> Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
There are technical reasons, but as ever the real underlying causes are incentives. Companies realized that the OS is a profit center, something they can use to influence user behavior to their benefit. Before the goal was to be a hardware company and offer the best hardware possible for cost. Now the goal is to own as large a slice of your life as possible. It's more of a social shift than a technological one. So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments? They'd be undercutting themselves.
That's not to say that attempts to build interoperability don't exist, just that they happen due to what are essentially activist efforts, the human factor, acting in spite of and against market forces. That doesn't tend to win out, except (rarely) in the political realm.
i.e. if you want interoperable mobile hardware you need a law, the market's not going to save you one this one.
I don't believe that's the true problem. Booting operating system is not a problem. There's no standardized hardware abstraction layer in PC either, every OS brings their own set of drivers.
My guess is that modern hardware is too complicated for one hacker to write reliable drivers. That wasn't the case back in the 90-s, when Linux matured. So we are at mercy of hardware manufacturers and they happened to not be interested in open upstreamed drivers.
> My guess is that modern hardware is too complicated for one hacker to write reliable drivers.
Modern hardware has turned our operating systems into isolated "user OS" nodes in the schematics, completely sandboxed away from the real action. Our operating systems don't really operate systems anymore.
In the ARM world, there isn't even a standard way to boot, and there are no standard hardware interfaces - except maybe the interrupt controller, since it's part of the CPU and only ARM designs the CPUs.
On any PC, you can still use BIOS/UEFI services to get a basic framebuffer and keyboard input. You cannot do that on embedded ARM devices - you need to get several layers into the graphics stack to have a framebuffer. I tried it on the PinePhone, using existing source code as a reference, and the furthest I got was sending commands from the video port to the LCD controller and then not having an oscilloscope to see if the LCD controller replied back.
I worked with ARM boards, I know a bit about it. Booting into Linux is never hard, it's all about using uboot, sometimes with tiny patches on top. I think it's actually even easier with android phones, as you don't have access to the low level bootloader, you just use fastboot stuff.
Having basic framebuffer in BIOS/UEFI is neat for toy OSes, but not very relevant for something practical. You gotta need proper driver for GPU. And if you're just starting, UART console is actually more preferable way to interact with board, IMO.
Booting into a mainline Linux kernel on your average junk-level SBC with all the hardware working (without simply sticking to an Android-like downstream/proprietary BSP) is quite hard, and that's what you need in order to make a phone usable as a daily driver. That's really the root issue; mobile phones are built as embedded devices, with no consideration for running a generic OS kernel. This isn't even an Android issue, OpenMoko was the same deal. If anything, Android was the first mobile platform to even loosely approach any kind of PC-like openness.
> So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments?
Because that's what customers want to buy. People are paying premium iPhone prices for hardware with mediocre specs and then the hardware sells out when someone like Purism or Fairphone actually makes an open one. How many sales would you get if you did the same thing on a phone that was actually price/performance competitive with the closed ones?
Meanwhile all of that "profit center" talk is MBA hopium. Nobody is actually using the Xiaomi App Store, least of all the people who would put a different OS on their phone.
The real problem here is Google. Hardware attestation needs to be an antitrust violation the same as Microsoft intentionally breaking software when you tried to run it on a competing version of DOS and for exactly the same reason.
Which is another reason we need to strip this hardware attestation stuff out of the hardware. It either needs to use exclusively keys the user loaded into the device themselves or the keys aren't on the device whatsoever and then the "high value targets" verify the contents of the drive from a known-clean machine once they get it back from the adversarial foreign officials before putting it back into service. Or better yet, keep a separate laptop on each side of the border and then sync the data over the internet instead of losing physical control over the device at an adversarial border.
Plenty of adversarial countries have a competent security service. A foreign government can compromise the corporation's root signing key for the devices through technical attacks and through bribery, espionage, physical intrusion, etc. And they're not going to tell you that they have before using it against your high value targets, so how do you protect them? By not relying on systems with a single point of compromise.
I generally agree, but as a caveat sometimes it's cheaper, more robust and more efficient to build an integrated system without having to worry about interoperability. BYD's electric vehicle chasis for example, seems to greatly cut manufacturing costs, even if it makes swap-in repairs harder down the road.
But, I'd guess this accounts for a relatively small fraction of corporate decision on lock-in strategies for rent extraction - advanced users should be able to treat their cell phones OS like laptops, with the same basic concepts, eg just lock down the firmware for the radio output, to keep the carriers happy, and open everything else, maybe with a warranty void if you swap out your OS. Laws are needed for that, certainly.
