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Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run

Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run by the technological elite, for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet was distinctly different and inferior. Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things. There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article. From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.

dannyobrien 3y ago
Link to the piece if anyone finds this in the future: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/ https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/ (It was both strangely broken in my WP database, and also I think my website was down when OP write this. Sorry!)
Obscurity4340 3y ago
This is an interesting thing. Honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad or easy phishing thing. Like obv in your junk mail but thats literally the extent of my exposure to it, everything else is curated and "good" or probably aligns with your concept of the priveleged netizens/areas even though Im poor as hell. Knowledge wise I suppose I rich so there's that but there's also seems like a tradgedy of the commons type situation that depends on all the tech-illiterates to be the meat shields for advertising and paying for things like YouTube
gipp 3y ago
> You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things. Wow, I just assumed it was some kind of auth flow the government runs themselves and never did any research
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen." It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).
  - spiralpolitik 3y ago
    No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing things in-house. Fix that aspect and the situation will improve significantly.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Arguably, they did in the past - and the current situation is an immune (over)reaction to that. Outsourcing is easier than figuring out how to get something done while navigating around all the regulations and CYA measures, so that things look fair to the people (otherwise they'll make a ruckus), and/or can't be easily portrayed as unfair by your political enemies (who will try to trick the people into making a ruckus).
  - rando_dfad 3y ago
    >The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. No, no they don't. They would love to build in-house, but are constrained in what salary ranges they can offer. The other challenge US government faces is that they continuously get their chain yanked by congress. I've read many stories of (corporate) management incompetence over the years, but they mostly pale in relation to the ability of congress to completely change priorities and goals every 6-12 months. Even the most disfunctional corporation has some kind of force/attraction towards having a product line with an outward semblance of consistency and cohesion.
sph 3y ago
I'm struggling to understand from your explanation what is this "hinternet". The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I look at it. How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps? The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy. EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on benefit for the user (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet is that which comes from focusing on making money. Now, focusing on utility does not preclude commerce - in fact, the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange for something of value. Focus on value provided includes figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast, focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from making things good, as fraud and abuse have much better ROI.
- cfeduke 3y ago
  From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]: It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2] As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project. Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities. Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm. 1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/ https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/ 2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html
dsco 3y ago
It’s basically what computer illiterates (which is growing, not declining because of mobile use) endure on windows desktop computers. At some time they’ve clicked the wrong link, managed to install a toolbar in their browser - and slowly it’s been infested with random dark patterns. I see it fairly frequently when relatives call me about computer issues.
tootie 3y ago
This is the difference between building a website as an experiment for an untested audience and running a modern business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-responsive text content isn't worth much.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  But they all suck on mobile! Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc. You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns. HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube. Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months". There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.
  - tootie 3y ago
    Sure, anyone can screwup, I'm just saying "mobile first" is valid business strategy. A lot of the annoying things like ads and whatever are just never not going to be annoying. It's kinda their raison d'etre. Things like date filtering on google results probably get so little usage there's no incentive to make them fully available. Very few apps are built to optimize utility, they're built to optimize revenue.
    - 3y ago
PaulHoule 3y ago
You’re lucky if it works with an iPad and that it doesn’t make you sign your life away to Verizon or T-Mobile the ur-Carrier (sic). I alway get voted down when I use words like “phonish” or “phonishness” but I feel that smartphones made life worse not better and made people serve computers than the other way around. Here’s to the next platform.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
This "hinternet" is a cool concept, but there's something missing from its account. On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the military and government - as rightful founders. On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers and grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers in the new world. The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a "woke" narrative. But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the actual real people. The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between 1997 and about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing money and power moved into the internet, along with a handful of rugged "entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around here). The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and Charibdes, and now they are corralled into ranches, all lovingly watched over... The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we have not solved many (indeed any) of the classical problems of freeloaders, tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I think "Web 3.0 and blockchain web" is dead (?) A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is once again public, high-quality and large might be looking more closely at the history/narrative of the internet and who the real stakeholders are.
- adventured 3y ago
  The people have their Internet already. They like Netflix, they like Amazon Prime, they love TikTok, they like Instagram, they like Pinterest, they like their various chat apps, they like their online gaming, and so on. That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking. There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be. They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage, bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they love dearly of course). No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor! The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art, and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the masses want at all. Not even remotely close. They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can insult people without getting punched in the face, and they can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub, and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired at/from Gaza in another thread. The peoples Internet is already here.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. Mastodon comes to mind, whose openness allows me to browse it from emacs with mastodon.el. Removing full or even useful content from both RSS and notification emails comes to mind as well.
hatware 3y ago
[dead]
n8cpdx 3y ago
An internet for the technical elite… sounds like gopher (if more people used it)
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Less users is probably a feature.
charlie0 3y ago
Don't we technically still have the non-hinternet in the Darknet/Tor? I've been there a super long time ago and I don't remember it being any better.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
> forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an opportunity to bash Apple? Apparently most of HN is not aware that multiple Android manufacturers implemented hardware destruction features when a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?
- r113500 3y ago
  I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing. dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.
throwaway290 3y ago
Thanks for recommending Oblomovka, great read.

dannyobrien 3y ago

Link to the piece if anyone finds this in the future: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/ https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/ (It was both strangely broken in my WP database, and also I think my website was down when OP write this. Sorry!)

