Comment by EGreg
9 hours ago
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.