The fundamental problem here is a little broader than ads, but "ads" mostly cover it. The problem is the commoditization of human attention. The incentive to catch and sell attention is poisonous to all human endeavors. Some things need to grab your attention to fulfill their purpose, I'm not against the idea of something directing a person's attention. Where it becomes a problem is the murky line of that direction of attention being something that is bottled and sold, or otherwise used in the interest of the distracter rather than the distracted.
So ads that someone seeks out of their own volition? Fine. That's just marketing material, and falls in the same category as every product announcement, press release, etc. What if a product catalog is mixed in with coupons or other rewards? Not fine anymore, you've mixed up reward-seeking and information-seeking.
If someone means to direct their attention and gets distracted by an important notice, like "I mean to drive down this road, and the stop sign grabbed my attention," that's also fine. The information is relevant to the human and important for augmenting their intention. But if you download an app and try to do something, only to be met with a banner/popup/whatever informing you of other products on offer by the company? Well, they're not selling your attention to third parties, but they are monetizing it by taking your intention to use one product and attempting to redirect it into a potential purchase of another, so that's out. If you want, you can include a clearly-labelled "our other offerings" section in the app, out of the way, somewhere it would only be encountered by someone seeking it out.
Distracting people cannot be allowed to be one of the main drivers of our economy.
It isn’t commoditised. It’s priced to a tee. If you can afford to keep your attention, you do.
The problem is we’ve let sociopaths like Zuckerberg and Mosseri convince us that we’re born into their servitude. That the natural order for our kids is for their attention to be stolen. That their parents have to then pay and work to buy it back.
> Distracting people cannot be allowed to be one of the main drivers of our economy.
Sure it can. Apple, Google and Microsoft get millions of impressions every day and everyone accepts it. Just because it's uncomfortable for you to think about doesn't mean that it's not happening, at-scale, this very minute.
Well, they cannot stop it. We're already in a post-advertising world and the US has no consumer protection laws to protect your attention.
If your OEM decides to serve you ads, you don't get to complain. The alternative is to buy a device with adblock or Airplane Mode and supposedly this represents a healthy, competitive economy.
Okay, go strike. Stop buying iPhones and smart-devices and let me know how many people follow your righteous warpath.
I don't disagree with your thesis. But the time for revolution has long since passed, this admin won't do anything about the ads. Nor will it's constituents.
To be clear, Dems are about as unlikely to do this as the Trump administration is. This is the sort of generational reform that requires a redefining of a political party.
Zen (Firefox-based) has been really refreshing. You could probably accomplish the same thing with some user scripts and user CSS, but the concern with those has always been that they could break at any time with a new update. That shouldn't happen with a fork like Zen as they have control over updates.
An integrated experience. In the past I found that the vertical tab options in Firefox had the tabs duplicated across the side and the top, which I always found to be a subpar experience. Again, probably something you could accomplish with user.js and user.css but there's a good chance an update could break your modifications.
Seems quite similar to Zen's experience, except it seems to be missing folders (which I admittedly don't use often, but they're sometimes handy to group a Jira ticket with a PR, or similar). I'll probably still stick with Zen while it's around, and maybe I'll hop over to LibreWolf as I'm not too happy about Mozilla's recent stance on privacy.
Passing io into things over and over seems annoying. Like, you can use io to get a File instance, then you need to pass io into its methods to read/write it? When would you ever make a File with one io implementation and want to manipulate it with another?
It's one of the major issues of our era. Either society will be utterly captured, gradually and quietly, or there will be a reconning and ads will become tightly regulated along the lines of tobacco, sectioned off from polite society.
I was surprised to see this on the HN homepage, I didn't create Tyr but I did create Yggmail (https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail) which it is based on. There is no store-and-forward as such, the sending node will keep the message in its outbox and will keep retrying until the destination is online.
> There is no store-and-forward as such, the sending node will keep the message in its outbox and will keep retrying until the destination is online.
Yes I might be wrong but my understanding is there is no point in creating another system where messages hop from one peer to the other like Meshtastic or Reticulum (what make sense for their use case).
Let's say users have their "email server" running on both on there mobile phone and a home server and in sync.
We can expect 2 of the 4 servers will be online at the same time to send the message. I personally like those odds, Internet is pretty reliable in our days.
I believe we have spent too long trying to solve very hard trilema in messaging, trying to have it all: confidentiality, anonymity and uncensorability ... and reliability ... and ease of use.
The result is in practice most people use GMail, Outlook and Whatsapp.
