11 ms·

How the Consumer Computer Is Consuming Computing

107 points by rcarmo 4y ago

diydsp 4y ago
arg! this is so true. You still have the same personal power you did with your own computer... but if you want to traverse through Real-Life, you get charged and surveilled. the home computer had no security, but running network lines through reality opens us up to all kinds of threats. the more isolated we were from the world, the safer.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Theodores 4y ago
I do not consider any Ubuntu to be a 'consumer operating system'. I am not a Raspberry Pi person, however, the projects that people are doing on that are definitely in the spirit of the BBC Micro (Model B obviously) and there is a lot of it going on. Recently I saw a model railway controlled by a Raspberry Pi with a phone app. This was not a 'computing project' but a model railway hobby. You are not going to see projects such as this unless you are into model railways. What I find funny is that the people that used messaging boards in the last century were sneered at as losers. Cool kids went partying, they did not sit in front of a glowing screen exchanging messages with friends they could meet in person. This crowd were not so keen on the social media applications because of tracking, the three letter agencies and tin foil hat availability. Therefore, in 2022, the OG online messaging crew are not doom scrolling on hand rectangles. There is some generalisation here, but social media is not for this crowd - they don't take selfies. The situation is now turned on its head, with the normal people totally absorbed by social media to be tracked everywhere they go without a care. That may be the majority, however, not everyone is 'normal' and I am glad to see so many Raspberry Pi projects going on.
- m463 4y ago
  Ubuntu phones home a lot and the privacy policy has a lot to be desired. that said, aside from proprietary drivers, people can usually examine what's going on and disable or rewrite the offensive parts.
  - boondaburrah 4y ago
    Right but I can simply choose another Linux and /not lose any functionality from my system/. Unfortunately if I choose anything other than iOS or Android on a consumer computing slab it's effectively a paperweight.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kmeisthax 4y ago
>But our everyday reality using the computer does not feel empowering. You want to use the internet without being tracked? Almost impossible. Want to message a friend? I hope you have read and agree to the WhatsApp Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Want to install some software on your Apple device? It better be in the App Store. Perhaps you want to lend an Amazon eBook to your sister? Well you don’t actually own it, so you’ll have to ask Amazon. >What happened? I thought computers were supposed to be empowering? In all the techno-euphoria of the 1980s, Brand and others did not consider the manufacturer’s intent: our everyday computers, tablets, and phones are consumer machines built for consumption. The personal computer was replaced by the consumer computer just as soon as it arrived. No. This isn't one thing. Three things happened concurrently: 1. Networked services 2. Malware 3. Copyright maximalism The first trend is close to the "consumer computer" concept, since it's basically the old mainframe business model warmed over. However, the other two trends greatly accelerated the handcuffing of users. Copyright maximalists feared the scourge of casual piracy and wanted to ban consumers from having access to copying technology. They failed, but Congress let them have protections for DRM that effectively amounted to being able to opt-out of being copied. They also sued and lobbied for intermediary liability on network services, requiring that they effectively do on-demand content removal. Malware did exist in the mainframe era but it was mainly prank programs. Personal computing dramatically extended its reach. Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DRM, but an active cracking & piracy scene stymied that. So people were now blindly executing modified applications, often times with obfuscation to prevent removal of cracktros[0]. Pranksters used and abused this to distribute malicious code along with their software. Network services made malware worse, too. The point of entry for malware in the Don't Copy That Floppy era was infected disks; and the solution was to write programs to detect and erase them. But with the Internet, everyone can connect to your machine, and it turns out that not only creates an entirely new class of software vulnerability to spread malware with, but a new motive for doing so - exfiltrating information and reselling it. So you have three cycles running together that has made actually exercising anything resembling "freedom" into a scary ordeal. Computers just "get sick" with "viruses" and start stealing your information, so people rush to centralized services, upon which copyright maximalists have demanded control over and largely gotten it. "Consumer computers" are not (entirely) conspiracy of big tech to control our lives, but an act of convergent evolution under particular pressures. [0] Object analysis complete. Target is a Space Pirate Crate. Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft. The only way into their crates is through use of force.
