I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.
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Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.
The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).
Regular people being able to commit contempt of companies' business models en masse seems to work well to keep them in check, but it's becoming ever harder with so much of everything becoming mobile-centric. And with all smartphones being locked down at the level of someone else's public keys being burned into the SoC at the factory, you can't do shit. They literally have technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity. And we're somehow okay with that.
I'll take consumer protection regulation, at least in the short term.
I wish manufacturers were required to clearly inform consumers which products are sold versus rented, self-hostable versus tied to hosted services, or crippled from running Free software by firmware locks. That would allow a market for freedom-respecting products to actually develop to a reasonable size, and not just to be a fringe thing.