These kind of stories led me to explore de-googling my digital life. And honestly its been a fun journey and given meaning and purpose to my homelab. 100% recommend. Own your digital life, run local, reclaim the web.
His real beef seems to be with “any lawful use”. He doesn't agree with the law and wants to only sell to customers who agree with his own moral code. I respect his moral choice but suspect this is not how a market economy ought to work. He ought to lobby government to change the law rather than make moral judgements about his customers.
The UNIX philosophy of tools that handle text streams, staying "quiet" unless something goes wrong, doing one thing well, etc. are all still so well suited to the modern age of AI coding agents.
You can go a long way with just Termux. You can upcycle old phones by installing or building code in Termux to turn the phones into a compute grid, AI inference nodes, file servers, compute servers, web servers.
More generally the tools used to write the code show through in the code itself. In the way code is distributed across files, in the length and style of names, in the organization of modules. Using an editor without syntax highlighting like Acme, and also because it's Acme will encourage a different style of organizing a project and the code within a file.
Following Karl Popper's thinking on this topic, I'd say that our problems define us, and when we solve our problems we often discover new and interesting children problems demanding attention. “The best thing that can happen to a human being us to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.” — Karl Popper