mikewarot 4y ago
My pet theory of breakdown causality goes like this We have operating systems that trust everything by default. This means that going tot he wrong web site can bork your machine. This means you don't stray from familiar sites, leading to walled gardens Which is why we have FAANG
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Capability-based instead of user-account-based operating systems and interfaces would go a long way of breaking this pattern.
  - oblak 4y ago
    General purpose hardware that's been artificially castrated by software? Is that really a good way to fight walled gardens?
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Depends on who controls the capability granting. Which at the end of the day feels a lot like ACL just with functionality based controls instead of file based (with some functional bits bolted on the side).
      - mikewarot 4y ago
        It's not just like ACLs, though. An ACL is like permissions into a vault. Capabilities are like taking a $10 bill out of your wallet to pay for a coffee, the most you can lose is the capability ($10 bill) you deployed in the transaction, you can't somehow lose your entire bank balance. Another analogy is that of a circuit breaker. No matter what, it protects the wires in your house from overcurrent. You never have to worry about accidentally taking down the power grid when you plug in a toaster.
  - whartung 4y ago
    I disagree. We already have this to some extent. Do you enjoy going through all of the dialogs and what not to run an application today? Consider all of the switches and opt-outs going on on a smart phone today. "X wants to do X, Y, Z, Q, E, D, A, B, C on your device. Is that ok?" Do you think users are going to say no? They want to run the software. The software is an all or nothing affair. "Use our software, we only ask for 'X, Y, Z, Q, E, D, A, B', unlike those other guys". Think that happens much? I don't think the companies are competing at that level, because the more they DON'T do, the less services they can provide. The litany of dialogs and options and managing all that sends the cognitive load of using the device on an exponential spiral. Most folks habitually click through those alerts. "Yes, I agree to the 1000 word, 4pt font, unread license. Yes, you can track my location, YES! You can have my contacts, Gee wilickers I just want to PRINT A PHOTO!!11!". It is exhausting! It's a false sense of control. "Well, sure you can turn all of that off...but then what? Guess you didn't want those tickets to that concert then, did you?" The action, unfortunately, has to be regulatory, and I don't see how that can be practical either without vast loophole as we've seen with the cookie banner hell we live with today.
amelius 4y ago
The main problem is that our devices are tethered by the vendor. We should have regulation that fundamentally breaks this relationship.
- rektide 4y ago
  Each application is still largely a siloed experience. AppleScript/KDE's old DCOP/AutoHotKey (see [1])/others have tried to make tge application surface itself machine ysable, something that can be integrared & worked upon, but these old frontiers fade, & the application is more or less king of it's own kingdom, the sole arbitrator of function once more. Mostly I think we just lack good upstanding examples of positive, extropic, "create more value than you capture" systems. Technocapitalism hasnt seen thr profit motive, and frelling "linux on the desktop" has sucked most of the oxygen out of the computing room- competing for obsolete pre-connected crowns. Recent "How consumer computer is consuming computing"[2] carries many of these tendrils. There's just fee strong positive innovations to push things the other way. Some efforts like Node-RED try to offer some resistance, something, I though XOPC has a lot going for it (Dbus Telepathy for multiparty apps kicked ass), but there's little awareness & counter-prrdsure against the caging in, except from ever more dispirate edges. [1] "In Praise of AutoHotKey" https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ahk/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ahk/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655951 (21min ago) [2] https://schmud.de/posts/2022-08-23-the-consumer-computer.html https://schmud.de/posts/2022-08-23-the-consumer-computer.htm... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636101 (34 points, 4 hours, 14 comments)
- butUhmErm 4y ago
