6 ms·

Developing Computer Self-Reliance

50 points by sT370ma2 6y ago

dividedbyzero 6y ago
I've noticed a sort-of orthogonal trend: To ditch the computer entirely and use mobile devices exclusively. I've seen a combo of an iPhone and a low-end iPad do everything many not-so-technical people ever do on their computers, while being a lot more secure, relatively inexpensive, and very easy to use, or rather, it tends to be very hard to actually break things inadvertently on those systems, and being able to transfer muscle memory from one's phone helps. iPads can still feed video to a TV, you can use a cheap bluetooth keyboard for writing letters (and, recently on iPadOS, even mice), lots of USB devices with an adapter, and they're highly mobile, have great accessibility features (increasingly popular with age), the higher-end iPad displays are actually kinda nice for reading, even. New-ish printers seemingly tend to just work over wifi (at least with iOS – so I'm told; I still have a hard time believing it.) I think that's actually another way of attaining more self-reliance. It's a way to avoid having to learn most of the things mentioned in TFA and still be able to not depend on others so much, without things getting crazy expensive or insecure. Software failure modes tend to be a lot easier to fix, and for hardware – same as with phones, even most knowledgeable people can't fix those themselves, but there are straightforward options to have it done (e.g. take it to an Apple Store), and even as a non-technical person, you can set up a new device without help with very basic skills. Maybe that kind of self-reliance isn't the most helpful kind in a pandemic or SHTF scenario, or the very cheapest way to solve one's computing needs, but it's viable and way easier than what TFA outlines.
- loup-vaillant 6y ago
  "Self reliance" that depends on a walled garden doesn't sound very self reliant to me. On the contrary, it increases your dependency on a for-profit juggernaut, whose interests are aligned with yours only insofar as your interests increase their revenue. Tolerating such helplessness is not for everybody.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    What are you going to do, build your own phone?
    - dijit 6y ago
      There's a reasonable trade-off to be made, because no, I'm not going to make my own phone (or CPU, for that matter) - But I shouldn't have to. If a device conforms to standards, and is not dependent on a vendor to support it to keep it functional, then I have achieved self-reliance of some kind. Consider for a moment a PC from 20 years ago, in fact, I have one: An AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 1G of ram. Now, this is not a "real" computer today, certainly not supported by anyone or anything- except for FOSS software which actually still runs, I can use the latest encryption schemes (and, yeah, they're slow) and interact with the world. I can even play the videos that I have on my harddisk which are no longer provided by any streaming service.
      - dividedbyzero 6y ago
        The trade-off in this case is hundreds or thousands of hours of learning the ins and outs of Linux, hardware, etc., and still having to put in work to keep all of this running and secure. If all you want to do is some occasional light browsing, use that banking app safely (that won't even run on Linux), look at photos and share them with others, write the occasional letter – why go through all of this? Unless this is your job or hobby, it feels weirdly out of touch to expect everyone and their mother to do this. It would feel like a huge disservice to them if that was all that IT could offer them as a solution to their needs. Besides, is it really that desirable to keep hardware that old running for so long, outside of industry or some specific niches? It's doable, with a lot of effort and asceticism, but I'd rather have a recent device with all the convenience and horsepower and battery life and energy efficiency those have.
        dijit 6y ago
        Sure, nobody is taking that from you. Much like stoicism doesn’t mean Christians have to die; I fundamentally believe that the time cost you ascribe to owning your own system is the same. Running an “old” computer is definitely not “learn the internal of Linux” as you seem to imply. The difference is you make changes on your terms. One need look not much further than Windows UI paradigms or the movement to touch optimised operating systems to understand that we need to incrementally learn as time passes through us. Regardless, this does nothing to speak of our movement to subscription services and “cloud”-optimised programs which have a heavy reliance on an internet connection. Computers from 20 years ago are a thing that can work because they were not built to exist in an ecosystem. You say you draw value in the ecosystem, I say that it should be a choice you can make.
- massysett 6y ago
  Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS devices. iOS automatically detects the printer on the network, no installation needed. MacOS is also about as seamless. On the other hand I recently acquired a Windows 10 PC due to work-from-home and it was trouble-ridden. The auto-detect failed and I had a hard time installing drivers when it did fail. I have an easier time printing from my old Thinkpad running an out-of-date Debian. Hard to believe that Windows is still this primitive. It’s disappointing.
  - gridlockd 6y ago
    > Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS devices. Not my experience at all.
    - mattius 6y ago
      Same here. I have a year old Cannon laser printer. While I've never had issues getting it to connect to WiFi, it's useless if multicast isn't enabled on the network. This lowers my speeds significantly. Without it the printer refuses to cooperate, even if I manually enter the IP address into a client. My network equipment is Ubiquiti which serves a mixture of Mac and Windows clients. Disabling multicast with an exception for the printers MAC address doesn't work either.
  - bserge 6y ago
    Never had a problem with HP and Canon on Windows, tbh. Even Wifi just works.
- grawprog 6y ago
