aeblyve

I use "artisanal software" to refer to software written by small groups of individuals as opposed to larger organized groups.

The expense is in its deficiencies, which include (in my perception) plentiful long-tail bugs and issues, lack of flexibility, and in some cases lack of maintenance, as a single author can leave their work for whatever personal reason.

I don't really agree... I try to avoid handmade or artisanal things as they are inconsistent in quality and wildly expensive.

Including in software.

They've been talking about UBI, as one variant.

I'm supportive of effort to mechanize work, but humanoid robots always seemed like a "horseless carriage" approach to me. The human body is powerful in its adaptability but most industrial processes are better enhanced by purpose-built machines.

This is also quite easy to do with .tar files, not to be confused with .tar.gz files.

From memory, I think it was something like 10% since Liberation Day.

I believe USD has devalued by a comparable amount since Liberation Day, so a big portion of that is the USD falling relative to stock.

Edit: https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...

Biological factors like maintaining adequate blood sugar level (intentional living requires bioenergetic resources) are important.

> But it worked (and still works) just fine with rootable phones on the network.

If the definition of "the network" is connecting to some LTE, sure, if it means being able to use RCS, or Google pay, or a banking app, it is much more questionable.

You attempt to cut the cellular chip out as the sole telecomm relevant part, but it is a fiction. It's visible today in bandwidth constrained environments like aircraft wifi that certain types of supposedly application-level traffic are not permissible (video calls). Conversely improving the channel capacity in general will require higher control of the user environment.

They wouldn't, that is exactly what I am saying. A phone isn't merely a standalone "computing tool" but represents an ongoing relationship between many corporate parties. Reasoning about the phone that way, as something like a PC from the 80s being encroached on, is an error. It is derived from entwined corporate interest from the beginning. The only similarity is the payment structure, lump sum or finance to "own".

>And PCs connect to corporate-run wired networks

A bit wrong, PCs usually connect to modems or ONTs that in turn connect to the wired telco network, which are deeply unfree.

The nature of RF as a channel means your handset plays the role also of one of these unfree modems.

Attempting to draw a line between the corporate part and "your part" doesn't necessarily make sense because one doesn't exist, and if it did, is always shifting, especially in different environments.

I'm not necessarily "arguing in favor" of this kind of organization by describing it, but any alternative must rival what makes the telco system, for the most part, actually work. It's not enough to demand freedoms (which doesn't work), they have to be enshrined in real organization, in the social sense and material too. Today that means people have to get paid.

I'm not aware of such specific cases myself, but an obvious example of new banking functionality requiring OS attestation is tap-to-pay.

I don't think phones were ever "user-controlled", each one is designed fundamentally to connect to corporate-run wireless networks. Thus they want a say in the types of communications you do, gating certain kinds like RCS behind attestation. To that end there will be never be an alternative without some channel control.

Not totally unlike the way Bell used to strictly regulate their own user endpoints in the 20th century.

Within that stage, I could be wrong, but I would expect a somewhat freer software ecosystem there, as it is an economy oriented around manufacturing, and it is useful to write many various applications around that end.

I'm not aware of a bank that is /only/ accessible with an App (maybe that is your point?), but obviously wanting to obtain the best financial offers, interest rates, etc., trumps software freedom for most people.

Part of the story is that it only takes a /single/ major scandal RE sideloading to seriously injure a bank's reputation, even if the vast majority of sideloading use cases are legitimate.

The smartphone is not a mere commodity but a part of an entire social system of production between banks, telcos, software houses. Alternatives seemingly must come from outside the system... possibly Huawei from China and their HarmonyOS, which happily enough is banned in the US.

Or any sufficiently hard-boiled alternative from the inside. IMO things like custom ROMs lack sufficient vertical organization and that is why they're not so relevant (but at that point, you're basically constructing something much like a corporation once again, if not an entire society stemming out of it).

I think that finding an aftermarket keyboard solution for a smartphone using the android virtualization framework to run a debian VM (i.e. the "Linux Terminal" on Android 16) is your best bet by far.

The economies of scale (and compactness!) in mainstream smartphones are very hard to match, and they tend to have superior power management.

Do heavy lifting by logging into a remote server for best battery life and compute power.

Not unlike web development, you're working against a contract (in this case, CPU instructions/features, storage formats, bus formats) defined by some megacorporate legacy. You also have support from pieces of embedded firmware running inside storage devices or other peripherals.

The book at http://ostep.org gets into some details.

Another useful illuminator: https://gwern.net/computers

As much as possible is generally done using simulators before testing on any real hardware.

> Are we going to let those digital assistants be rented from our corporate overlords?

Probably yes, in much the same way as we rent housing, telecom plans, and cloud compute as the economy becomes more advanced.

For those with serious AI needs, maintaining migration agility should always be considered. This can include a small on-premises deployment, which realistically cannot compete with socialized production in all aspects, as usual.

The nature of the economy is to involve more people and more organizations over time. I could see a future where somewhat smaller models are operated by a few different organizations. Universities, corporations, maybe even municipalities, tuned to specific tasking and ingested with confidential or restricted materials. Yet smaller models for some tasks could be intelligently loaded onto the device from a web server. This seems to be the way things are going RE the trendy relevance of "context engineering" and RL over Huge Models.

I would love to learn more about the unit economics of groceries. How is it that a small grocery store can sometimes provide things (much) more cheaply than a megacorporation? [0]

If the latter was functioning well in a competitive market, I would expect their play to be on lower margins but higher volume.

[0] Mostly I'm referring to offal TBF, which I think most firms are happy to make any money on at all.

Did you spend a few thousand on a purism, tolerate the woeful hot and slow character of a pinephone, or something else?

Less sardonically: I am a Linux Person but couldn't imagine really using one of those things today. It would probably kneecap my whole life in subtle ways; in the US using android already does.

Not seriously, IMO.

I've owned a few pixels but for whatever reason in my case the hardware had a habit of randomly dying just outside of the warranty period. But maybe I can revisit.

It's not necessarily about it being possible, but the level of support and refinement.

The future I'm seeing is one in which custom ROMs still exist as hobby projects, but aren't suitable for use in "production".

Seems you may have to start getting good at SMD rework soon.

The writing's been on the wall for custom ROMs in general for a while, so I've been starting to think about a mobile phone vendor I could actually have a decent business relationship with. I.e. use their stock ROM and be fairly happy with it.

Any opinions? Samsung was a candidate for their somewhat unified ecosystem. Maybe even apple.

I'm not really convinced of this in the long term. Commodities like baskets or vases were something that were once made by each tribe individually but became industrial products made in relatively fewer places (relative to human settlement) at much larger scales.

The economies of scale of cloud computing seem to prescribe the same trajectory to computer services as well for completely material reasons, not ideological ones.

In any case, differentiation is only made possible by a base of de-differentiated socialized production. Electricity.

I had a nice ebook reader at one point, but now I prefer Zotero on Linux and Android for reading.

I don't miss the world of a million purpose-built gizmos like this. Smartphones are a very good thing, so long as android is still mostly free.

Fun exercise nonetheless

I struggle to phrase it in a way that doesn't feel cruel, but I often find "small web" stuff too personal to interest me.

Oftentimes it seems the content between such sites can be somewhat interchangeable. Similar film photography, cycling, hobbies, retro video games, some esoteric programming languages, whatever. Then, the only utility left per each individual site is the assumed specificity of the author themselves, which I usually do not care much about.

To your point, that last bit might matter inside a community.