  The main problem is people wanted to make money so they went into the business of building things that financiers threw money at. So long as people are going to treat nation state totems (coin) and scripture (bank statements) as sacrosanct they’re going to be building a nanny state that trades in such things to support trade in such things Automators we’re rewarded for unemployment career workers and employing gig workers. They deflated others value for their own. Nice work. Talk about freedom all you want; Muricans chase that dollar carrot on a stick that relies on the existence of the police state “they hate”.
sydbarrett74 4y ago
Parallel to what happened with edge devices, the Internet itself went from a peer-to-peer model in the 70's and 80's to the (multi/broad)cast model of today. Once the cable companies gained ownership of most regional networks as a consequence of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, they de-emphasised most protocols and honed in on HTTP, turning the 'Net into 'billions of channels with nothing on'. They wanted users to be passive consumers of oligopolistically-sourced content, not active participants in a noosphere.
openfuture 4y ago
There's a way to reverse the trend and start moving in a better direction but we've got to work together to do it and right now I just don't see it, people are too blinded by short term gain.
- disqard 4y ago
  We are definitely stuck in a (very suboptimal) local maximum. It reminds me of "Meditations on Moloch": > Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - coffee_beqn 4y ago
    The thing is that is just not what most people want out of a computer. Force everyone to use OpenBSD and they’ll still just use the browser and a few consumer apps. They won’t magically care about how computers work or spontaneously set up a programming environment. Those who do buy a real computer (which are cheap! and a click away on Amazon) and go work in tech. Schools also (I hope!) still use PCs to teach technology. You can get a programming capable computer for free since most people consider a 5 year old computer (with 4-8 cores and 8-16GB RAM) to be ancient useless garbage. You have choices of form factor at $100. Everyone could buy a $70 old office liquidation computer that’s perfectly capable of servicing their emailing and document editing needs. But instead they buy $1200 phones. I think Steve Jobses most powerful idea was that other things should be computing devices too. Computers haven’t gone anywhere. You can buy one at the big grocery stores.
    - Grumbledour 4y ago
      But the bicycle for the mind idea goes further than programming your own system and doing creative works. Or rather, it starts smaller. One example: When I encounter a word I don't know, in my native tongue or another language, how can I find out what it means? I can copy it to some service like google translate or an online dictionary. Maybe I even think of looking for a browser extension? But all these things are work and complicated. So I probably just read on. On my kobo reader, I can long press a word and get the dictionary entry. So I use that regularly to look up and learn new words which I would not if I always had to take out my phone and go online. Back in the day, google+ had a translate button, that would instantly translate text inline, which made it super easy to follow or even talk to people who wrote in a different language. These kind of features are empowering! They use computers at what they are good at and they benefit most users who don't want to learn to program or customize their system. But they are few and far between in commercial systems or open source alternatives. An empowering system is not just one that you can customize, but also one that enhances the users own capabilities in meaningful ways. And there is a plethora of low hanging fruit there, we sadly are just too often stuck between "good enough" and "works for me"
betwixthewires 4y ago
The problem is people. Computing wasn't for everyone until it was. Half of all people are below average. A good chunk of people are just wandering through life and can't causally connect where they are right now to where they were when they woke up this morning. The answer is to not use what they use. If you don't like what's made for them, what's made for them is not for you. Don't use it. Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks. (Side note: You can pry a little more functionality out of AOSP, but not all the functionality your hardware can deliver. I use it, but it's still a kiosk.) Facebook and twitter are analogous to cable TV, people that use them are modern day couch potatoes. These people existed before them, the products and services they wasted their lives consuming were just different. You don't have to partake. There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do. That's half the point. The unwashed masses are lazy, you're not. Are you? Or are you flipping through channels while complaining that there's nothing good on?