All tech is becoming more and more integrated and purposefully locked down. Everything from operating systems to cars. It’s truly a shame. I think many of us tinkerers/hackers have a similar story to yours - something grabs your attention when you’re a child and develops into an engineering knack later on.

All tech or all physical tech? For now software managed to somehow go in the opposite direction. In the '90s many / lots of operating systems / tools / libraries were paid / hard to access, today we have lots of (open-source) stuff for people to tinker with.

Tinkering with physical stuff is also good and should be encouraged / supported, but let's also be careful not to loose the software tinkering (for example by not permitting in any shape rooting mobile devices).

No, most people are stuffing everything into the application layer, or worse, a web/mobile app these days and don't know how to fix anything below it. I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch nor build their own PC or server from parts. Also, during the 90's everything was easy to find and access. Piracy was the norm and FOSS was booming.

The field exploded though, both in terms of complexity and of number of people involved. I know many engineers that can do from compiler optimizations to web apps. I also know "programmers" that don't want to learn a new library because it stresses them.

Lots of tech we currently rely on is built under FOSS model (thinking web stuff, mobile stuff, os stuff, data center stuff). Of course you must choose to use it, but I find nowadays using Linux daily on desktop as easy as using Windows or MacOS. 20 years ago you had to fight drivers, file formats, browser issues, media formats, lack of software (I mean we run many Windows video-games on Linux without issues, how cool is that?!)

I did not check piracy lately because I find FOSS alternatives (or I can afford to buy some stuff).

The house of cards is build with far more than just libs. And everything you just mentioned came at a price.

> I know many "programmers" who can neither configure a SME/Enterprise firewall or switch

This is a very weird baseline to use for qualifying a programmer. Firewall configuration is completely irrelevant for most programmers and has been for decades. It is objectively not a programming task, it's just something that might get foisted upon a programmer if there is nobody else to do it.

Not op but how I understood it is that until recently the majority of programmers were geeks and liked to tinker and understand the systems they were writing and deploying code on.

Not sure that this is the case now, nonetheless it can be a good thing that people are specializing and concerned just on the frameworks or design patterns.

Even proprietary software in those times was accessible via piracy, and was generally tolerated/accepted as long as it wasn't for profit (in fact it benefited the software authors by allowing users to learn the usage of their software, for which they'd then push their future employers to buy).

Question is what ___domain/field is the next virgin frontier for hackers, unspoiled of commercial greed and integrated and locked down solutions, where you can still not only buy things but also own them, and rebuild from parts what you bought when it breaks down?

There are all sorts of things like this, but one that springs to mind is drones, specifically FPV drones. You can build a very good drone from basically parts that runs on open firmware. The videos that you see coming out of Ukraine is clearly using flight control software that is basically the standard for non commercial drones. Nothing more cyberpunk than fighting fascists using open source software and commodity hardware.

What seems to be lacking is the path to accidental discovery that underlies these stories from the past. Is there a reasonable way people will find themselves building drones without being intentional about it?

The normal progression is that you had a commercially built one, and one of two things happened. 1. It was a prebuilt FPV drone and you need to repair it after smashing it into something at mach Jesus or 2. You bought a DJI, which is really a camera platform, and you want a drone that can fly at mach Jesus and do the cool aerobatics so that pulls you into the FPV genre where you buy a prebuilt or just build from scratch.

Drones are just an example, there are plenty of other areas where people might get sucked into DIY electroncisbuilding. E-skateboard/bike/scooter modification and fixing, keyboard hobbyists, cosplay, 3d printing, home automation etc...

Not accidental, but government restrictions are the main reason people built their own drones here. Government banned import of drones here back then. Only way to fly and have fun was build your own. build them part by part.

I have built them for dozens of non technical friends too. And then they themselves got into fixing them once they broke. Solder the wires. Get parts 3d printed etc..

Embedded systems for sure.

Eg. Home Automation with custom LED strips + an ESP32 (via. tasmota, esphome etc...), Wireless sensors using the same, FPV Drones and RC toys/cars in general, 3D printers, Custom keyboards are the usual gateway hobbies in my experience. I haven't seen anyone who is into one of these and hasn't explored the others.

> Everything from operating systems ...

The subtle reference to systemd has not escaped our notice; and it is truly a shame.

We (in the West, at least) live in an age of vendor lock-in. In the East, it's state lock-in but vendor freedom.

There are plenty of places where both are locked in

I suppose, but they are free to pirate Disney movies or whatever. Maybe "freedom" wasn't the right word for lack of IP protection.

My dad has set up a repair cafe near where he lives, and they're popping up in loads of places now. While some electronics are hard / impossible to repair, sure, there's still a lot that can be done with the rest. Household appliances, for example.

The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run, but to make a living out of anything you need to charge an X amount per hour, and if the repair is more expensive than a replacement it's simply not worth it.

All the e-waste going to e.g. India like in the article is stuff where repairing it where it comes from is not worth it.

> The main issue of course is cost;

This is exactly it, and it's a similar issue to what people talk about with clothing (Shein etc). Although clothing isn't automated, that really is just cheap labour.

We have all these electronic artefacts in the first place because of highly integrated processes (starting with the "integrated circuit" itself!), done on mostly-automated production lines. But the automated processes rely on rigid standardization: all the inputs must also be new and precisely in-spec. You can't easily "undo-redo" part of the manufacturing process to fix something.

As a society gets richer through automation, things which still require humans get relatively more expensive. This is known as "Baumol cost disease", the phenomenon that things like education and healthcare are much more expensive than consumer goods because the latter can be automated and outsourced while the former can't.

People will pick cheap-unrepairable over expensive-repairable almost all the time. The awkward corner is expensive-unrepairable, which is becoming an issue (see John Deere vs right to repair).

> The main issue of course is cost; these places are volunteer run

There is cost, and there's also the companies/devices themselves. We are losing modularity. With almost no benefit to the user.

I mean companies have the audacity to solder an SSD to the motherboards of laptops. And make the batteries - one of the biggest points of failure - non user replaceable. We had all that. It was cheap. It was user friendly. When one failed, you were able to replace it yourself.

Once there is enough momentum on letting users fix these failing parts themselves, the ecosystems would automatically fix themselves imo. That's one of the things that companies like Framework, Valve etc.. seem to do really well with their hardware endeavors.

Framework and Valve are brands for their end products but the meat of the argument really should be what occurs in the background, eg: formal contractual and agreement say, the integration of a Sony co-designed and manufactured camera component and its integration into an Apple iPhone for example, as well as all the intermediaries involved up and down the chain.

reminded me of my own childhood.