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nl 3 hours ago [-]
I read the article and sadly I think the author missed a key thing that is going on.
Yes, there are few people who created cyberdecks as a counter-culture, anti-company tool (which is a lot of what the author argues).
But some of the newer ones they highlight are nothing more than engagement farming reels. They are the very definition of the opposite of what the author writes here:
> We want to escape the algorithmic plantations that tech companies have herded us into.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
sandcat_ 2 hours ago [-]
Are you sure this isn’t just because it’s the “wrong” people who are building them? Instead of the typical (older) FOSS/geek/whatever crowd?
It feels overly negative to me. People, mostly younger people, are building them, tinkering with them and are excited to post about them. Is it any surprise they’re doing so on TikTok or wherever? Yes, it’s a little ironic considering the anti-big-tech vibes mentioned in the article, but is it any different from when our lot were posting to Google+ etc?
I don’t know, this feels like a good thing to me, and something we should encourage. The more people playing and experimenting with tech rather than passively consuming the better.
If I was a teenager again today I like to think I’d be hacking one of these together.
nl 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm perhaps you are right.
I think I'd over indexed on the unfinished look of some of them, but relooking at them as prototypes instead of the level of the original set makes them seem more reasonable.
edgarvaldes 2 hours ago [-]
Agree. Any hobby can become superficial content for Instagram, especially if your only or main source of information is online channels. But real communities exist, and you need to be in the real world to experience them firsthand.
nl 2 hours ago [-]
Not arguing that real communities don't exist!
I'm arguing that the author's main point is based on the Instagram posts, and this is invalid.
cookiengineer 34 minutes ago [-]
My opinion is somewhat that the last "real" cyberdeck was the Hackberry Pi, which is essentially the Blackberry I always wanted and that they never produced. Due to it being fully open, there's an insane amount of 3d printing community overlap, where people share their upgrades, designs, modifications and customizations.
Raspberry Pi as a platform has revolutionized access to computers in my opinion, though since the RAM crisis started not so much anymore due to the insane price differences. But the Hackberry is the computing device where I think it has lots of potential for being my actual "Linux on the go" that I wanted but never got ... for the last 15(?) years waiting for it.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
There is. "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
Freeing yourself from the social media is definitely doable. Depending on how firmly engaged you are at the moment, it can vary in difficulty between fait accompli and moderately challenging. It's obviously possible for anyone to do themselves.
Liberating the masses? Morpheus said it best:
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
nl 2 hours ago [-]
> "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
I don't think this is a point the author spoke about at all.
To crudely summarize what I think their claim is: Cyberdecks are an anti-big tech creation. They are spreading outside traditional hackers and the proof is these reels.
My claim is that cyberdecks are not spreading, and instead those reels is just evidence that (a) people will mine all subcultures for topics that they can create views from and (b) the author themselves is enabling this behavior.
nl 5 hours ago [-]
I recently got a (good!) 3D printer, and that combined with Claude has got me building lots of custom hardware devices using ESP32s.
I don't really see the value in a full-computer experience (which seems to be what most cyberdecks try to do - badly) but I can see utility in "sidecar"-style hardware, which is more akin to a phone app but with a better experience because of custom hardware.
stackghost 5 hours ago [-]
I'd be very interested in reading about the kinds of hardware projects you're doing with esp32s and your printer!
I'm working on a Tamgotchi-style mini-game device using ESP-NOW to connect with nearby devices.
Lots of other random projects at various stages of development.
cobertos 4 hours ago [-]
Any chance you have or could post pics of those custom HA controllers? Seeing custom interactables and how they integrate with ppl's environments are always suuuuper interesting
Something I've been doing is making an automated hydroponic tent. Temp, humidity, EC sensors and a few servos to control nutrients all feed into an esp32 + servo controller and broadcast data through a local webapp. Just need to add a camera for timelapses and remote viewing.
ideasphere 6 hours ago [-]
Cyberdecks are nice for photos and build blog posts, but does anyone actually regularly use them?
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
Been working on a handheld cyberdeck with a good thumb keyboard. I'm masochistic enough to write entire projects on my smartphone with vim running inside termux, so I think anything that improves on this will certainly be used.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
yummypaint 5 hours ago [-]
For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.
