it’s a good point about pessimism, I should try harder to not spread it

you’ve put together a pretty useful table there!

RE voting with our wallets, I was mostly referring to this: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-13-consumption-choices-marginal-benefits-66edd5d9a82e

oh, sorry, now I understand the question

yes, devices available in CrowdSupply tend to philosophically align with my values: owner is in charge, no subscriptions, cloud connectivity is not a thing or completely optional, schematics are open, drivers are open, etc

so they aren’t usually interfered with at a functionality or technological level

but they’re popularity and availability are subject to interference: we’ve already had multiple governments ban or consider banning the Flipper Zero for various reasons

and we have various media codec patents and DRM requirements that prevent truly open devices from being able to be used for popular purposes like streaming video content which pretty much guarantees that only industry-approved devices will ever gain wide distribution and popularity

I don’t think it’s too tin-foil hat to suggest that if a truly open device did gain popularity somehow, that we’d see IP lawsuits or import restrictions or mandatory modifications (e.g. countries attempting to mandate a government-operated surveillance app preinstalled on over smartphone)

seems good?

I bought my Precursor on CrowdSupply :)

I’ll probably buy more stuff in future there

and I’m also a big fan of https://mntre.com/ although I’m waiting for the next model that’s currently in development

what’s frustrating is that we can’t really vote with our wallets, and any right-to-repair or consumer-is-in-charge movement is going to be limited by intelligence agencies, corporations like John Deere, Apple, and the entire entertainment industry

really, unless it’s a Precursor-style open chip and able to be verified by the consumer that it hasn’t been tampered with, then we’re already putting an awful lot of faith in the primary CPUs in our systems, anyway

• https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
• https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-xous-a-pure-rust-rethink-of-the-embedded-operating-system

there’s also so much mistrust of TPMs that every verified damage wrought by them ought to be very well documented by now

TPMs are certainly worthy of our vigilance, but it seems like we should be spending more energy pestering CPU and GPU vendors for better behaviour