No, I really think the author is right about consumption devices. They're just not optimized for creation. No keyboard, tiny screen, perfect for reading tweets and scrolling Instagram but not great for sitting down and creating a PowerPoint presentation, flash game, application, or what have you. Hate Microsoft as much as you want, it was possible to write programs on a Windows machine, in fact they produced tools like Visual Studio and Excel. Making an android app on Android or an iPhone app on an iphone is impractical. That's why we lost.

Both of these phenomena are the problem: a smartphone is problematic both because it's a consumption-oriented device, AND because it's tethered to Google for updates and services.

I do find it odd that the best environment for making an android/iOS app are on other OS's.

The main problem is people wanted to make money so they went into the business of building things that financiers threw money at.

So long as people are going to treat nation state totems (coin) and scripture (bank statements) as sacrosanct they’re going to be building a nanny state that trades in such things to support trade in such things

Automators we’re rewarded for unemployment career workers and employing gig workers. They deflated others value for their own. Nice work.

Talk about freedom all you want; Muricans chase that dollar carrot on a stick that relies on the existence of the police state “they hate”.

We should, but such regulations require political will, that requires a sizeable intent supporting this to manifest collectively in the electorate (aka. "the people"), that ultimately requires alot of "the people" to care.

What often gets overlooked in such debates, is the fact that the percentage of people who know enough about IT to care about these topics, is a pretty small fraction of the general populace.

Which, on the one hand, is great, because it means job security and lots of leverage when it comes to salaries. On the other hand, it means that there are probably not that many politicians who's first thought of the day is along the lines of: "Boy, I gotta get all these IT peoples votes in the next election cycle!"

Ok, we'll leave it to the EU to fix it, then.

Each application is still largely a siloed experience. AppleScript/KDE's old DCOP/AutoHotKey (see [1])/others have tried to make tge application surface itself machine ysable, something that can be integrared & worked upon, but these old frontiers fade, & the application is more or less king of it's own kingdom, the sole arbitrator of function once more.

Mostly I think we just lack good upstanding examples of positive, extropic, "create more value than you capture" systems. Technocapitalism hasnt seen thr profit motive, and frelling "linux on the desktop" has sucked most of the oxygen out of the computing room- competing for obsolete pre-connected crowns.

Recent "How consumer computer is consuming computing"[2] carries many of these tendrils. There's just fee strong positive innovations to push things the other way. Some efforts like Node-RED try to offer some resistance, something, I though XOPC has a lot going for it (Dbus Telepathy for multiparty apps kicked ass), but there's little awareness & counter-prrdsure against the caging in, except from ever more dispirate edges.

[1] "In Praise of AutoHotKey" https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/ahk/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655951 (21min ago)

[2] https://schmud.de/posts/2022-08-23-the-consumer-computer.htm... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32636101 (34 points, 4 hours, 14 comments)