Yggdrasil is fantastic, it goes back some original ideas of the Internet we have almost forgotten, and in practice solves a lot of problem we have been dealing with for too long.
Tyr is probably overkill with Deltachat on top of yggdrasil. The network already is encrypted so it's fine to send plaintext emails as long as there's no 3rd party email hubs.
back in the day a few of us used to run ssb (secure-scuttlebot) over yggdrasil (and cjdns before that) and that system would distribute the private messages to all of the peers within 3 hops. offline peers would just sync up when online and then decrypt the messages sent to them.
ssb's been broken for around five years, but now that it's working again it'd be fun try this experiment again.
2026 could be the year mesh networks finally take off!
Curious why you believe it was broken, and is now fixed. What new development are you referring to? I agree that Patchwork kinda took a dive, and functionality started to bitrot with each new maintainer...but it still replicates feeds.
I couldn't get any of their latest versions working. The ssb-server was still functioning, but had no working client that I could find. https://github.com/evbogue/ssbc is a working fork with a patchbay lite client from circa 2015/16 live at https://ssb.evbogue.com/ (with git-ssb!). I'm also recreating pfrazee's original Phoenix client from scratch.
Let's talk more on a more appropriate channel. Are you on bsky? we're having a small discussion there about "bringing open source projects back from the dead with AI" right now.
Surely most deployed solar isn't owned by average people? I would expect that it's almost all coming from large-scale deployments, and a good investment opportunity.
Both comments are true. We could go faster if fossil subsidies shifted to solar and batteries, but we will still go fast regardless. Most US solar is utility scale, but buying your own solar is cheap enough now you can almost go off the grid (battery price decline will catch up shortly) assuming you have enough space for panels. Utility scale solar is still a good investment, even with the loss of tax subsidies, and is the fastest way to deploy new generation capacity.
Regardless, we’ve reached a global tipping point where solar, battery, and EV deployment continues to accelerate and peak fossil fuel demand is very near.
Microsoft has been making it harder to run their proprietary python plugin in vscodium, which I was relying on to provide hints from pyright. That's something I didn't want to deal with, so I just jumped ship.
There are some things I miss from codium, and I still capitulate back when editing files with nonstandard indentation because zed doesn't yet have autodetect for that, and also its git-staging / diff-view isn't as good yet, but aside from those it's a mostly alright experience.
> The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
Certainly it's biased. I'm not the author, but to me there's a huge difference between computer/software as a tool, designed and planned, with known deterministic behavior/functionality, then put in the hands of humans, vs automating agency. The former I see as a pretty straightforward expansion of humanity's long-standing relationship with tools, from simple sticks to hand axes to chainsaws. The sort of automation AI-hype seems focused on doesn't have a great parallel in history. We're talking about building a statistical system to replace the human wielding the tool, mostly so that companies don't have to worry about hiring employees. Even if the machine does a terrible job and most of humanity, former workers and current users, all suffer, the bet is that it will be worth the cost savings.
ML is very cool technology, and clearly one of the major frontiers of human progress. At this stage though, I wish the effort on the packaging side was being spent on wrapping the technology in the form of reliable capabilities for humans to call on. Stuff like OCR at the OS level or "separate tracks" buttons in audio editors. The market has decided instead that the majority of our collective effort should go towards automated liability-sinks and replacing jobs with automation that doesn't work reliably.
And the end state doesn't even make sense. If all this capital investment does achieve breakthroughs and creat true AGI, do investors really think they'll see returns? They'll have destroyed the entire concept of an economy. The only way to leverage power at that point would be to try to exercise control over a robot army or something similarly sci-fi and ridiculous.
"Automating agency" it's such a good way to describe what's happening. In the context of your last paragraph, if they succeed in creating AGI, they won't be able to exercise control over a robot army, because the robot army will have as much agency as humans do. So they will have created the very situation they currently find themselves in. Sans an economy.
There are technical reasons, but as ever the real underlying causes are incentives. Companies realized that the OS is a profit center, something they can use to influence user behavior to their benefit. Before the goal was to be a hardware company and offer the best hardware possible for cost. Now the goal is to own as large a slice of your life as possible. It's more of a social shift than a technological one. So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments? They'd be undercutting themselves.
That's not to say that attempts to build interoperability don't exist, just that they happen due to what are essentially activist efforts, the human factor, acting in spite of and against market forces. That doesn't tend to win out, except (rarely) in the political realm.
i.e. if you want interoperable mobile hardware you need a law, the market's not going to save you one this one.
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