11 ms·

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if co

Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. The big tech era is in fact now just starting. The big corporations finally realized nobody is seriously challenging them so they will only tighten the grip gradually from here on. I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access. Keep your guard up, folks, and improve your hardware operation skills -- and any physical real-life skills in general. We can't all be dependent on the corps, they must always be shown we can do without them and we only tolerate them because they are not too unpleasant.

mehdix 5y ago
I'm doing my part: - Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.
- ramesh31 5y ago
  Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.
  - tartoran 5y ago
    Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told. That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset. For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-vote-for-interoperable-messengers/209942/ https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    > the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest. Not really "the vast majority" ... I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close". So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure. Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    You don’t need everyone to change, the commoners imitate the elite.
    - randcraw 5y ago
      Who will the masses ultimately follow: solitary tech savvy geeks who warn of naked emperors? Or armies of corporate-sponsored feel-good social influencers who entertain by promoting only themselves and the fad-du-jour? I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        The masses will do the easy thing, signal was made and adopted by WhatsApp for example. The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.
- tartoran 5y ago
  Im on the same page but personally I think it won’t make a big difference.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    It's not so much about making a difference as it's about living by principles. I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.
    - randcraw 5y ago
      I agree that living by principles is worthwhile. But so few people do it that it will have so little impact on market forces and inequities that they are wholly irrelevant to the OP topic. You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms.
      - Lich 5y ago
        > It's not so much about making a difference
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dvtrn 5y ago
        You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms. How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal principals, even if there isn’t an outcome on “market forces” in any remote way comparable to believing you’re a bird?
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    You don't always have to make an impact on the world. Sometimes making an impact on your world is enough.
- hoofedear 5y ago
  It’s like going technologically vegan
tapan_jk 5y ago
A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.): I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).
- sofixa 5y ago
  Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.
  - pdimitar 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.
      - pdimitar 5y ago
        Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.
lowwave 5y ago
>Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I wish that too, believe me, but the interests of the corps is to pull us towards a cyberpunk future when they can stop your (artificial and cloud-connected) liver from working if you post something vaguely anti-establishment somewhere. They have been very trigger happy lately.
  - snek_case 5y ago
    This is why we need to protect free speech. IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want here too? Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of democracy.
    - clairity 5y ago
      it's a truism that free speech undergirds democracy, but you get to it via a false dichotomy (left vs right) handed down to us by surrogates of power (political scientists, in this case) to distract and divide the populace. the only useful (but not wholly accurate) dichotomy regarding political economies is the one between the powerful and the powerless. this is the timeless and unending conflict, not left-right, liberal-conservative, or any of that other bullshit. free speech is one tool of the powerless populace to keep the powerful in check.
becuz99h 5y ago
It’s on a path to contraction due to the environment. Cashier-less grocery stores are to get people used to not dealing with the traditional finance system, which is environmentally toxic. ML generated multimedia is coming to implode commercial sales. A 3D printed home community is being built in the EU soon. 3D printed metal, wood, and synthetic material parts machines are being installed in UPS hub warehouses to distribute parts on demand. Industrialization must be scaled back for environmental stability. Once commercial jobs of little real utility are gone, and people are used to coming and going without paying, why money? Sorry/not sorry but one nerd on HN does not get to hold their social avoidance strategy up as a reason the species should stick to species endangering over consumption. Big tech isn’t going away. Personal computing as we know it is. The systems I mentioned are being deployed now. You’re the past. The future is the 20-something’s building the startups I mentioned. They’re onto more interesting tech than Rpis and phone apps. Formal language is only 5,000 years old. We know of entropy generally now. The words and whines mean nothing. The end of our society is coming due to our coming death. That’s how it goes.
throwaway894345 5y ago
> Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).
roody15 5y ago
Agree feel like we have entered Blade Runner style future where mega tech corporations essentially run everything.
yyyk 5y ago
>I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access. Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front. PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).
- darepublic 5y ago
  I think big tech will attack that way once they start to feel threatened enough by competing innovation, or they can't hang on to their advantage through softer means
  - dasil003 5y ago
    Right now big tech just acquire all threats. If anti-trust starts to get more teeth, and shifts towards regulating scale and power more directly with less focus on ham-handedly trying to regulate specific outcomes based on political fashion or poor analysis of feasibility or second-order effects then we will likely see the lawyers come out in force. Which is okay if we can find the right political leader, because the facts on the ground for small business is hanging right there for a savvy leader to craft a killer narrative. The problem is democrats have completely lost the thread on what benefits real people, and the republicans are still hungover from an era where facts were meaningless so they really have no platform or principles at all anymore. I do have hope that a grassroots leader can emerge though.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  IMO they attack on all fronts, the one both me and you mentioned included. Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology". In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem. So yeah, both things are happening in parallel. > PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software). Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).
darepublic 5y ago
Agree that it's small tech in danger
marto1 5y ago
If anything introducing new legislation clearly helps out big tech in the end by raising the bar for their (smaller) competition thus deepening their moat even further. It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.
throwaway47292 5y ago
Remember, things are never as good or as bad as you think. 'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you. Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing. Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing). Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully). The new phrack is out. The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma. The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles. Let it go, life always finds a way.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > /etc/hosts > Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing. > Pi zero 2W Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives. If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.
  - e9 5y ago
    It’s on this community right here to make these things as easy and accessible as possible for everyone to use.
    - city41 5y ago
      I don't think that's HN and ycombinator. The original intent of HN was to support yc, an incubator that creates semi-giants like Airbnb and DoorDash. If push really comes to shove, most people here are going to look out for themselves. They may not like the current big tech companies, but probably would have no problem becoming the next one.
varelse 5y ago
So apparently the US government is very responsive to the concerns of anti-competitive behavior when it's between one corporation versus another. But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations. Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?
jcun4128 5y ago
> PiHole might get criminalized That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there. My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.
zcw100 5y ago
It's like saying, "Oh no they're talking about breaking up Ma Bell. Telecommunications is over." Sure Bell got broken up but the industry as a whole ballooned.