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  >Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks. For what it's worth, all of them enable me and everyone I know to achieve the things I need or want to get done. Working on some paperwork? Office and Windows right there to get me through it. Need to use some industry standard tooling for work? Windows more than likely (probably the only one) handles it. Need a reliable workstation? Macbooks and Thinkpads can seemingly last the better part of a decade if not more, no matter how badly they're handled. Need to do some important phone calls? I've literally never seen an iPhone fail to be a phone. Want a nice and compact, all-purpose portable device on the road? Android phones and tablets can handle mostly anything nowadays. If anything is a "kiosk", it's desktop Linux. They don't enable me to operate my property (because they literally can't outside of very specific niches), they enable me to bask in their ideologies (which IDGAF about).
  - betwixthewires 4y ago
spideymans 4y ago
>What happened? I thought computers were supposed to be empowering? Computers are empowering.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  People are being people. Intentions, philosophy, morals, etc. are nice but ultimately people spend money on products they like. And the moralizing philosophers ultimately don't make or sell a lot of products that match their rhetoric that people actually want to buy. The products that wow people tend to be provided by companies that have their own values (e.g. shareholder value) that they worry about instead of some set of morals. So, Apple creates a beautiful phone and of course it's a closed source thing that they control because that's how they became Apple. And people buy it because it works really nice (apparently, I use Android myself). It's that simple. Something like the Pine phone is kind of crude in comparison. The people buying those tend to be very passionate about the perceived freedoms and flexibility they get with it. But it's not competing that well against the iphone ultimately because there just aren't that many people like that. Most people just want a phone that works. For the same reason, Linux is failing to dethrone Microsoft and Apple for almost three decades now. Don't get me wrong, I actually have a Linux laptop and love using it. But it's not for everyone. IMHO Linux is not very usable unless you know your way around on a command line. Which is a skill I happen to have. It just lacks a lot of the polish of other alternatives and when you encounter any problems (and you will), the solution just almost always involves some cli action. You can fix it; but only if you know how to. Most people buy products they believe they won't have to fix. Of course that's a promise that's easily broken as well. People pining for the days when all computer users were expert users are missing the point that they are now a tiny minority. That's what computer consumerization has meant. It empowered masses of non experts to use computers as well. Turning everyone into experts was never a goal.
lardolan 4y ago
Computer was always for me a tool for expression. My machine with 2x 2080ti is quite dated, but nothing feels more empowering than creating something cool. Mobile is different topic.
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  damn i'm still on 960. but i dont do anything with it so no reason to change for me, im lazy
kuramitropolis 4y ago
Computers? Wasn't that what they gave to impressionable minds in the 1970s so they wouldn't get, say, guns, and learn to shoot those?
ElCheapo 4y ago
Computers are mind boggingly empowering, the problem is always the ignorance of people. Today you can go to a dumpster and take home a perfectly working computer able to run Linux and an capable office suite. With said office suite you are able to keep track of your money, predict expenditures and find ways to save income and organize your life. Want to find the cheapest car? Go to the internet and keep track of the prices with an Excel sheet. Want to standardize your diet to buy in bulk and save plenty of money? Excel sheet. Want to keep track of all your deadlines and avoid paying fees? Excel sheet or your calendar. Hell, even writing stuff down on a physical notepad would help people immensely to live a better life, but if nobody is educated about it they will hardly do it.
aa-jv 4y ago
This is why I retro. Old computers are still perfectly great bicycles for the mind. They still work. Some of them are awesome at inspiring mad and wonderful things, outside the walls and constraints of todays high-power gardens. Man, what the Amstrad CPC6128 gets released for it even still today. Same with the C64. Of course. And the Oric Atmos!! Winningest platform of the 10-liner competition, which in itself, is a wonderful, wonderful landscape for ones mind to ponder. (Oric didn't win in the 80's.. but still lives, wtf!) Old computers never die. Their users do.
nuc1e0n 4y ago
For someone who appears to be from Germany this is a very American centric view. Perhaps he is too young to have first hand knowledge of computing during 70s and 80s?

