Certainly there are black-box-ophiles on here, but there is much more awareness of the problems of black boxes on HN than most places. After all, the post you're replying to went out of its way to bring up the problem of black boxes. If this were Reddit or Twitter/X, would there even be a person around to bring up this issue?
Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have declined from where it was a couple decades ago. I've been surprised by that and I have a hard time understanding why it happened. I mean, if you show a carpenter two hammers, the only difference being that one of them can only drive nails from a specific vendor while the other works on any nail, he or she would instantly recognize how significant that difference is in terms of overall usefulness. How is it that computer users intuitively understood this in the past, but somehow the level of awareness and understanding seems to have declined from where it was? I don't get it.
> Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have declined from where it was a couple decades ago.
Did it decline, or did the demographics change? Us old-timers are probably still as interested in computing freedom as we were back then, but there are a lot of new people entering the computing world, whose first (and perhaps only) experience with computing was with more closed systems like modern smartphones (and even desktops nowadays are more closed than they were back then).
Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have declined from where it was a couple decades ago. I've been surprised by that and I have a hard time understanding why it happened. I mean, if you show a carpenter two hammers, the only difference being that one of them can only drive nails from a specific vendor while the other works on any nail, he or she would instantly recognize how significant that difference is in terms of overall usefulness. How is it that computer users intuitively understood this in the past, but somehow the level of awareness and understanding seems to have declined from where it was? I don't get it.