That BIOS feature can be disabled… now. But there’s nothing keeping a manufacturer from just not providing that functionality, and requiring only signed firmware updates. Now the machine is more or less locked down.

The fact it can be disabled now is a convenience feature based on historical availability, but that’s absolutely no guarantee it will continue to be there in the future.

You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don’t get to install a custom OS, unless you’re lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don’t get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.

We are absolutely entering this nightmare phase.

Yes, but it’s going to repeat that way FOREVER the same way the average person got slow walked hand in hand with a mobile operating system into corporate social media and app hell, taking the entire internet with them.

Or you become a BIGGER dick so you if you ever get a time machine you can go back to past you and show them how it’s done.

This, and not even ironically.

Something broken on the laptop? It’s so locked down nobody can do a damn thing about it, and even if I could I can’t spend 15 minutes of class time troubleshooting while the others are waiting, so I guess you’re just not participating today, Billy.

You can use them fine. In fact, you’ll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.

Call your representatives

Hire a lobbyist to donate millions of dollars to election campaigns for your representatives

Well considering it’s their PUBLIC BUSINESS PLAN, I don’t think you’re gonna have a hard time proving it.

Only when you’re talking to a cop.

No, and it’s by design.

You’re gonna lease a tablet and use cloud-based storage services and like it.

The dystopia is here.

The problem with that is Intel is subject to the same bullshit economic assessments as AMD and Nvidia… They’ll just as soon retool for ai as well.

That would be nice. But video cards are a VERY niche piece of engineering. The knowledge of HOW to make them is locked in a handful of people, and the ability to make them locked behind a very niche set of equipment that will ALSO be exploding in cost.

One does not simply start a graphics card company.

Came here specifically for this. Not disappointed.

“Old tools” does not mean obsolete or bad. It means tested, hardened, and reliable. And crucially, probably runs in a couple megabytes of memory, which you might need if the cost of RAM suddenly quintuples for no reason.

I intentionally ignore the vast majority of everything on my phone until I can get to a real computer. Phones and tablets feel like unmitigated torture and I loathe it every time I have to use one to do something

It’s depressing how much history is going to be lost. Entire movements have been launched on videos that are now private or removed for copyright violations, and now they are gone forever to future historians. Even looking for information or knowledge now… 80% of your results are YouTube videos. All of that knowledge will disappear forever, and it doesn’t even take a cataclysmic event - YouTube’s search is so actively hostile that even if you know exactly the name of the video you’re looking for, you will NOT find it unless it happens to already be algorithm aligned. YouTube is BY FAR a bigger danger to the throughline of history than ANY social media platform.

The simple solution is to just… stop using video so much. Video is riddled with problems as a long term human record, doesn’t scale, increases perpetually in requirements without actually improving quality of CONTENT, isn’t indexable or searchable, isn’t easily translated into multiple languages, not as easily shared, not as easy to back up… Text is not obsolete. It was our main method of information transmission for tens of thousands of years, and NOTHING will convince me that it should be replaced as the primary method.

Again, it’s a human problem. If humans accepted text and images again for the majority of information transfer, the problem would go away.