Montana Made Computation a Constitutional Right. Devs Are Split.

A state in the US just enshrined computation as a constitutional right. And the tech world is split on whether it's genius or pure nightmare fuel. Senate Bill 212, or the "Right to Compute Act," was signed into law in April 2025. It establishes that your right to own and use computational resources — that's hardware, software, AI tools, servers — should be considered a fundamental liberty. Just like freedom of speech. Any government prohibition on computation is now required to be "demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored." The same legal test you have to meet to restrict free speech. It's intense. The Hacker News thread on this is currently trending at 243 points, and boy, the comments are salty. The Half-Full Glass Take 🥂 Most state proposals for regulating AI lately are basically trying to limit the kinds of things you're allowed to run on your personal stack. Montana's policy is a 180 on that. Instead of asking "okay, should we allow this particular AI tool?," the default is "y