@garbados i went and did a quick spot check a few weeks ago to see where libre phones are at now, and all i could come up with is "...the same place they were 7-10 years ago", which is to say, not very far

@garbados i take comfort in "one of the central lessons of history is 'horribly bad things end, even if it may seem like the end of everything while in the thick of it'", but it's not always that much of a comfort either, lol sigh

but a comfort it is, i'll take what i can get

@shoutcacophony @garbados this reminds me of a quote from Conflictual Wisdom I've been finding inspiring:

“I don’t do what I do because I think I can save the world. I fight because I know that the whole
world will be destroyed, it will be consumed by the sun, leaving only ash, and when that day comes, I want the story that comes to an end to be a story of beauty and tragedy and resistance, not a story of stupid, pointless suffering, but a story of joy and courage.”

@polymerwitch @garbados amazing quote, ty

@shoutcacophony yeah

and yet what would it take to reinvent the classic ipod? an RPi, an SSD, a battery pack, and a 3D-printed case.

sometimes i feel like we're closer than we think to serious alternatives.

@garbados see, *this*. the iPod is a really good example -- with the exception of how unopen (and wasteful) they were even back then, its proof that in some if not a lot of cases, "things are even worse now" has a flip side, namely, that things back then were actually better

not perfect, but better. the iPod for all its flaws was sort of a wonder, the more recent iPhones in particular, not so much (or at all)

@garbados the concept of a media player isn't that complex, like you said. neither is "let's establish a tax on media devices, and use it to create an economic commons for musicians and performers"

@garbados both of which were respectively real and on the table, until things went off the rails: 9/11, "rebuilding" the tech industry in ways that only gave lip service to reforms, re-re-building after the subprime crash in ways that barely even tried to do so, or seriously overstated their importance while gentrifying the heck out of everything, etc

but that's all fixable. so...good point, ty

@garbados @shoutcacophony Replicating the touch wheel would be a bit of bother, since you would have to custom source the touch panels for it.

There's a handful of small LCDs so that isn't going to be a super big problem, depending on how fancy of a screen you need.

If you wanted to get super nerdy, you could probably use a Teensy and some cheap FPGA. Teensy is lower power, and you could use the FPGA to do the hardware decoding of various audio formats.

@garbados

@shoutcacophony

I think to truly free the system you would need more than that. The cortex A57 chip in the rpi3 is certainly not free in the sense of speech, and I have seen no truly libre SSDs. On the bright side v-risc is on the horizon.

@garbados my least favourite thing about those devices is how impossible they are to repair by the layperson (and me)

@hirojin absolutely. it's just another way of inflicting dependence.

@garbados lala lala lala https://mastodon.social/@hirojin/99833851614011112

@garbados why is software so hard to debug?

like, not even extend?
just debug, for starters

@hirojin @garbados (a lot of) programmers love complexity

@garbados all of that is true but I'm not sure it's quite as horrible as it sounds. we have things like F-Droid that bring some measure of freedom to the locked-down devices people have. it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing, and we can work on moving the boundary ever closer to freedom.

if hardware manufacturers ever manage to do trusted boot correctly and only give the keys to big companies, then we may be hosed. fortunately nobody can write bug-free software yet, I guess?

@jamey f-droid makes me want an android machine

@garbados At least until the EMP pulse hits and then we all…

@rotatingskull

> haha, remember computers?
< yes, with varying degrees of nostalgia and spite

@garbados ha, okay but seriously notwithstanding the electroapocalypse the real solution is Free hardware manufacture

but for that someone would need to

sieze
the
means
of
something?

@rotatingskull i think about this. i think about establishing lo-tek production lines for open hardware gadgets, like non-phone PDAs, routers, etc; it's the sort of thing that can be done horizontally, with relatively low overhead, even though it's totally perpendicular to mainstream products.

@rotatingskull salvage also matters. we accumulate so much electronic junk, but with some labor and the right knowledge, machines can be salvaged and redistributed. but most of us are so disconnected from anyone with those skills, and the communities around those skills tend to be so insular, that efforts to resurrect and distribute salvage end up inaccessible and practically secret, not to mention fragile.

@garbados

@rotatingskull
I could (and almost did) go on a screed about this but that is increasingly untrue. Modern smartphones are designed to displace easier to maintain hardware from public awareness and then die unrecoverably, leaving only worse successors as an alternative. The real fear of iot is that becomes every machine.

@garbados i just got rid of a box of old mobos and ram and whatnot that i was saving for a rainy day that will never come

what if it comes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@garbados Political advocacy might help. Someone managed to force Microsoft into supporting ODF files.

@alienghic can you link me more about who forced microsoft to support ODF? i can't find any information about it

@garbados I think it was at least the British government who decided office suites needed to use open standards.

A randomly found story about it:
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/07/22/making-things-open-making-things-better/

@garbados And for what its worth the EU also managed to force mobile phone manufacturers to use one standard for charging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply

@garbados Well said. People love to say how *liberating* computers are, how they shift power toward the common person. These people hugely underestimate how dependent today's technology stacks are on the capital, supply chains, and well-coordinated work of big businesses.

If you want that kind of liberation, think long-term. Think pragmatically. Think baby steps. Acknowledge the enormity of the challenge.