ThrowawayR2 4 hours ago [-]
> "For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment."
Any real world examples? I don't think that's plausible from a RFI, power, heat, or just plain fragility perspective even with the cheapo hobbyist instruments suitable for kitbashing and only energizing a couple of instruments a time.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
I'm imagining a computer set up for DJing with big-ass speakers on the outside top lid, and a bunch of analog controls on either side of the keyboard, and a heavy battery.
sublinear 3 hours ago [-]
That's not only possible, but was done to death in the early 2000s during the heyday of car audio components, "home theater" PCs, iPods, and finally good enough laptops.
If you built one of those you were automatically the DJ after school, at the skate park, etc. You better believe those SLA batteries were heavy.
muyuu 3 hours ago [-]
Idk if it merits being called a cyberdeck, but i use my rickety suitcase tablet+keyboard+mouse (+ powerbank) setup which I VNC from to my house computers mainly. One of the reasons is local LLMs being often impractical to run directly in my laptop, especially as I also do other things. Before that I didn't use it as much. Sometimes I just put the laptop and the mouse in the suitcase, mainly because I find the trackpad virtually unusable for VNC, particularly for copy-paste.
overvale 4 hours ago [-]
They're interactive art projects!
tartoran 5 hours ago [-]
I got a ClockworkPi uConsole and am not really using it much, and that’s because it’s become very hard for me to read on the high dpi small screen for too long.
Retr0id 5 hours ago [-]
The ideal "cyberdeck" form factor is just a regular laptop. So to the extent that a macbook pro counts as a cyberdeck, yes.
skydhash 4 hours ago [-]
The two non computer device I use today are my digital audio player (DAP) and my ereader. If I have the time and money, that would be the kind of specialized tasks that I could design a cyberdeck towards. The laptop form factor is quite nice for computing although I would like more direct ports than USB which is complex for experimentation.
glaslong 5 hours ago [-]
More of a fun Maker project for sure
functionmouse 6 hours ago [-]
no, they're plastic crap for kickstarter photos. not designed for human hands.
They once existed (see Sony Vaio P 2nd gen; coolest thing in the universe) but modern OEMs no longer have such taste.
colechristensen 5 hours ago [-]
I always wanted one of the tiny form factor laptops but during that period I had a specific need for a real non-usb hardware serial port and instead bought a laptop that actually had one which was very strange (2009 maybe?)
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
At CCCamp 2023 was someone showing off how they converted a laptop with a broken screen into a cyberdeck by removing the screen and permanently connecting the bottom half to VR glasses.
There was also a musical Tesla coil. And some group called Anderstorp, who converted a massive obsolete router into a beer tap.
palmotea 1 hours ago [-]
> Cyberdecks are changing for the better
> I say that cyberdecks are having another wave of resurgence because the interest in cyberdecks waxes and wanes, like everything in life, there is a cycle to the ideas coming into focus and out of focus, washing into the shore and washing back out to the sea of etheral thought.
> In my own view, cyberdecks have remained popular because of hacker culture. And all of the cultural norms wrapped up in hacker subcultures carries along with it. Specifically, the design of cyberdecks over the years has maintained a steady state of projects that maintain a military or scientific bend to them. They are afterall, influenced by science fiction about dystopian future societies that focus on war, dystopian corporate megacities, or interstellar travel.
AI or just terrible writing?
NDlurker 3 hours ago [-]
I'll just wait until I can jack in with a jailbroken Neuralink.
noosphr 2 hours ago [-]
If you already have the electrodes installed in your brain you can use stimulation circuitry from the courtocal labs cl1 to get a bidirectional bci.
Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.
Yes, there are few people who created cyberdecks as a counter-culture, anti-company tool (which is a lot of what the author argues).
But some of the newer ones they highlight are nothing more than engagement farming reels. They are the very definition of the opposite of what the author writes here:
> We want to escape the algorithmic plantations that tech companies have herded us into.
I don't know of they fail to see this because they are blinded by their hope or there is a more complex viewpoint I'm missing.