Obscurity4340 3y ago

This is an interesting thing. Honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad or easy phishing thing. Like obv in your junk mail but thats literally the extent of my exposure to it, everything else is curated and "good" or probably aligns with your concept of the priveleged netizens/areas even though Im poor as hell. Knowledge wise I suppose I rich so there's that but there's also seems like a tradgedy of the commons type situation that depends on all the tech-illiterates to be the meat shields for advertising and paying for things like YouTube

gipp 3y ago

> You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things. Wow, I just assumed it was some kind of auth flow the government runs themselves and never did any research

shadowgovt 3y ago
The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen." It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).
- spiralpolitik 3y ago
  No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing things in-house. Fix that aspect and the situation will improve significantly.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Arguably, they did in the past - and the current situation is an immune (over)reaction to that. Outsourcing is easier than figuring out how to get something done while navigating around all the regulations and CYA measures, so that things look fair to the people (otherwise they'll make a ruckus), and/or can't be easily portrayed as unfair by your political enemies (who will try to trick the people into making a ruckus).
- rando_dfad 3y ago
  >The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. No, no they don't. They would love to build in-house, but are constrained in what salary ranges they can offer. The other challenge US government faces is that they continuously get their chain yanked by congress. I've read many stories of (corporate) management incompetence over the years, but they mostly pale in relation to the ability of congress to completely change priorities and goals every 6-12 months. Even the most disfunctional corporation has some kind of force/attraction towards having a product line with an outward semblance of consistency and cohesion.

sph 3y ago

I'm struggling to understand from your explanation what is this "hinternet". The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I look at it. How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps? The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy. EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on benefit for the user (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet is that which comes from focusing on making money. Now, focusing on utility does not preclude commerce - in fact, the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange for something of value. Focus on value provided includes figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast, focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from making things good, as fraud and abuse have much better ROI.
cfeduke 3y ago
From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]: It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2] As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project. Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities. Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm. 1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/ https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/ 2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb https://kagi.com/smallweb X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html

dsco 3y ago

It’s basically what computer illiterates (which is growing, not declining because of mobile use) endure on windows desktop computers. At some time they’ve clicked the wrong link, managed to install a toolbar in their browser - and slowly it’s been infested with random dark patterns. I see it fairly frequently when relatives call me about computer issues.

tootie 3y ago

This is the difference between building a website as an experiment for an untested audience and running a modern business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-responsive text content isn't worth much.

Aerroon 3y ago
But they all suck on mobile! Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc. You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns. HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube. Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months". There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.
- tootie 3y ago
  Sure, anyone can screwup, I'm just saying "mobile first" is valid business strategy. A lot of the annoying things like ads and whatever are just never not going to be annoying. It's kinda their raison d'etre. Things like date filtering on google results probably get so little usage there's no incentive to make them fully available. Very few apps are built to optimize utility, they're built to optimize revenue.
  - 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago

You’re lucky if it works with an iPad and that it doesn’t make you sign your life away to Verizon or T-Mobile the ur-Carrier (sic). I alway get voted down when I use words like “phonish” or “phonishness” but I feel that smartphones made life worse not better and made people serve computers than the other way around. Here’s to the next platform.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

This "hinternet" is a cool concept, but there's something missing from its account. On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the military and government - as rightful founders. On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers and grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers in the new world. The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a "woke" narrative. But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the actual real people. The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between 1997 and about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing money and power moved into the internet, along with a handful of rugged "entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around here). The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and Charibdes, and now they are corralled into ranches, all lovingly watched over... The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we have not solved many (indeed any) of the classical problems of freeloaders, tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I think "Web 3.0 and blockchain web" is dead (?) A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is once again public, high-quality and large might be looking more closely at the history/narrative of the internet and who the real stakeholders are.

adventured 3y ago
The people have their Internet already. They like Netflix, they like Amazon Prime, they love TikTok, they like Instagram, they like Pinterest, they like their various chat apps, they like their online gaming, and so on. That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking. There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be. They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage, bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they love dearly of course). No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor! The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art, and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the masses want at all. Not even remotely close. They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can insult people without getting punched in the face, and they can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub, and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired at/from Gaza in another thread. The peoples Internet is already here.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

> There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. Mastodon comes to mind, whose openness allows me to browse it from emacs with mastodon.el. Removing full or even useful content from both RSS and notification emails comes to mind as well.

hatware 3y ago

[dead]

n8cpdx 3y ago

An internet for the technical elite… sounds like gopher (if more people used it)

matheusmoreira 3y ago
Less users is probably a feature.

charlie0 3y ago

Don't we technically still have the non-hinternet in the Darknet/Tor? I've been there a super long time ago and I don't remember it being any better.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

> forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an opportunity to bash Apple? Apparently most of HN is not aware that multiple Android manufacturers implemented hardware destruction features when a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?

r113500 3y ago
I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing. dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.

throwaway290 3y ago

Thanks for recommending Oblomovka, great read.