107 points by rcarmo 4y ago

arg! this is so true. You still have the same personal power you did with your own computer... but if you want to traverse through Real-Life, you get charged and surveilled. the home computer had no security, but running network lines through reality opens us up to all kinds of threats. the more isolated we were from the world, the safer.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Theodores 4y ago

I do not consider any Ubuntu to be a 'consumer operating system'. I am not a Raspberry Pi person, however, the projects that people are doing on that are definitely in the spirit of the BBC Micro (Model B obviously) and there is a lot of it going on. Recently I saw a model railway controlled by a Raspberry Pi with a phone app. This was not a 'computing project' but a model railway hobby. You are not going to see projects such as this unless you are into model railways. What I find funny is that the people that used messaging boards in the last century were sneered at as losers. Cool kids went partying, they did not sit in front of a glowing screen exchanging messages with friends they could meet in person. This crowd were not so keen on the social media applications because of tracking, the three letter agencies and tin foil hat availability. Therefore, in 2022, the OG online messaging crew are not doom scrolling on hand rectangles. There is some generalisation here, but social media is not for this crowd - they don't take selfies. The situation is now turned on its head, with the normal people totally absorbed by social media to be tracked everywhere they go without a care. That may be the majority, however, not everyone is 'normal' and I am glad to see so many Raspberry Pi projects going on.

m463 4y ago
Ubuntu phones home a lot and the privacy policy has a lot to be desired. that said, aside from proprietary drivers, people can usually examine what's going on and disable or rewrite the offensive parts.
- boondaburrah 4y ago
  Right but I can simply choose another Linux and /not lose any functionality from my system/. Unfortunately if I choose anything other than iOS or Android on a consumer computing slab it's effectively a paperweight.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kmeisthax 4y ago

>But our everyday reality using the computer does not feel empowering. You want to use the internet without being tracked? Almost impossible. Want to message a friend? I hope you have read and agree to the WhatsApp Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Want to install some software on your Apple device? It better be in the App Store. Perhaps you want to lend an Amazon eBook to your sister? Well you don’t actually own it, so you’ll have to ask Amazon. >What happened? I thought computers were supposed to be empowering? In all the techno-euphoria of the 1980s, Brand and others did not consider the manufacturer’s intent: our everyday computers, tablets, and phones are consumer machines built for consumption. The personal computer was replaced by the consumer computer just as soon as it arrived. No. This isn't one thing. Three things happened concurrently: 1. Networked services 2. Malware 3. Copyright maximalism The first trend is close to the "consumer computer" concept, since it's basically the old mainframe business model warmed over. However, the other two trends greatly accelerated the handcuffing of users. Copyright maximalists feared the scourge of casual piracy and wanted to ban consumers from having access to copying technology. They failed, but Congress let them have protections for DRM that effectively amounted to being able to opt-out of being copied. They also sued and lobbied for intermediary liability on network services, requiring that they effectively do on-demand content removal. Malware did exist in the mainframe era but it was mainly prank programs. Personal computing dramatically extended its reach. Proprietary software vendors were able to condition users to execute programs they could not inspect or modify. They also attempted to prevent copying with DRM, but an active cracking & piracy scene stymied that. So people were now blindly executing modified applications, often times with obfuscation to prevent removal of cracktros[0]. Pranksters used and abused this to distribute malicious code along with their software. Network services made malware worse, too. The point of entry for malware in the Don't Copy That Floppy era was infected disks; and the solution was to write programs to detect and erase them. But with the Internet, everyone can connect to your machine, and it turns out that not only creates an entirely new class of software vulnerability to spread malware with, but a new motive for doing so - exfiltrating information and reselling it. So you have three cycles running together that has made actually exercising anything resembling "freedom" into a scary ordeal. Computers just "get sick" with "viruses" and start stealing your information, so people rush to centralized services, upon which copyright maximalists have demanded control over and largely gotten it. "Consumer computers" are not (entirely) conspiracy of big tech to control our lives, but an act of convergent evolution under particular pressures. [0] Object analysis complete. Target is a Space Pirate Crate. Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft. The only way into their crates is through use of force.

