>We can't have some nefarious chip put into the supply chain from a hostile country.

On the other hand, China can think the same. Why rely on Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia? Or why rely on any US based tech, including software and services?

>We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone.

So the phone that costs them $550 is sold for about $800, while the phone that costs them $650 is sold for $2000. I wonder why is such a big difference in the margins.

>Remember when the internet was all goofy shit like this instead of algorithmically optimized social media angst?

I first accessed the internet in 1998 through school. I still like it more how it was in those days. Most people didn't care about the Internet so the people lurking the Internet had a particular interest in it or were technically inclined.

Once some guys discovered they can make tons of money through the Internet, those good times are over.

It's like you travel to a beautiful place which is not popular. Once it starts becoming a major tourist attraction, it will be ruined for good in 20 years.

>It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size

Things in the past look simple only if we look at them through today's lens.

The apparent complexity was the same.

Today I work with microservices, on top of Kubernetes on top of cloud services and I have to know a gazillion things. But I don't have the feeling that I had an easier time when I was a kid playing with C/C++ under DOS, learning assembly, writing terminate and stay resident programs, trying to write simple device drivers or trying to program the graphics hardware using whatever limited info I had access to. When I started doing desktop application using Win32 and Qt, it didn't seemed more simple than now. Learning how to use Linux syscalls, how to program for X11 in 2000 didn't seem simpler.

Of course, software was much more simpler but now we have better tools, a lot of more easy accessible information, we have developed practices, standards and methodologies to help. And since we have huge resources, we don't have to extract every last drop of performance from the hardware.

So, I don't think the life of average programmer in 70s,80s,90s,2000 was easier than now.

It only seems easy if we have to resolve problems from 40 years ago using the knowledge, tools and the hardware we have now.

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