It feels overly negative to me. People, mostly younger people, are building them, tinkering with them and are excited to post about them. Is it any surprise they’re doing so on TikTok or wherever? Yes, it’s a little ironic considering the anti-big-tech vibes mentioned in the article, but is it any different from when our lot were posting to Google+ etc?
I don’t know, this feels like a good thing to me, and something we should encourage. The more people playing and experimenting with tech rather than passively consuming the better.
If I was a teenager again today I like to think I’d be hacking one of these together.
I think I'd over indexed on the unfinished look of some of them, but relooking at them as prototypes instead of the level of the original set makes them seem more reasonable.
I'm arguing that the author's main point is based on the Instagram posts, and this is invalid.
Raspberry Pi as a platform has revolutionized access to computers in my opinion, though since the RAM crisis started not so much anymore due to the insane price differences. But the Hackberry is the computing device where I think it has lots of potential for being my actual "Linux on the go" that I wanted but never got ... for the last 15(?) years waiting for it.
[1] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
There is. "We want to escape" is a very different viewpoint from "we want to liberate the masses."
Freeing yourself from the social media is definitely doable. Depending on how firmly engaged you are at the moment, it can vary in difficulty between fait accompli and moderately challenging. It's obviously possible for anyone to do themselves.
Liberating the masses? Morpheus said it best:
"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
I don't think this is a point the author spoke about at all.
To crudely summarize what I think their claim is: Cyberdecks are an anti-big tech creation. They are spreading outside traditional hackers and the proof is these reels.
My claim is that cyberdecks are not spreading, and instead those reels is just evidence that (a) people will mine all subcultures for topics that they can create views from and (b) the author themselves is enabling this behavior.
I don't really see the value in a full-computer experience (which seems to be what most cyberdecks try to do - badly) but I can see utility in "sidecar"-style hardware, which is more akin to a phone app but with a better experience because of custom hardware.
I have a bunch of Home Assistant controls using a variety of custom controls and cases.
I have a custom version of Seeed's ESPClaw (https://github.com/Seeed-Projects/espclaw - there are a lot of other ESP Claws too) with a case.
I'm working on a Tamgotchi-style mini-game device using ESP-NOW to connect with nearby devices.
Lots of other random projects at various stages of development.
One-shotted LVGL UI (which I think it a bit ugly).
A Bluetooth gateway has a flat battery so 2 temperature sensors aren't getting relayed.
This is a Guition ESP32-S3-4848S040 board with this case https://makerworld.com/en/models/2859961-guition-4-esp32-s3-...
About $25 in total I think.
Measured my thumb's swiping arc and designed a split keyboard specifically for my hands. Managed to get every symbol in there with no layers. Now I just need to save up some money and order protypes so I can get a feel for the switches. Can't move forward until I've perfected the keyboard.
Any real world examples? I don't think that's plausible from a RFI, power, heat, or just plain fragility perspective even with the cheapo hobbyist instruments suitable for kitbashing and only energizing a couple of instruments a time.
If you built one of those you were automatically the DJ after school, at the skate park, etc. You better believe those SLA batteries were heavy.
They once existed (see Sony Vaio P 2nd gen; coolest thing in the universe) but modern OEMs no longer have such taste.
There was also a musical Tesla coil. And some group called Anderstorp, who converted a massive obsolete router into a beer tap.
> I say that cyberdecks are having another wave of resurgence because the interest in cyberdecks waxes and wanes, like everything in life, there is a cycle to the ideas coming into focus and out of focus, washing into the shore and washing back out to the sea of etheral thought.
> In my own view, cyberdecks have remained popular because of hacker culture. And all of the cultural norms wrapped up in hacker subcultures carries along with it. Specifically, the design of cyberdecks over the years has maintained a steady state of projects that maintain a military or scientific bend to them. They are afterall, influenced by science fiction about dystopian future societies that focus on war, dystopian corporate megacities, or interstellar travel.
AI or just terrible writing?
https://corticallabs.com/cl1
Unfortunately getting that as elective surgery is impossible in the developed world and the quality of Brazilian back alley brain surgery leaves a lot to be desired.