J’en comprends pas le 10e, mais c’est impressionnant !

There are few phrases in the modern lexicon more accursed than "software-based car," and yet, this is how the failed EV maker Fisker billed its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed, shut down its servers, and degraded all those "software-based cars".

As a child of the home computer boom, I'm used to general purpose machines that do my bidding without interference from neither the manufacturer nor some unknown other wanting to sell me Depends and Bitcoins. That's what I want my computing to still be like.

The Man wants something different, though. The Man wants you to log in, click accept, sell your soul and Buy More Stuff. Hence, working to avoid that must be some level of subversive computing: Sticking it to The Man, one bit at a time.

In this text, I'll try to outline how I do my best to achieve that. Fair warning: it doesn't come without what some would call sacrifice, because you can't have the cake and eat it. This "sacrifice", however, might ultimately turn out to be beneficial.

L‘explication a quand même de quoi surprendre, comme l’explique Neil Madden sur Mastodon : « euh, c’est un peu inquiétant que leur réponse soit « nous avons corrigé le fichier de configuration », et non « nous avons corrigé le bug qui permet aux fichiers de configuration de faire tomber la moitié du monde ».