mikewarot 4y ago

My pet theory of breakdown causality goes like this We have operating systems that trust everything by default. This means that going tot he wrong web site can bork your machine. This means you don't stray from familiar sites, leading to walled gardens Which is why we have FAANG

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Capability-based instead of user-account-based operating systems and interfaces would go a long way of breaking this pattern.
- oblak 4y ago
  General purpose hardware that's been artificially castrated by software? Is that really a good way to fight walled gardens?
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Depends on who controls the capability granting. Which at the end of the day feels a lot like ACL just with functionality based controls instead of file based (with some functional bits bolted on the side).
    - mikewarot 4y ago
      It's not just like ACLs, though. An ACL is like permissions into a vault. Capabilities are like taking a $10 bill out of your wallet to pay for a coffee, the most you can lose is the capability ($10 bill) you deployed in the transaction, you can't somehow lose your entire bank balance. Another analogy is that of a circuit breaker. No matter what, it protects the wires in your house from overcurrent. You never have to worry about accidentally taking down the power grid when you plug in a toaster.
- whartung 4y ago
  I disagree. We already have this to some extent. Do you enjoy going through all of the dialogs and what not to run an application today? Consider all of the switches and opt-outs going on on a smart phone today. "X wants to do X, Y, Z, Q, E, D, A, B, C on your device. Is that ok?" Do you think users are going to say no? They want to run the software. The software is an all or nothing affair. "Use our software, we only ask for 'X, Y, Z, Q, E, D, A, B', unlike those other guys". Think that happens much? I don't think the companies are competing at that level, because the more they DON'T do, the less services they can provide. The litany of dialogs and options and managing all that sends the cognitive load of using the device on an exponential spiral. Most folks habitually click through those alerts. "Yes, I agree to the 1000 word, 4pt font, unread license. Yes, you can track my location, YES! You can have my contacts, Gee wilickers I just want to PRINT A PHOTO!!11!". It is exhausting! It's a false sense of control. "Well, sure you can turn all of that off...but then what? Guess you didn't want those tickets to that concert then, did you?" The action, unfortunately, has to be regulatory, and I don't see how that can be practical either without vast loophole as we've seen with the cookie banner hell we live with today.

amelius 4y ago

The main problem is that our devices are tethered by the vendor. We should have regulation that fundamentally breaks this relationship.

rektide 4y ago
Each application is still largely a siloed experience. AppleScript/KDE's old DCOP/AutoHotKey (see [1])/others have tried to make tge application surface itself machine ysable, something that can be integrared & worked upon, but these old frontiers fade, & the application is more or less king of it's own kingdom, the sole arbitrator of function once more. Mostly I think we just lack good upstanding examples of positive, extropic, "create more value than you capture" systems. Technocapitalism hasnt seen thr profit motive, and frelling "linux on the desktop" has sucked most of the oxygen out of the computing room- competing for obsolete pre-connected crowns. Recent "How consumer computer is consuming computing"[2] carries many of these tendrils. There's just fee strong positive innovations to push things the other way. Some efforts like Node-RED try to offer some resistance, something, I though XOPC has a lot going for it (Dbus Telepathy for multiparty apps kicked ass), but there's little awareness & counter-prrdsure against the caging in, except from ever more dispirate edges. [1] "In Praise of AutoHotKey" https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ahk/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ahk/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655951 (21min ago) [2] https://schmud.de/posts/2022-08-23-the-consumer-computer.html https://schmud.de/posts/2022-08-23-the-consumer-computer.htm... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636101 (34 points, 4 hours, 14 comments)
butUhmErm 4y ago
The main problem is people wanted to make money so they went into the business of building things that financiers threw money at. So long as people are going to treat nation state totems (coin) and scripture (bank statements) as sacrosanct they’re going to be building a nanny state that trades in such things to support trade in such things Automators we’re rewarded for unemployment career workers and employing gig workers. They deflated others value for their own. Nice work. Talk about freedom all you want; Muricans chase that dollar carrot on a stick that relies on the existence of the police state “they hate”.

