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  • Hacker News
  • Miss the days you could script or tweak everything. Modern apps feel like sealed black boxes with no escape hatches.
    by finn888
  • Intelligence and the mental load it requires has a budget - in both real and artificial forms. In real - people are bombarded with tools and requirements and when the teams behind those don’t consider mental load required, that spends down the budget. Thus people give up fighting all battles and are forced to prioritize their resources. Denial of service attack on the brain. AI models running out of context will do the same and get lazy. Sadly any bad actor private or government knows this and uses it as a tool to fight intelligent resistance to its plans.
    by dzink
  • I believe it is critical for regulators to force mega-corporations (and software vendors in general) to permit third party clients.

    I use services like YouTube every day, why can I get sued if I write my own YouTube client that's better than the one provided by Google? Why can I get sued if I create a chat client that aggregates the myriad of chat services I use?

    I'd argue that this even extends down the stack. Why is there only Android and iOS? It's because hardware drivers are practically impossible to write for undocumented hardware (which is virtually all hardware). Vendors should be compelled to document their hardware such that drives could be produced for them.

    Asahi Linux is a testament to a team attempting the impossible and making unbelievable progress - but it's still not competitive with first party drivers.

    I want a world where I can run Linux on my MacBook Pro and my phone. I want a world where I can flash a custom firmware to my TV that removes the bloat and spyware. I want a world where I can use the services I depend on in ways that are better than what the vendor can produce. I want a world where I can rebuild applications and games lost to time.

    I have the skills and desire to do these things.

    But nah. Not allowed.

    by apatheticonion
  • Discussed at the time:

    Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 - June 2025 (114 comments)

    by dang
  • I think one of the best ways of stopping lock-in is to be file-based. Obsidian is a good example of this. Users can just keep their data as is and move on with their lives.
    by lucrbvi
  • This whole article is true and to the point but... reality is: most people still don't build their own setups: work, home - most of them follow a sh*tty software or decorate with Ikea. I think this applies only to a small group of users how will be willing to go extra mile and prompt their ideal interface for whatever they need to do.
    by piterrro
  • I agree that the current state of software is quite rigid. There is no room for imperfection and often one opinion is seen as fixed the best.

    I think the essence of the GPL is trying to solve this issue, the freedoms of that license is focused on keeping software as editable as possible. The idea of malleable software is not new but most "business/industry" software is still very rigid.

    One of the more interesting realized concepts of malleable software are the freewheeling apps from Kartik Agaram (https://akkartik.name/freewheeling/). Additionally in my opinion the idea of malleable software is at the core of unix everything is a file and the plan 9 system.

    by trashb
  • The other day, I spent at least 20 minutes trying to share screens with my mother on Google Meet. She uses OSX.

    There was a cascade of subtle issues which blocked every possibility.

    My mother was using an an Apple iPad and I was using Linux. I sent her the link to the Google Meet to her email. When she tapped it, it opened in Safari browser. Safari did not allow screen sharing via Google Meet so I told her to download Chrome and told her to copy the URL into Chrome. Safari would not let her copy the URL from the address bar... She ended up literally typing out the URL and the resource ID by hand while I read it out to her. Then when she opened Google Meet in Chrome, it required her to download a browser extension (I don't recall having to do this on Linux)... Anyway it was unbelievably tedious.

    It's obvious that operating system companies have been intentionally making it difficult to 1. Know where you are when browsing your file system or the web and 2. Copy the URL or path between different apps.

    This has been a major point of frustration for software developers. First, it started with OSes hiding file extensions, then converting the address bar into breadcrumbs/buttons which can't be highlighted or selected... Then hiding the protocol (e.g. http:// or https://) then hiding most of the start of the breadcrumbs which make up the address so that you can't even see the full path in a single screen and you can't even select individual words to copy even a single folder name.

    And this trend spread to a lot of other apps. Sometimes in downright dangerous ways. For example, recently, I noticed that my email client was hiding most of the email address of the sender of an email I had just received. If I clicked on the email address it opened up their contact card in a modal but only showed their name! Their email address still cut off on the contact card view and also not selectable... I just wanted to see if the domain name was legit but I physically couldn't see what the domain name was. OMG. Nowadays, whenever I'm forced to use one of these crappy web applications, I just open up the Chrome developer panel and inspect the HTML directly. I don't know what's wrong with people that they put up with this stuff voluntarily.

    by jongjong

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