The slab and the permacomputer

I really disagree. I think engineers scratching their own itch leading down to trickle-down tooling is what a lot of independent devs _like to believe_, but that it's motivated mostly by self-importance. I think the utter failure of the FOSS desktop is proof that devs are motivated to work on things they find fun and that these things do _not_ necessarily translate to things that general users want to use.

> Even in the startup world, a common advice is to scratch your own itch - it often leads to something that's widely useful.

I think that's bad advice. That's the _kind_ of advice that leads to things like the hundreds of now-dead clothes washing startups or valet parking startups. And while endless VC rounds blunt this, at least startups have some form of market pressure to have people use their software.

> In defense of the "independent dev community": perhaps we care a little bit too much about ordinary users?

Not really. Software devs are the last set of STEM-engineers that still insist on understanding _everything_ and holding entire systems in their heads. Civil Engineers don't start by considering the subatomic forces that hold their materials together; automotive engineers don't understand every aspect of the software and combustion reaction that goes into their designs. Most engineers accept abstraction as a cost for building useful things.

> The way I see it, most modern software is dumbed down, lowest-common-denominator toys, whose sole purpose is to sell well and/or sell their users out.

"Sell well" is just a euphemism for "software that others use". Money is just the easiest metric to calculate for software being bought and sold, but metrics like "downloads per month" are just as impactful.

Just like you didn't buy a new car and then spend days learning about how it works, most users of software don't want to either. That's not to say that there isn't a robust scene of modifying cars or building hobby cars, but that most people who drive cars for utility purposes don't care to pierce the abstraction veil of an automatic transmission, a brake pedal, and power steering. Most software users just want software that gets out of their way or enables to connect with others in novel ways. They don't care about how much energy their software uses (as long as it's affordable) or how "simple" it is or whether it uses Unix sockets or DBus or something.

I'm imagining an individual or org could download a daemon, start it up on a spare machine (or a workstation with spare cycles!) and just get paid over time as people run lambdas/workers on their hardware. Of course you'd need some really intense sandboxing, but that seems like it could be solvable. Or maybe it isn't, and that's the reason this doesn't exist.

Now _that_ would be very cool! I can imagine a computing device driven by solar or wind. But when it comes to solar or wind, the important part isn't energy usage as much as it is dealing with inconsistent energy output. Here we'd want to design computers for situations with varying amounts of available power. But that's much more nuanced than "low power".

> Also since data storage is constantly moving to be more volatile, complex to decode and distributed in space, we might want to start encoding our knowledge as the ancient civilizations did, in stone, but with some easy to decode language (think Voyager probe). That would be permastorage.

That too would be very cool. Not sure if you've read over VPRI's paper on digital Cuneiform Tablets [1] but it's a great read in that vein.

[1]: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf