Comment by piterrro
14 hours ago
This whole article is true and to the point but... reality is: most people still don't build their own setups: work, home - most of them follow a sh*tty software or decorate with Ikea. I think this applies only to a small group of users how will be willing to go extra mile and prompt their ideal interface for whatever they need to do.
The realization that "normal" people don't care and will never care was the saddest for me. There are so few people who care. We're essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. We have no leverage.
When I was younger and I heard the saying along the lines of "struggling against the indifference of the universe" I didn't realize at the time it included people too.
Yeah. The indifference of the universe is perfectly manageable. It's the indifference of people that broke me... I'm starting to question every principle I've ever had.
1 reply →
Life is complex. You probably don't optimize your life in a way that some other person would be shocked you're not doing.
And they probably optimize their life in a way that's invisible to you.
Different people care about different things (beyond near term well being). We have no ability to be deeply involved in million different topics, but most of us care about several. And random couple of people may have no intersection and could symmetrically see each other as a "useless normie".
That's, uhm, normal and why groups form by interests, from cooking to hiking to reading to hackerspaces to rocketry. I see it as neither bad nor sad. My 2c.
I understand that, I just don't like it.
Computers are world changing technology, magical runes we can bend to our will. I wanted people to care, to fully harness the power of these machines. But virtually nobody cares.
That wouldn't be a problem if this just came down to individual choice, but it doesn't. The fact they don't care has enormous impact on us who do care.
Because they don't care, we are a minority and therefore have no economic leverage. One day the big corporations will make computers that only they control. They will lock us all out. Nobody really cares, people will keep buying the locked down computers and will even defend it as a security feature as though the lockdown was for their own benefit. They could have been lords of their own digital domain, but it turns out they enjoy living as serfs in the digital fiefdoms of trillion dollar corporations.
We also can't have privacy and anonymity because of this. For anonymity to work, we need a massive anonymity set. We need lots of people using things like Tor, ideally most people if not all people. This is so that people can't tell us apart, but also so that they can't just blanket ban Tor traffic without serious economic consequences. But nobody cares, people are just fine with being spied on, so they don't use it and it weakens privacy for us who do care as well.
It's so sad, and I'm starting to actually blame these people for the sad state of things. I look at the trillionaire technocrats building this dystopian world and taking advantage of them, and I start to wonder if they were right to do so. People could have stopped this, if only they cared. They didn't... And therefore they deserve it.
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What exactly are you sad about? You're only just realizing highly technical knowledge makes your opinions a minority?
DUH.
Guess what? That same knowledge gives you agency. With LLMs now, even more so. Want something? Build it (or have claude build it)
Why are you being a defeatist over something you can't control that was always the case? Nothing has changed.
I seriously encounter this hand-wringing on HN. You are pointing out a real problem in the world. A problem that, if not solved, will keep most of the people in the world helpless and at the mercy of governments, billionaires and the platforms they control.
But I don’t like to just bitch. I like to build. So then I show the free and battle tested software I built lovingly over a decade, that solves exactly this, and that I use in my own companies, but also give away for free
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
We're not just bitching. I've contributed to free and open source projects. I've reverse engineered my laptop and released Linux free software. I'm investing in local inference computers. I've even created my own programming language.
We're doing what we can. The point is it's not enough. One day they will lock us out either way.
The whole point is we can't create an open source computer fab. They cost billions of dollars. It's just not happening. We can make free software at home, but we can't make free computers in our garages. Unless we figure out a way to do this, it's pointless. The chip manufacturers will be the ones responsible for the end of our freedom.
FPGAs -at the cost of going back to 90s hardware performance- actually grant us the ability to make free computers in our garage. I’ve been using LLMs to design CPUs and SoCs and had decent success, actually. You’re still trusting Vivado, I guess, but there is work being done in open toolchains.
Running at 200Mhz rather than 4GHz though is hard to accept for most people, even though retro OSes make the experience quite smooth overall.
I’d argue stuff like the various bootrom exploits for Apple SoCs and similar, used for jailbreaking, is the other side of this. And that one gets you open computing at a much higher perf, although not necessarily malleable, and is not going to be a long term viable strategy.