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- Hacker News
- Or just pick up any shithouse old laptop from a thrift store or wherever and put Linux Mint on it. Done.by everyone
- I became an engineer because I'm lazy.by jesse_dot_id
- "Yeah I don't get it..." meanwhile me packing for holiday with my GrapheneOS Pixel with my 3D printed phone stand and my BT mechanical keyboard "Wait a minute!"
Also gave a workshop last weekends to kids and brought a "server" as a RPi Zero and a cheap (as in goodie level) tiny battery.
Damned, I'm part of the "movement".
by utopiah - Analog Electronics are the goat, there this whole branch of people who make electronic music using pure analog circuits, here is an example : https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOr4ShNCFBv/?igsh=MTR2MWx6aHh...by GL26
- I'll just wait until I can jack in with a jailbroken Neuralink.by NDlurker
- If you already have the electrodes installed in your brain you can use stimulation circuitry from the courtocal labs cl1 to get a bidirectional bci.
Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.
by noosphr - > Technology was supposed to connect us[...]
Was it? According to whom? The quoted phrase is pretty much a meme at this point, but I don't think it's true. This would suggest people in the 80s and 90s were sitting around feeling lonely and isolated, wishing they could be "more connected".
Technology has always been about one thing: giving people more freedom. Whether it's the ability to make coffee at home, or travel vast distances at great speeds whenever you want to, it's all about people being free from the constraints of relying on society (and the environment) for things.
It's all fundamentally counter to a cohesive society. It was never going to make us "more connected", quite the contrary. Asimov saw where this was going half a century ago. In his books the Solarians took technology to the extreme, allowing them to live alone on enormous estates affording them all the freedom in the world. But they were alone, communicating only remotely through screens. They didn't even have sex any more. Sound familiar?
When I read this as a teen it totally put me off "freedom" as the singular goal so many people treat it as. I didn't want to end up like that. I don't want to be alone. Life is about sharing and technology is never going to help with that, it's only going to make it worse, if we let it.
> This is apparent in the rise of "journal tok", where people on TikTok are posting about returning to written journals, planners, and sketchbooks.
Is this intended to be ironic? People will do anything for views on TikTok, including making videos about not using TikTok. If anyone does anything and puts it on TikTok, or other social media, I assume they're doing it for the views, not because they actually enjoy it. If you want to find someone who enjoys cooking, find someone who will cook and eat with you, don't look on TikTok. If you want to find someone who doesn't like TikTok, well, guess where you won't find them.
The rest of the article is filled with TikTok videos which I'm not going to watch.
- At CCCamp 2023 was someone showing off how they converted a laptop with a broken screen into a cyberdeck by removing the screen and permanently connecting the bottom half to VR glasses.
There was also a musical Tesla coil. And some group called Anderstorp, who converted a massive obsolete router into a beer tap.
by inigyou - Now this would at least resemble a cyberdeck from the books.by y1n0
- I think these things are interesting, but I grew up on neuromancer...and so I have some cognitive dissonance when I see these described as cyberdecks and see screens.
I get that the term has moved on, and cyberdeck means whatever people say it means now. But to me, these are just novel retro diy laptops. I think given today's technology you could sort of a approximate a cyberdeck with some low end ar/vr glasses like something from xreal and ditch the screen.
by y1n0 - that's why I still love the quest3, just for the potential. but xreal makes more sense, and then a more open platform. but I think post-covid we approach neuromancer more than ever.by _glass
- Someone said to me yesterday "I'm thinking about building my own cyberdeck" and I boggled, because the only meaning I knew was the Neuromancer one.by QuesnayJr
- Cyberdecks are nice for photos and build blog posts, but does anyone actually regularly use them?by ideasphere
- More of a fun Maker project for sureby glaslong
- I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.by tartoran
- The ideal "cyberdeck" form factor is just a regular laptop. So to the extent that a macbook pro counts as a cyberdeck, yes.by Retr0id
- Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.by muyuu
- They're interactive art projects!by overvale
- The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.by skydhash
- For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.by yummypaint
- Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
- What keeps going through my mind regarding this topic is that we have Instagram for pictures, YouTube for videos, Reddit as a forum, Twitter/Bsky as a microblogging service, and so on. But what if we focused on locality again? What if each city/region had its own virtual meeting place for pictures, videos, forums, microblogging, and so forth? I don't mean a "super app" that simply divides things regionally, but rather that each regional center builds its own Hangout.
I realize that this sounds fantastical, and I don't know how something like that could be implemented in the current situation. It's more the idea that while Facebook and similar platforms allow us to see content from people all over the world, we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
by ma2kx - > we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Almost every larger city has a more or less active subreddit these days, on platforms like Twitter you can look what people post with a city name tag. And then there are Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed with instances for geographic regions.
by b3orn - Local social is one of the most attempted startup ideas of the 2010s. It is quite challenging because network effects are hard to reach at the local scale, and you need significant moderation to prevent bullying.by goldenarm
- I live in a village with 2.000 people and about 25 common Whatsapp channels. And it is hell. Sometimes, you really don't want to interact with your neighbors beyond the courtesy "hello". These people don't have anything in common with you, other than your coordinates on the map. That's no basis for a functional community in the online sense.by wossab
- > we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.
Exactly, and the local layer is actually were we as normal people have the most power of participation, opportunity to find consensus and act together for the overall common (local) good. And the beautiful emergent side-effect is that this local good turns automatically into a global good if it's approached locally from the bottom up.
Side-note: The (global) commercial news industry is very contra-productive to actual useful action: by reporting 24/7 almost only negative out-of-reach quick changing 'news' that people can't possible resolve in any way by their own, has as effect the entrapment of cynicism that keeps people from doing local community action. This inertia is of course very welcome by the few conglomerates that run the world and rather would like seeing you in despair and inactive while patching over the real issues with cheap consumerism they also conveniently provide.
Study after study shows that the only real antidote to this despair is local-action: bounding together with others and doing positive tangible things on the local level.
by mentalgear - I recently got a (good!) 3D printer, and that combined with Claude has got me building lots of custom hardware devices using ESP32s.
I don't really see the value in a full-computer experience (which seems to be what most cyberdecks try to do - badly) but I can see utility in "sidecar"-style hardware, which is more akin to a phone app but with a better experience because of custom hardware.
by nl - I'd be very interested in reading about the kinds of hardware projects you're doing with esp32s and your printer!by stackghost
- I read the article and sadly I think the author missed a key thing that is going on.
Yes, there are few people who created cyberdecks as a counter-culture, anti-company tool (which is a lot of what the author argues).
But some of the newer ones they highlight are nothing more than engagement farming reels. They are the very definition of the opposite of what the author writes here:
> We want to escape the algorithmic plantations that tech companies have herded us into.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
by nl - I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
There is. "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
Freeing yourself from the social media is definitely doable. Depending on how firmly engaged you are at the moment, it can vary in difficulty between fait accompli and moderately challenging. It's obviously possible for anyone to do themselves.
Liberating the masses? Morpheus said it best:
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
by chongli