mehdix 5y ago

I'm doing my part: - Degoogled for three years now - Voting with my money (such as supporting Pine64) - Self-hosting my website and some services - Self-hosting at work as much as possible - Learning and applying basic tech instead of some black box from some giant corp - Shopping regional as much as possible - Shopping on alternative online stores - etc.

ramesh31 5y ago
Unfortunately you were never the target audience. Companies like Google operate on the scale of billions, and the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest.
- tartoran 5y ago
  Yep. Same thougts here. But I feel that a turning point may come at some point though
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  The point of technically-minded people switching away from these companies isn't that we expect everyone else to all follow our example at the same time. Instead, the goal is to support these alternative services financially; and with bug reports, feature requests, and pull requests; so that those alternative services become the easiest to use, at which point the rest of society will switch without having to be told. That may seem unrealistic, since billions-scale companies have much greater resources to invest in user experience, but you have to think of this as asymmetric warfare, with their size being a liability rather than an asset. For example, large services need to justify their expenses by maximising the amount of money they extract from users (just look at the latest controversial feature of Edge[0]). Also, keeping these alternative services running provides an existence proof to regulators about how services don't need to be exploitative, giving them cover to write rules that re-balance the playing field, such as requiring social media and messaging companies to make their services interoperable.[1] [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59492429 [1] https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-vote-for-interoperable-messengers/209942/ https://marketresearchtelecast.com/digital-markets-act-meps-...
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > the vast majority are completely unsophisticated and only able to use whatever software is easiest. Not really "the vast majority" ... I believe the problem on Google's side is that it is easier to do good services on easy stuff, like mail and simple search querries like "who is the president in Finland" or "when does X close". So Google prioritizes trivia searches over searches an unsophisticated dentist would querry to look up some procedure. Programmers just seem to rely more on websearches where other fields have like magazines, workplace courses and conferences.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  You don’t need everyone to change, the commoners imitate the elite.
  - randcraw 5y ago
    Who will the masses ultimately follow: solitary tech savvy geeks who warn of naked emperors? Or armies of corporate-sponsored feel-good social influencers who entertain by promoting only themselves and the fad-du-jour? I know none of the former who have built self-promotion-based $multi-million empires. I wish that were true of the latter.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      The masses will do the easy thing, signal was made and adopted by WhatsApp for example. The magic and evil of software and hardware is that you don’t have to understand it to use it. Elon musk memed people into crypto.
tartoran 5y ago
Im on the same page but personally I think it won’t make a big difference.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  It's not so much about making a difference as it's about living by principles. I boycott Facebook, Amazon, and Disney.
  - randcraw 5y ago
    I agree that living by principles is worthwhile. But so few people do it that it will have so little impact on market forces and inequities that they are wholly irrelevant to the OP topic. You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms.
    - Lich 5y ago
      > It's not so much about making a difference
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      You may as well tell us that you've decided to take up flying by flapping your arms. How is having and deciding to live by a set of personal principals, even if there isn’t an outcome on “market forces” in any remote way comparable to believing you’re a bird?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  You don't always have to make an impact on the world. Sometimes making an impact on your world is enough.
hoofedear 5y ago
It’s like going technologically vegan

tapan_jk 5y ago

A comment about one aspect of big tech, i.e IT infrastructure (think AWS, GCP, Azure, and now Cloudflare etc.): I don't see this mentioned enough but it wouldn't be surprising if some companies will want to start owning and running their own IT infrastructure. Buy your own servers and setup a small data-center for a small to medium business. This will be a thing again. The pendulum has to swing, but the question is -- is there money in enabling this for companies that want to go this way? I expect some startups in near future to target this opportunity and help shift towards decentralization (again).

