Hardware and low-level tinkering is having a moment

RepRapMicron, an open effort to make micro-scale fabrication from off-the-shelf parts, got the joke 'in 18 months we can start making our own RAM', and one commenter pushed on whether the cheap USB microscopes are good enough. A 6502-based laptop (65C02 at 10MHz) and a PalmOS Lemmings port drew nostalgia for small hardware. Free Pascal added dynamic packages, and The DNS Museum had people trading stories about hosting blogs and DeCSS in TXT records. On the serious side, a thread asks how quickly the US DoD can rebuild its munitions base, with commenters asking why we can't build a cheaper Tomahawk the way SpaceX cut launch costs, and a robot-training post asks whether the bottleneck is sensor data.

The through-line: people care about owning the physical and low-level layers, either for fun or for supply security. Cheap, open fabrication ideas get a warm reception, and the DoD thread shows the same instinct at national scale.

Counterpoint: much of this is hobby energy, and the thread admits costs and capability gaps are large.