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points

by ericmay12 hours ago |

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by matheusmoreira12 hours ago|

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> Freedom, perhaps, starts with not making up and applying limitations on yourself.

Nothing wrong with applying limitations to oneself. That's discipline, principles. It's important stuff.

The real problem is accepting the completely made up limitations that others apply on you. Corporation wakes up one day and just decides people can't run more than two virtual machines? That's stupid. Actually defending this with "but convenience" arguments as if convenience was supposed to override freedom? No.

Freedom isn't something you actively work towards. It's something you start with. It's the status quo. Others take it away from you. You can either accept it passively and enjoy the "convenience", or you can resist and go down the harder path. It's very disappointing to see people on Hacker News choose the former path.

by ericmay9 hours ago|

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You’re just living under the illusion of freedom. You are completely dependent on the decisions of others and their good graces for all of your computing needs, from the silicon to the Linux distro you use. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line a little further to feel like you’re in control, but you’re not.

by matheusmoreira9 hours ago|

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Silicon? Sure. Billion dollar fabs are huge single points of failure. It's turning into a problem too due to the war on general purpose computing. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it. Linux distro? Not really. It's only a matter of how much effort I want to put into things. I can make my own distro, I can't make my own trillion dollar fab.

Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so it doesn't matter? Don't even bother trying? Just give up? Just accept your lot in life as a serf in Apple's digital fiefdom? I'm pessimistic about the future but even I haven't completely succumbed to such total nihilism yet.