013/2014. Part of my role was to populate and run the private pacman server that the devices got their OS and software updates from (we ran ARCH, but didn't connect to the public ARCH pacman repos, because we had some hardware specific code and kernel mods we needed to work, so we tested everything that updated on there public pacman repos before letting the devices load them). The startup failed after the first batch of products were shipped - as they are wont to do. Much acrimony about who owned what. I kept the Linode instance running the pacman server on my own credit card for years, but eventually the domain name (or perhaps the dns hosting, I don't recall) expired and the only devices that still knew how to get to the repo were my own. If I'd have a heads-up that dns was going to die, I could have pushed a config change to use a domain name under my control, but it just unexpectedly switched off. There were only a few hundred devices I was keeping software updates flowing to. But the feeling of despair when I was no longer able to do that and finally decommissioned that Linode server was heartbreaking.
  - myself248 5y ago
    Everyone on HN is building it. It is the purpose of this entire place. Don't feel alone.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Cyberpunk used to be fiction. It disgusts me when I realize I'm already living in it.

bigiain 5y ago
That feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you've been _building_ it hurts. I still feel complicit. I worked for a hardware startup in 2013/2014. Part of my role was to populate and run the private pacman server that the devices got their OS and software updates from (we ran ARCH, but didn't connect to the public ARCH pacman repos, because we had some hardware specific code and kernel mods we needed to work, so we tested everything that updated on there public pacman repos before letting the devices load them). The startup failed after the first batch of products were shipped - as they are wont to do. Much acrimony about who owned what. I kept the Linode instance running the pacman server on my own credit card for years, but eventually the domain name (or perhaps the dns hosting, I don't recall) expired and the only devices that still knew how to get to the repo were my own. If I'd have a heads-up that dns was going to die, I could have pushed a config change to use a domain name under my control, but it just unexpectedly switched off. There were only a few hundred devices I was keeping software updates flowing to. But the feeling of despair when I was no longer able to do that and finally decommissioned that Linode server was heartbreaking.
- myself248 5y ago
  Everyone on HN is building it. It is the purpose of this entire place. Don't feel alone.