We Should Have the Ability to Run Any Code We Want on Hardware We Own

Apple and Google are still a problem, but they are a secondary problem.

It should be able to make an OS. It should be able to write drivers. It should be able to port code to new platforms. It should be able to transpile compiled binaries (which are just languages of a different language) across architectures.

Sure seems we are very far from that, but really these are breadth-based knowledge with extensive examples / training sources. It SHOULD be something LLMs are good at, not new/novel/deep/difficult problems. What I described are labor-intensive and complicated, but not "difficult".

And would any corporate AI allow that?

We should be pretty paranoid about centralized control attempts, especially in tech. This is a ... fragile ... time.

While it would be a burden to require a degree of openness, it's not like companies are all rugged individualists who would never want to see legal restrictions in the field.

It's just a question of what is overall best and fairest.

Restrictions can both help and hinder innovation, and it's innovation that in the ling run makes things improve IMO.

And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.

Yep. They control our information - how we make it, what we are allowed to find, and what we can say. And they are large enough to not face real competition. So let’s treat them like the state owned corporations they are and regulate heavily. Smaller companies can be left unregulated. But not companies worth 500 billion or more.

Sometimes owner control, cf. corporate control, can be had by sacrificing hardware functionality, i.e., features, closed source drivers. Choice between particular hardware feature(s) working and control over the hardware in general.

To push further, Google and Apple have basically as much power as the US.

The UK going after Apple, only to get rebutted by the US is the most simple instance of it. International treaties pushed by the US strongly protecting it's top corporations is the more standard behavior.

Any entity fighting the duopoly is effectively getting into a fight with the US.

Without that fraudulent marketing, Android never would have crowded out other options so quickly in the marketplace.

The solution is to either have Google back down on breaking its promise that Android would be open or to have an antitrust lawsuit strip Android from Google's control.

Lets be real, they do not have more power than any nations. They have a lot of power in a few tiny silos that happen to make up like 90% of the mental space of a lot of terminally online folk.

Heck they probably have less power than Coca Cola or Pepsi did during the Cola wars, or United Fruit Company at its height.

Wake me up when Apple rolls a tank into red square or Google does anything but complain about national security legislation it then goes and assertively complies with.

> building those alternatives is basically impossible

For smart people it is not impossible. Just few years ago, few folks wrote complicated drivers for completely closed hardware, and I'm talking about M1 Macbook.

Google Pixel, on the other hand, was pretty open until very recently. I might be wrong about specifics, but I'm pretty sure that most of software was open, so you could just look at the kernel sources in the readable C to look for anything. You can literally build this kernel and run linux userspace and go from there to any lengths of development. Or you can build alternative systems, looking at driver sources.

I don't understand why mobile systems do not attract OS builders.

I don't understand why everybody is ignoring existing, working GNU/Linux phones: Librem 5 and Pinephone. The former is my daily driver btw.

Also worrisome are e-fuses, which allow software to make irrevocable physical changes to your hardware. They shouldn't be allowed to be modified except by the owner. (See Nintendo Switch updates blowing e-fuses to prevent downgrades.)

The smartphone does not consist of just one processor, it's a collection of dedicated processors, each running custom algorithms locally. Sure, there's software running in the application layer, but it's playing more of a coordination role than actually doing the work. Just think of sending a packet over the internet and how different it is between a smartphone and a computer, how much more complex a cellular modem is compared to a network card.

It's less about software now and more about hardware accelerated modules. Even CPUs run primarily on microcode which can be patched after the fact.

These patterns are cyclical. It will take a number of years before we return to standardized compute again, but return we will. Eventually.

In practice, a whole lot software would have to be open source too so that the hardware is reasonably usable. The layers you'd need to let an iPhone run android well, or a Pixel phone to run iOS are not small.

Cars are increasingly controlled more via code than driver, but that (hopefully) goes through certification and oversight processes. Lane control, collision detection, self parking, self driving features - should people be able to hack these systems? Do we want people running their own collision detection routines that are less sensitive, because the stock option keeps slowing them down so much everyday when they drive past a school?

I imagine many of us here have encountered a computer that's broken because the user installed a programe to "make their machine faster" which deleted important windows files or removed everything from the startup folder that the user needs to use. I'm sure I could make a lot of money with a programme that decreases the time it takes to recharge your EV. Might remove heat protections, run at your own risk! (And the risk of passengers, neighbours, pedestrians and anyone your share a road with...)

I don't care if you want to run code that can allow more nuances to the seat heating, but do I think that's an important enough principle to also allow drivers to watch netflix on the in car display?

TVs and home appliances are less concerning, but I'm sure there's users out there who'd like to disable the annoying "don't run the dryer when it's full of lint" lock out or stop their garage door from beeping at their car everyday, not realising that setting also keeps it from closing on top of neighbourhood kids or cats.

I don't know if there's anyway to balance a reasonable right to tinker with a general right to live in a safe environment. I also suspect EU and US readers will have quite different takes on it - in part because of the current culture, in part because I think a lot of it is quite effected by geography. Live in dense housing and your neighbours ability to burn their house down is much more of your concern!)

If a manufacturer makes a device locked down, it's the technological protections preventing you from running your own code. Not IP/copyright. Sometimes they get jailbroken but sometimes not.

There may be alternatives to copyright and IP in general, but that would require dramatic changes to society, and maybe not in a good way. What you would get is essentially communism. Rejection of intellectual property is a form of rejection of private property, which is at the core of communism. Problem is, looking at past examples, it didn't work great.

Except GrapheneOS, I suppose, but it's still riding the coattails of Android. Police in some places assume you're a drug dealer and arrest you if you have it, so it does qualify as "dark web".

Actually enforcing the anti-monopoly rules on the books would help, too.

And while we're making wishes, we could kill the VC-backed tech play by enforcing a digital version of anti-dumping laws.

With those rules in place, we'd see our market engine quite a bit more aligned with the social good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

(Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)

However the interests you mention aren't collective at all but very singularly the ones of the manufacturer only

Because I did. How come I can do what I want with my computer, but not my phone? Why are phones so inferior in this area?

My phone is more powerful than many of the computers I've had in the past, yet I need to jump through a million hoops to use it as a software development platform. Why?

Will it be as good as the iOS implementation? Probably not. But it's hardly an impossible fact and not one that has to be done entirely over and over for every device. The Asahi folks showed it could be done despite hostile conditions.