It's time to make computing personal again

> one of the supplied examples showed any form of network effect. It was all stuff you did at home.

That's what's wrong with the various "federated" social networks. They lack a network effect that makes them grow.

Due to the way iOS apps are sandboxed together with their user created content a lot of users have video projects that are locked into CapCut without an easy way to access them following the ban of the TikTok suite of apps. Remind me how your iPhone is yours, when your creations on your device can be locked away from you.

I agree- though I think the problem is more that the focus of attention is not on making personal computing better, so it's withered. And some programs you could get as a buy once works offline experience are now subscription based -as-a-service

Extrapolating this point outward, I don't think there is really any community computing.

Most people I know literally still to use the lowest common denominator of communications because corporates have managed to screw up interoperability in their land grabs to build walled gardens. The lowest common denominator in my area is emailing word documents or PDFs around. Same as we have been doing for the last 30 years. The network effect there was Word being the first thing on the market.

All other attempts have been entirely transient and are focused in either social matters or some attempt at file storage with collaboration bolted on the top. The latter, OneDrive being a particularly funny one, generally results in people having millions of little pockets of exactly what they were doing before with no collaboration or community at all.

If we do anything now it's just personal computing with extra and annoying steps.

And no, 99% of the planet doesn't use github. They just email shitty documents around all day. Then they go back home and stare at their transient worthless social community garbage faucet endlessly until their eyes fall shut.

Recently there's been another shift - processing power.

In the past you could do almost anything on a personal computer, it was generally about as fast as mainframe or high end workstation.

Training large AI models is currently impossible for most home users. They just do not have the processing power.

The challenge is making community computing ethical

Yeah, but I think part of the point is people don't actually want or need network effects for a lot of things. Even where connection is needed, companies have used it to wedge in stuff that doesn't benefit users.

I have the same fear as you do.

My prediction, is that, in the not too far future, perhaps 20-25 years, with the "blessing" of national security, ads business and other big players, devices will be further locked down and tracked, INCLUDING personal computers.

A lot of people already don't own a computer nowadays, except for the pocket one. In that future PCs, if they still exist, perhaps are either thin clients connecting to the vast National Net, where you can purchase subscriptions for entertainment, or completely locked down pads that ordinary people do not even have the tool to open properly. Oh, all "enhanced" with AI agents of course. You might even get a free one every 5 years -- part of your basic income package.

They won't make learning low level programming or hardware hacking illegal, because they are still valuable skills, and some people need to do that anyway. But for ordinary people it's going to be a LOT tougher. The official development languages of your computer system are some sort of Java and Javascript variants that are SAFE. You simply don't get exposed to the lower level. Very little system level API is going to be exposed because you won't have to know. If you have some issues, submit a ticket to the companies who program the systems.

We are already halfway there. Politicians and super riches are going to love that.

Hard disagree.

macOS has been very conservative in redesigning the user experience; it's aging slowly like fine wine. There are a few hiccups occasionally but I feel it's a lot more polished and elegant compared to the quirkiness of earlier versions. I don't get this common sentiment that it was better in Snow Leopard etc.

Stability is great, power consumption is awesome since the introduction of the M-series chips and I can still do everything (and more) that I did on my mac 20 years ago. Yes there are some more hoops here and there but overall you have to keep in mind that macOS never fell into the quagmire Windows did with bloatware, malware and all the viruses (although I think the situation is much better today).

macOS has been walking a fine balance between lockdown and freedom, there is no reason to be alarmist about it and there are still projects like OpenCore Legacy Patcher that prove you can still hack macOS plenty to make it work on older macs.

We're eating good as mac users in 2025, I don't buy the slippery slope fallacy.

Linux exists.

I know the usual comments will crop up but, now if ever is the best chance to give it a try, at least as a semi daily driver if you still want to play games or such.

Two Things:

1. If you were a bit more familiar with Apple history, you'd know that the Mac was actually Steve Job's push to make things more proprietary and locked down, not less. Make of that what you will.

2. If your ideological stance is in opposition to companies like Microsoft/Apple/etc. and you work in the tech industry, the most effective action you can take as an individual is to deny them your labor.

