is there anybody out there taking the idea of making air-gapped computation workable again seriously, in a "practical for actual normal human use" kind of way?
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@Coffee i'm not really thinking of a specific goal so much as i'm inhabiting the general vibe that the network is a hazard (both cognitively/socially/politically/culturally/spiritually and in specific infosec terms) and wondering what might be done to mitigate that for people who don't, like, keep track of CVEs in the course of their day jobs and retain a razor sharp ability to discern genAI outputs, propaganda, and scams.
@brennen I want to make a proof of concept "home computer", but probably not "normal human use", since I intend to deliberately cap both speed and graphics fidelity to something I find reasonable for lo-fi computing pastimes.
No internet. I don't quite know what to use as a physical media format; there isn't really any direct analogue today of what floppies were.
@datarama SD cards feel like the closest thing, in some ways?
(they certainly share the unreliability factor.)
i think i know the answer to this question, and that it is "hahahahaha fuck no", but it's a serious question.
(my personal thinking is that while i'd like a computer to sit quietly and, say, act as a container for photos and writing and music and such, and only update by way of physical media i tell it to trust, i'm going to invest most of my energy in this stack of notebooks and maybe a filing cabinet.)
@brennen wait, did it stop being practical? or are we just too damn social, as a species?
@mewsleah my read at this point is that you can do some practical things with a computer that's not on a network if you know what you're doing and you're careful in your choices, but the entire architecture of nearly everything that's been built in the last ~15 years expects always-on high-bandwidth networking in ways that really militate against it as an option for most people.
@brennen What precisely is your goal? Most of my computing is offline-first, unless I'm specifically using the net, although I do pull software updates from the online. (Technically while air-gapped, 'cause nobody uses cabled networking anymore.)
Sure would be nice though if there were a mobile offline Fediverse client a la Bluewave. (Anyone remember Bluewave?)