I haven't talked about my goal for personal computing in a while.
With Sundog nerdsniping me in to attempting to turn the LibSSH-ESP32 port in to the basis of a full fledged SSH client for the ESP32, I guess I should spend a few minutes talking about why I bother with this bullshit.
Computers could be good, but they aren't.
That's the gist of it.
I guess I mean Good with a capital G, as in "a force for good in the world", but I also mean good with a lowercase g, as in "not super shitty to use, or think about".
I'm not going to waste a lot of bits talking about how computers are bad. I've done this a lot before, and you probably already agree with me. I'll quickly summarize the high points.
What's wrong with (modern) computing?
- Computers spy on us all the time
- Computers are insecure, while pretending not to to be.
- Computers enable new modes of rent seeking, further exasperated by shitty patents and worse laws
- Computers/the modern internet encourage behaviors which are bad for our mental health as individuals.
- Computers and the modern internet, in concert with modern capitalism have built a world essentially without public spaces.
You know, all that bullshit.
@ajroach42 In retrospect, one of the most regrettable parts of the "PC revolution" is how much wheel-reinvention happened due to disconnects between large systems people and micro/PC people.
E.g. the high watermark of hardware-enforced security in operating systems is arguably still Multics…developed 1964-67. Just one example.
So much knowledge from the development of large multiuser systems was ignored or not known to PC developers, and we now live with the consequences.
@kadin @ajroach42 Well back in the 80;s dos took over then Windows on desktop computers.
Linux was great, an actual multi user system. By which time windows had got a huge foothold and was pre-installed on computers.
@zleap @ajroach42 Yes, that's largely the issue; early PC OSes like CP/M and DOS never had multi-user or security as requirements. And then they evolved seemingly in isolation from the huge body of existing CS knowledge.
"Advanced" features like hardware-enforced (multi ring) security, self-hosting virtualization, ACLs, key-value stores, etc were all well-known on large systems decades before they were rediscovered/reinvented in Silicon Valley. Some still haven't been, even on Linux.