from Hacker News

Reaching the Enchanted Forest

by dansitu on 6/21/24, 2:52 PM with 11 comments

  • by card_zero on 6/21/24, 6:06 PM

    The ancient spirits of the enchanted forest, the Greek dryads, the Shinto kami, and Microsoft's Clippy.

  • by davidw on 6/21/24, 7:50 PM

    As an Oregonian, I'm thinking "well, head towards Salem..."

  • by advael on 6/21/24, 6:29 PM

    I like this idea for a lot of reasons, but I think the best reason to like it is that it presents a compelling technological vision of the future that motivates upending and destroying the incumbent model of the world realized by the modern surveillance state. It's way easier to know what you don't want than what you want, but without even the edges of a goal state it's hard to coordinate the monumental effort it takes to do hard stuff. I don't know which way the causality arrow points, but the rise of solarpunk aesthetics seems correlated and interconnected with what some people are calling a revolution in green energy technologies. As with that revolution, incumbent industries and states supporting them serve as a significant obstacle to this vision, as the network overseers will not withdraw from surveilling our lives without a fight any more than the oil barons are giving up the reins of their machines that poison the earth to drive their "growth". I am a belligerent and easily motivated by spite for tyrants, but most are actually not at the end of the day, and revolutions (whether at the workshop, the polls, the markets, or by the sword) require numbers. A positive vision for what the world could be when the evil is defeated is what motivates the mass of will needed for such an endeavor. And also this particular vision is one I'd love to see realized

  • by walterbell on 6/21/24, 7:27 PM

    To fulfill this inspiring vision of local autonomous private sensing, we'll need optical ("Li-Fi") wireless networking, or large-scale RF shielding for perimeter surfaces (wall, window, floor, ceiling), as 2024-onward PCs and other devices ship with human activity recognition radar a.k.a. Wi-Fi 7 Sensing.

    We will also need robust network perimeter firewalls with 10+ years of security updates, preferably based on reproducible, open-source, memory-safe software for all security-critical functions, unlike existing consumer routers that are routinely pwned.