sofixa 5y ago
Why? Especially for small and medium businesses, the capital costs involved rarely make sense, and if you're leasing, might as well lease from a cloud provider which saves you time and people. There are many smaller players which are OK depending on uptime requirements - OVHCloud, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Scaleway, Linode, etc.
- pdimitar 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you but I wonder if you are underestimating how many years of useful service can you get out of dual Xeon E-2690v3 systems. Almost no business actually needs the latest and greatest -- the only serious concern when hosting on-prem is energy consumption and heat dissipation. If that can be covered well the rest is much easier to cope with.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I do have some server hardware on premises (well it is in my basement and I have fat internet pipes) but I do not mind going middle road and renting dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVH. They're surprisingly cheap for whet they offer. The same performance / resource wise hardware on Amazon would make one bleed the money.
    - pdimitar 5y ago
      Agreed, and that's just what we might end up doing btw. A bit more manual sysadmin work which we end up doing on EC2 instances currently anyway. And a lot of money can be saved by EU dedicated server hosting.

lowwave 5y ago

>Hell no it's not ending, why would you even think that? Because a few governments only started cautiously talking about breaking apart giants? So what? As if corporate lawyers don't find holes in any new regulation literally the same week. Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. In some way wish it is ending. As human society, we don't need any more mega big company. Everything ought to kept local and small and diverse, so there is no central control, it is only resilient way to thrive for tech and innovation.

pdimitar 5y ago
I wish that too, believe me, but the interests of the corps is to pull us towards a cyberpunk future when they can stop your (artificial and cloud-connected) liver from working if you post something vaguely anti-establishment somewhere. They have been very trigger happy lately.
- snek_case 5y ago
  This is why we need to protect free speech. IMO the far left challenging free speech is a bit of a trojan horse. Yes, you can use censorship to suppress distasteful ideas, but it's also obvious that if you give corporations the power to censor whatever they want, they will also use it to censor anything you say to criticize them. Look at what the Chinese government is doing, they can basically erase anything that makes China look bad from the internet in less than 30 minutes. Is that what we want here too? Free speech is not a "far right" idea. It's the basis of democracy.
  - clairity 5y ago
    it's a truism that free speech undergirds democracy, but you get to it via a false dichotomy (left vs right) handed down to us by surrogates of power (political scientists, in this case) to distract and divide the populace. the only useful (but not wholly accurate) dichotomy regarding political economies is the one between the powerful and the powerless. this is the timeless and unending conflict, not left-right, liberal-conservative, or any of that other bullshit. free speech is one tool of the powerless populace to keep the powerful in check.

becuz99h 5y ago

It’s on a path to contraction due to the environment. Cashier-less grocery stores are to get people used to not dealing with the traditional finance system, which is environmentally toxic. ML generated multimedia is coming to implode commercial sales. A 3D printed home community is being built in the EU soon. 3D printed metal, wood, and synthetic material parts machines are being installed in UPS hub warehouses to distribute parts on demand. Industrialization must be scaled back for environmental stability. Once commercial jobs of little real utility are gone, and people are used to coming and going without paying, why money? Sorry/not sorry but one nerd on HN does not get to hold their social avoidance strategy up as a reason the species should stick to species endangering over consumption. Big tech isn’t going away. Personal computing as we know it is. The systems I mentioned are being deployed now. You’re the past. The future is the 20-something’s building the startups I mentioned. They’re onto more interesting tech than Rpis and phone apps. Formal language is only 5,000 years old. We know of entropy generally now. The words and whines mean nothing. The end of our society is coming due to our coming death. That’s how it goes.

throwaway894345 5y ago

> Governments take years to formulate a legislation, and your average corporate legal team defeats it in days. Cynically I suspect the lobbyists defeat it before it is even signed (ensuring the legislation has appropriate loopholes, etc).

roody15 5y ago

Agree feel like we have entered Blade Runner style future where mega tech corporations essentially run everything.

yyyk 5y ago

>I am actually afraid for small tech now. And that one day me using a PiHole might get criminalized. Or a rootless VPN used for blocking invasive traffic on an Android phone might become a reason for some lobbyists to pressure my ISP into stopping my internet access. Big tech is unlikely to attack that way. It's far better for big tech to stop these things via new technology, rather than try a political process which will require expensive brib^W lobbying and is subject to backlash. Big tech have a far bigger advantage on the tech front than the political front. PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software).