> There isn't much we can do, as long as everybody tolerates this.

I don't know if this will be effective in any way, but I've decided to start hosting services for my friends and family out of my closet. It seems that money destroys everything it touches, so it feels nice to be doing something for reasons besides money.

My friends and family are not particularly influential people, but I think it'll be nice to create a little pocket of the world who knows what it was like to not be exploited by their tech.

There is heaps you can do, but admittedly not all of it will you want to, and not all of the results will be equivalent.

For one though, you can support open source software, especially linux OS's. Similarly, ditch the Bambu. There are countless better and more open printers out there, and you can DIY excellent 3D printers that get great results.

I think that's the point of difference between now and the past, information has spread so far, and people have fought so hard for open source software and hardware, that we actually have a good defence against corporate greed. You accept some compromise and work a little harder for it, but it's really not that bad.

You cannot simultaneously complain about companies closing systems off and give Apple any credit at all for the past 20 years of operation. They are the absolute worst offender in the industry without exception.

And no, if the axis you are measuring on is openness versus locked down then Microsoft is not worse. You have simply been brainwashed.

See https://media.ccc.de/c/DS2024 for inspiration and ideas.

It is the legal system that hasn't caught up with how tech scales seemingly small damage.

What were small conflicts of interest before (a little trash here or there, a little use of personal information for corporate instead of customer benefit here or there, ...) now scales to billions of people. And dozens of transactions, impressions, actions, points of contact, etc., a day for many of us.

That not only makes it more pervasive, but massively profitable, which has kicked in a feedback loop for sketchy behavior, surveillance, coercion, gatekeeping, etc., driven by hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and trillions in potential market caps.

Things that were only slightly unethical before, now create vast and growing damage to our physical and mental environments.

It should simply be illegal to use customer information in a way not inherent to the transaction in question. Or to gather data on customers from other sources. Or share any of that data.

It should be illegal, to force third party suppliers to pay a tax to hardware makers, for any transaction that doesn't require their participation. And participation cannot be made mandatory.

Etc.

One commonality here, is that there is often a third party involved. Third party gatekeeper. Third party advertisers. Third parties introduce conflicts. (This is different from non-personalized ads on a site they have relevance for, which are effectively two independent, 2-party transactions.)

Another commonality, is the degree to which many third party actors, those we know, and many we never hear of, who "collude" with respect to dossiers, reaching us, and milking us by many coordinated means.

In some respects, I agree. Yet I don't think we have to put up with it all of the time. Most of the technology in our life is either frivilous or has a workable alternative. It is not as though we have to abandon technology in, or even current technology in pursuit of the personal. Yes, it involves making more careful decisions. Yes, it will likely be limited to people with technical knowledge. On the other hand, that was true of computing in the 1980's and largely true of computing in the 1990's.

In many respects, we are also better off than we were in the 1980's. There are more of us, we are connected globally, and the tools that we have access to are significantly better. We also have a conceptual framework to work within. Technically speaking, Free Software may have existed back then but few people even knew of it. People were struggling with ideas like public domain software (rarely with an understanding of what that meant). If you wanted to make money, outside of traditional publishing channels, you were usually toying with ideas like shareware (where you had pretty much no control over distribution). If you wanted to spend money of software, outside of traditionally published stuff, chances are that you had to send cheques or cash to somebody's house.

And then there is communicating with likeminded people. We may like to complain about things like Discord or Reddit, but they are not the only players on the block. Plenty of people still run small or private forums. Yeah, they can be hard to find. On the other hand, that has more to do with the noise created by the marketplace rather than their lack of presence.

It's time we give up on the majority of people who don't care for freedom and focus on the few that do.

Unfortunately at the time we need them the most pretty much every pro-user organization is imploding because everyone and their grandmother wants to turn them into vehicles for whatever their pet cause is.

I mean, the solution is inside your definition of the problem. Infinite capital growth isn't possible. They will either finally make their products unusable or collapse. When they have collapsed enough and we have reached the plateau of innovation someone will make some basic device interoperable with everything and leave us be to count their millions instead of billions.

