The philosophy behind Enliner
Computing should happen
on hardware you own.
The quiet fight over the future of personal computing
There is an enormous amount of money going into data centers right now, in a push to cripple personal computing and co-opt the individual productivity of humans at large. The pitch underneath it is that real computation is too heavy to run on our own machines, so it belongs in the cloud instead, on silicon we rent by the minute and reach across the network.
Each year a little more of what used to run on our own machines gets pulled into the cloud, and we are sold access to it with no option to meaningfully opt out (go try to quit Notion and dump everything into an editable, coherent data store you can actually work with).
The nuance to keep in mind is that this is an agenda, not a necessity, and not a predetermination of the technology. It is a choice that someone somewhere makes.
So we have a choice, and I think we should take it: we can co-opt the tools and use them to build our own future. Enliner is built by one person. Imagine if everyone built their own tool like that, for something they love to do and care about.
Enliner is the argument, built
The AI parts of Enliner will be rough for a while: we need more RAM in our computers, which now sadly goes to cloud customers. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. The bubble will pop and the landscape will shift. What it shifts into is what we need to be thinking about, and what kind of tools we want in our tool belt when it happens. Robust. Resilient. Working both offline and online. Computing for you, on your own hardware. Enliner is a stake in the ground and a proof that something like that can be done.
Enliner is a piece of functional software, and also an artifact and a statement: an example of a future we may choose for ourselves. It is one step toward something else, and should be treated as such. It is not perfect. It is partially built by machines. It probably contains bugs. Yet I think it deserves to exist. If you buy it, please consider that you are buying into the story that is unfolding right now.