sydbarrett74 4y ago

Parallel to what happened with edge devices, the Internet itself went from a peer-to-peer model in the 70's and 80's to the (multi/broad)cast model of today. Once the cable companies gained ownership of most regional networks as a consequence of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, they de-emphasised most protocols and honed in on HTTP, turning the 'Net into 'billions of channels with nothing on'. They wanted users to be passive consumers of oligopolistically-sourced content, not active participants in a noosphere.

openfuture 4y ago

There's a way to reverse the trend and start moving in a better direction but we've got to work together to do it and right now I just don't see it, people are too blinded by short term gain.

disqard 4y ago
We are definitely stuck in a (very suboptimal) local maximum. It reminds me of "Meditations on Moloch": > Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  The thing is that is just not what most people want out of a computer. Force everyone to use OpenBSD and they’ll still just use the browser and a few consumer apps. They won’t magically care about how computers work or spontaneously set up a programming environment. Those who do buy a real computer (which are cheap! and a click away on Amazon) and go work in tech. Schools also (I hope!) still use PCs to teach technology. You can get a programming capable computer for free since most people consider a 5 year old computer (with 4-8 cores and 8-16GB RAM) to be ancient useless garbage. You have choices of form factor at $100. Everyone could buy a $70 old office liquidation computer that’s perfectly capable of servicing their emailing and document editing needs. But instead they buy $1200 phones. I think Steve Jobses most powerful idea was that other things should be computing devices too. Computers haven’t gone anywhere. You can buy one at the big grocery stores.
  - Grumbledour 4y ago
    But the bicycle for the mind idea goes further than programming your own system and doing creative works. Or rather, it starts smaller. One example: When I encounter a word I don't know, in my native tongue or another language, how can I find out what it means? I can copy it to some service like google translate or an online dictionary. Maybe I even think of looking for a browser extension? But all these things are work and complicated. So I probably just read on. On my kobo reader, I can long press a word and get the dictionary entry. So I use that regularly to look up and learn new words which I would not if I always had to take out my phone and go online. Back in the day, google+ had a translate button, that would instantly translate text inline, which made it super easy to follow or even talk to people who wrote in a different language. These kind of features are empowering! They use computers at what they are good at and they benefit most users who don't want to learn to program or customize their system. But they are few and far between in commercial systems or open source alternatives. An empowering system is not just one that you can customize, but also one that enhances the users own capabilities in meaningful ways. And there is a plethora of low hanging fruit there, we sadly are just too often stuck between "good enough" and "works for me"

betwixthewires 4y ago

The problem is people. Computing wasn't for everyone until it was. Half of all people are below average. A good chunk of people are just wandering through life and can't causally connect where they are right now to where they were when they woke up this morning. The answer is to not use what they use. If you don't like what's made for them, what's made for them is not for you. Don't use it. Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks. (Side note: You can pry a little more functionality out of AOSP, but not all the functionality your hardware can deliver. I use it, but it's still a kiosk.) Facebook and twitter are analogous to cable TV, people that use them are modern day couch potatoes. These people existed before them, the products and services they wasted their lives consuming were just different. You don't have to partake. There are options. They just take a little bit work, because of course they do. That's half the point. The unwashed masses are lazy, you're not. Are you? Or are you flipping through channels while complaining that there's nothing good on?