darepublic 5y ago
I think big tech will attack that way once they start to feel threatened enough by competing innovation, or they can't hang on to their advantage through softer means
- dasil003 5y ago
  Right now big tech just acquire all threats. If anti-trust starts to get more teeth, and shifts towards regulating scale and power more directly with less focus on ham-handedly trying to regulate specific outcomes based on political fashion or poor analysis of feasibility or second-order effects then we will likely see the lawyers come out in force. Which is okay if we can find the right political leader, because the facts on the ground for small business is hanging right there for a savvy leader to craft a killer narrative. The problem is democrats have completely lost the thread on what benefits real people, and the republicans are still hungover from an era where facts were meaningless so they really have no platform or principles at all anymore. I do have hope that a grassroots leader can emerge though.
pdimitar 5y ago
IMO they attack on all fronts, the one both me and you mentioned included. Gmail is pretty much a standard right now (even if there's no public technical standard involved; only Google's apps can communicate with Gmail). That's monopoly dressed as "new technology". In the meantime the pressure in the EU is mounting between the both camps of the encrypted messaging ecosystem. So yeah, both things are happening in parallel. > PiHole could be trivially sidestepped by hardcoding the DNS server and then encrypting DNS in the name of security (Didn't some Androids have Google hardcoded?). Android/iOS could allow some apps to ignore VPNs (this already happened with some Apple software). Yeah, you're sadly correct. I dread the day when this will start becoming the norm. But it's also true that many common citizens can stop using service X or Y and it would cost them nearly nothing (with some prominent exceptions like Gmail or Whatsapp).

darepublic 5y ago

Agree that it's small tech in danger

marto1 5y ago

If anything introducing new legislation clearly helps out big tech in the end by raising the bar for their (smaller) competition thus deepening their moat even further. It's no wonder FB is pretty much always positive about this law or that law that will supposedly regulate tech in one way or another.

throwaway47292 5y ago

Remember, things are never as good or as bad as you think. 'Offline' internet can come back, we can put 32g of microsd cards in special locations so we can share content and /etc/hosts without anyone knowing, maybe go online from time to time to get the newest /etc/hosts from your friends and the new locations for microsd cards near you. Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing. Pi zero 2W costs 10$ and with 40$ screen you can watch feynman lectures with mplayer -vo fbdev, it boots into vim for 3 seconds (init into openvt -w vim kinda thing). Soon the-eye.eu will be back (hopefully). The new phrack is out. The social networks are eating themselves, same as google is eating itself, the search is garbage, the feed is even more garbage, 99% of the content is anxiety inducing miasma. The web is eating itself, with gazillions of GPT(ish) generated articles. Let it go, life always finds a way.

Nextgrid 5y ago
> /etc/hosts > Gopher is making a comeback, and gemini is growing. > Pi zero 2W Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the number of people with the skills necessary to use this is low. Not to mention that new generations have grown up with the current status-quo and seem to be happy enough with it not to search for alternatives. If things get really bad (a debate for which I'm not taking either side), only a very small minority will be able to use the aforementioned workarounds and can trivially be marginalized and crushed with legislation and its enforcement.
- e9 5y ago
  It’s on this community right here to make these things as easy and accessible as possible for everyone to use.
  - city41 5y ago
    I don't think that's HN and ycombinator. The original intent of HN was to support yc, an incubator that creates semi-giants like Airbnb and DoorDash. If push really comes to shove, most people here are going to look out for themselves. They may not like the current big tech companies, but probably would have no problem becoming the next one.

varelse 5y ago

So apparently the US government is very responsive to the concerns of anti-competitive behavior when it's between one corporation versus another. But they seem particularly apathetic to the privacy considerations, robocalls and all things telemarketing, junk mail, insane product placement, and the blatant manipulation of our dopamine system by such corporations. Does that sound like something that's going to end the big tech era or just keep driving it further?

jcun4128 5y ago

> PiHole might get criminalized That would suck, I hate ads but also just like split up subscription shows, not sure if I'm willing to pay for that either. There's so many I am currently subscribed to 3 different shows and maybe watch 1% of their content. I wanted to watch a movie and I would have had to get Paramount Plus like wtf... at least a lot of things show up on YT where I can rent it there. My response is primarily about YT and mobile phone usage (where I don't have a browser extension adblocker). On mobile I don't open websites, just scan the suggested articles.

zcw100 5y ago

It's like saying, "Oh no they're talking about breaking up Ma Bell. Telecommunications is over." Sure Bell got broken up but the industry as a whole ballooned.