Its just another bubble, one predicated on mining the users rather than expanding the product.

>What the article doesn't appreciate--and we techies don't either--is just how much the scale of today's tech market absolutely dwarfs the scale of the tech market back in the days before the internet.

I understand it and know it. But I don't appreciate it either (in the sense of liking it).

I think it's easy to forget that computing technology is a tool. Of course it was bound to be huge today, because it's supposed to be a tool in the toolbox of every company. It wasn't as big back then because not every industry could incorporate it right away, knew how to, or was interested in doing so.

It's not bad that it's big. It only needs to grow because the rest of the economy needs to grow.

I am also afraid you're a doomer in this regard. You don't think the bigwigs with their fax machines in the 1980s wanted to make money off of us 24/7? Of course they did.

Tech is scary in the sense that it's now gone quite a bit beyond the understanding of the average joe. Even most of us on this site probably don't fully understand how much detail data can paint a picture of a person. There are companies that probably know something about me that I don't even know.

I guess I don't know how to alleviate that feeling, and maybe it's the correct default assumption to be a doomer. It certainly would be very helpful if the US treated the situation more like the EU treats the situation.

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That looks like the most radical/unusual operating system thing I have seen in recent memory. Not sure how practical it is, but kudos for trying something so different.

I had not heard of Genode/Sculpt, but it looks interesting. These days, I feel like if I boot a new operating system, I have no idea what all it's doing and whether or not things are secure--I'm basically relying on the operating system to have good defaults. And then it's so easy to screw something up!

I like the idea of Qubes and it looks like Genode might be an even better idea...

Wow, this looks really cool. How does it handle Atheros WiFi cards? I have a ThinkPad X200 I’d love to throw this on for fun. Thanks for sharing!!

If you want to cheat in 2025, you buy a bag of virtual coins and spend those coins on boosters, extra turns, etc.

If you wanted to cheat in 1992, you'd call the Sega Hotline on a premium phone number and they'd give you cheat codes.

It's the same thing, just a different medium and middleman.

That's a side effect of the way we've educated the market to expect everything to be "free." That leaves the only option available being indirect monetization through ads or in-app purchases or something similar to that.

And usage tends to go two ways.

> "Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage."

...the quote, *AS A SOUNDBITE*, only sounds good on a surface level, but collapses under the slightest test. All products in some form or another increase the usage of resources in order to reach a certain goal.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-anti-economy/

The article, where the quote originates from, contextualizes the quote marking (a) the difference between products in service of an actual goal, (b) products that are only meant to look good on a balance sheet, and (c) how companies have morphed towards (b) in order to attract investor funds and increase share prices / company market values.

The quote, BY ITSELF AND WITHOUT CONTEXT, is a twisted Neo-luddist version of its original self.

If you want to run your own little silo completely disconnected from your fellow human beings then it has never been easier. But that was never really all difficult in the first place. I don't think it's truly the problem that needs to be solved.

Sadly only for the people in very techinal field. Most of the common consumer products are impossible to use local-only.

I mean, the building blocks are there, but so much has moved into "the cloud". You can't run Just Photoshop anymore, you can only run CC that sends all your images to them, you can't run Word without running Office 365, you cant run most games without Steam, etc etc. And all of the exciting new software is -As-A-Service

So while there's more options now for homelab things the overall ecosystem has moved strongly away so there's a lot more to avoid

people would rather complain than put in a little effort, especially if it means losing the chance to invent an evil empire to rebel against

Your definition of "anyone" is pretty skewed toward the tech-savvy.

Spend some time in the tech support desk of a mobile phone store to get an idea of the general level of technical sophistication of the average person. Average folks are not running containers. They're not installing... anything... except maybe an app from an App Store. Half of them aren't sure what a file is.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but too many people in power directly benefit fom enshittification for anything about it to change. Even just the problem of fixing the housing market while the majority of politicians own several properties is an example of this. There's zero incentive for anything to change.

Maybe we should reconciling the best of the past with the benefits of today...