Dalewyn 4y ago
>Android is a kiosk. iOS is a kiosk. Windows is a kiosk. These are not operating systems, they don't enable you to operate your property, they enable you to use services. They're kiosks. For what it's worth, all of them enable me and everyone I know to achieve the things I need or want to get done. Working on some paperwork? Office and Windows right there to get me through it. Need to use some industry standard tooling for work? Windows more than likely (probably the only one) handles it. Need a reliable workstation? Macbooks and Thinkpads can seemingly last the better part of a decade if not more, no matter how badly they're handled. Need to do some important phone calls? I've literally never seen an iPhone fail to be a phone. Want a nice and compact, all-purpose portable device on the road? Android phones and tablets can handle mostly anything nowadays. If anything is a "kiosk", it's desktop Linux. They don't enable me to operate my property (because they literally can't outside of very specific niches), they enable me to bask in their ideologies (which IDGAF about).
- betwixthewires 4y ago

spideymans 4y ago

>What happened? I thought computers were supposed to be empowering? Computers are empowering.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
People are being people. Intentions, philosophy, morals, etc. are nice but ultimately people spend money on products they like. And the moralizing philosophers ultimately don't make or sell a lot of products that match their rhetoric that people actually want to buy. The products that wow people tend to be provided by companies that have their own values (e.g. shareholder value) that they worry about instead of some set of morals. So, Apple creates a beautiful phone and of course it's a closed source thing that they control because that's how they became Apple. And people buy it because it works really nice (apparently, I use Android myself). It's that simple. Something like the Pine phone is kind of crude in comparison. The people buying those tend to be very passionate about the perceived freedoms and flexibility they get with it. But it's not competing that well against the iphone ultimately because there just aren't that many people like that. Most people just want a phone that works. For the same reason, Linux is failing to dethrone Microsoft and Apple for almost three decades now. Don't get me wrong, I actually have a Linux laptop and love using it. But it's not for everyone. IMHO Linux is not very usable unless you know your way around on a command line. Which is a skill I happen to have. It just lacks a lot of the polish of other alternatives and when you encounter any problems (and you will), the solution just almost always involves some cli action. You can fix it; but only if you know how to. Most people buy products they believe they won't have to fix. Of course that's a promise that's easily broken as well. People pining for the days when all computer users were expert users are missing the point that they are now a tiny minority. That's what computer consumerization has meant. It empowered masses of non experts to use computers as well. Turning everyone into experts was never a goal.

lardolan 4y ago

Computer was always for me a tool for expression. My machine with 2x 2080ti is quite dated, but nothing feels more empowering than creating something cool. Mobile is different topic.

nh23423fefe 4y ago
damn i'm still on 960. but i dont do anything with it so no reason to change for me, im lazy

kuramitropolis 4y ago

Computers? Wasn't that what they gave to impressionable minds in the 1970s so they wouldn't get, say, guns, and learn to shoot those?

ElCheapo 4y ago

Computers are mind boggingly empowering, the problem is always the ignorance of people. Today you can go to a dumpster and take home a perfectly working computer able to run Linux and an capable office suite. With said office suite you are able to keep track of your money, predict expenditures and find ways to save income and organize your life. Want to find the cheapest car? Go to the internet and keep track of the prices with an Excel sheet. Want to standardize your diet to buy in bulk and save plenty of money? Excel sheet. Want to keep track of all your deadlines and avoid paying fees? Excel sheet or your calendar. Hell, even writing stuff down on a physical notepad would help people immensely to live a better life, but if nobody is educated about it they will hardly do it.

aa-jv 4y ago

This is why I retro. Old computers are still perfectly great bicycles for the mind. They still work. Some of them are awesome at inspiring mad and wonderful things, outside the walls and constraints of todays high-power gardens. Man, what the Amstrad CPC6128 gets released for it even still today. Same with the C64. Of course. And the Oric Atmos!! Winningest platform of the 10-liner competition, which in itself, is a wonderful, wonderful landscape for ones mind to ponder. (Oric didn't win in the 80's.. but still lives, wtf!) Old computers never die. Their users do.

nuc1e0n 4y ago

For someone who appears to be from Germany this is a very American centric view. Perhaps he is too young to have first hand knowledge of computing during 70s and 80s?