**D Dino** @garbados · May 02, 2018, 19:26

**D Dino** @garbados · May 02, 2018, 19:26

D Dino @garbados

May 02, 2018, 19:26

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> Worse, it’s not clear what we can do. This reflects our current political emergency. Ignorant and wicked people control the government, propped up by chortling billionaires, corrupt evangelical hucksters, and resentful wing nuts; we can work to end the nightmare but the road is long and uncertain. The future of computing now seems to depend on the whims of a few businessmen, none of whom appears to care very much about computing.

http://www.markbernstein.org/May18/DependentDevelopers.html

**D Dino** @garbados · May 02, 2018, 19:51

**D Dino** @garbados · May 02, 2018, 19:51

May 02, 2018, 19:51

D Dino @garbados

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any time i really think about it, i'm overwhelmed by the sense that to combat corporate control of electronics we will have to reinvent and re-normalize untold swathes of modern technology, but we haven't got the free labor for that, and definitely not to make it broadly accessible. i think about friends whose only computer is a phone or tablet. for all practical purposes, we're locked into this mess.

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 19:56

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 19:56

May 02, 2018, 19:56

Punching back in 2018 @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party

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@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

**D Dino** @garbados · 2018-05-02T20:01:09Z

D Dino @garbados

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@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.

May 02, 2018, 20:01 · Web · 2 · 5

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:07

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:07

May 02, 2018, 20:07

Punching back in 2018 @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party

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@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)

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:10

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:10

May 02, 2018, 20:10

Punching back in 2018 @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party

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@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"

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:10

**Punching back in 2018** @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party · May 02, 2018, 20:10

May 02, 2018, 20:10

Punching back in 2018 @shoutcacophony@anticapitalist.party

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@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

**Iced Quinn** @icedquinn@niu.moe · May 02, 2018, 20:16

**Iced Quinn** @icedquinn@niu.moe · May 02, 2018, 20:16

May 02, 2018, 20:16

Iced Quinn @icedquinn@niu.moe

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@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.

**Alex** @alexjgriffith@mastodon.social · May 02, 2018, 22:59

**Alex** @alexjgriffith@mastodon.social · May 02, 2018, 22:59

May 02, 2018, 22:59

Alex @alexjgriffith@mastodon.social

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@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.