  I'm sorry but this reads like an advertisement for Apple products. On an article about computer self reliance your comment summarizes to 'Why bother learning any of that stuff, just get an iPad and an iPhone and let it do everything for you, it can't be fixed or repaired, but hey just take it to an Apple store, and don't worry about that technical mumbo jumbo' It's not a different kind of self-reliance, it's using a locked down, device that doesn't let you ever learn self reliance. Can you call it self reliance if a person never learns to take the training wheels off their bike?
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    Why would training wheels increase reliance on other people? As I understand it, that is what self-reliance is about: Not being dependent on others overmuch to solve one's problems. If that training wheels bike gets them from A to B for just a few rides, and cost/benefit of learning it properly just doesn't work out for them, they'll look silly, but otherwise ... fine if it works for them? That wouldn't fly for a bike courier, but then, most people aren't professionals using self-managed IT either, and employers pay specialists to do this properly. I believe most people only need their private devices for very light usage. I'm not very familiar with Android tablets and the people in my set of anecdata all got iPads, so that skews my perception towards Apple I guess; I didn't intend to sound like an Apple ad. Personally, I'm a strong adherent of "whatever works best" when it comes to computing products, and I'm quite opposed to sticking to one camp or other out of principle. I'm sure all of this is perfectly viable with Samsung devices as well, I believe they actually have a walk-in service point where I live, but I lack the first-hand experience. At any rate, there are those people who will not invest the time and effort to become capable sysadmins, for whom the learning curve will be far too steep and tall, who may be fluent in a language for which little good studying material is available, those who'd stop too early and just be dangerous, and those who invariably end up with a dozen shady toolbars if left to their own devices and can't be taught otherwise – and lots of those who only need their devices for some light usage in their private time, hence couldn't justify spending so much of their spare time on making things work. Computing is basic infrastructure like automotive mobility nowadays; people expect being able to operate a car with very basic technical knowledge, why should computers be different? I believe these people do gain a measure of autonomy and security from buying into one of those ecosystems. Less problems to begin with (devices/OSes are harder to break), issues are easier to fix. If that doesn't suffice, less reliance on unreliable third parties like shady "computer repair" shops or that acquaintance who knows computer stuff, instead there's a place to turn to for help that operates on actual processes and is pretty dependable to produce some solution, even if it might not be the cheapest, fastest, or best one, whether that's a Samsung Service Point or an Apple Store or whatever others offer. Maybe that doesn't strictly qualify as self-reliance, but it would seem to be an improvement regardless. And as the "guy who knows computer stuff" for way too many people, it selfishly feels like a big improvement for me, since I'm no longer needed in that capacity. I'm getting very much out of touch with Windows, anyway, and haven't been able to help at all a few times of late; fixing aging laptops can be fiendishly hard.
- ip26 6y ago
  I'm a strongly DIY sort of person, but I do think we'll inevitably go that direction. Think of cars. Once, repairing your own car was a very valuable skill because they broke all the time. Now, they still break, but it's so rare and so complicated that it's not worth developing that skillset for most. You could look at it from a different angle- a certain degree of reliability is a core feature for most products. We tolerate poor reliability when a new product category completely outmodes another (cars vs horses, computers vs typewriters) but as the new product matures, consumers as a group quickly shift to preferring reliability over bleeding edge performance.
  - type0 6y ago
    > repairing your own car was a very valuable skill because they broke all the time. Now, they still break, but it's so rare and so complicated that it's not worth developing that skillset for most. Not just that, but often skills aren't even enough, you need special tools to do the job. Those don't transfer well between the models and there's electronics in every freaking thing, you can't repair those, the cost's are climbing for each part.
bullen 6y ago
I'm making my final computer:http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235
- hawski 6y ago
  I don't understand what you're trying to describe there. A raspberry-pi as your computer? It's too vague and pictures seem to not correlate with this short text.
  - bullen 6y ago
    Basically, the rasperry 4 has 2 GFlops/watt and that's as good as it will get. So I'm transitioning to raspberry that powers it's own screen for a 15W computer that can run 40 hours with a 50Ah lead-acid battery.

50 points by sT370ma2 6y ago

I've noticed a sort-of orthogonal trend: To ditch the computer entirely and use mobile devices exclusively. I've seen a combo of an iPhone and a low-end iPad do everything many not-so-technical people ever do on their computers, while being a lot more secure, relatively inexpensive, and very easy to use, or rather, it tends to be very hard to actually break things inadvertently on those systems, and being able to transfer muscle memory from one's phone helps. iPads can still feed video to a TV, you can use a cheap bluetooth keyboard for writing letters (and, recently on iPadOS, even mice), lots of USB devices with an adapter, and they're highly mobile, have great accessibility features (increasingly popular with age), the higher-end iPad displays are actually kinda nice for reading, even. New-ish printers seemingly tend to just work over wifi (at least with iOS – so I'm told; I still have a hard time believing it.) I think that's actually another way of attaining more self-reliance. It's a way to avoid having to learn most of the things mentioned in TFA and still be able to not depend on others so much, without things getting crazy expensive or insecure. Software failure modes tend to be a lot easier to fix, and for hardware – same as with phones, even most knowledgeable people can't fix those themselves, but there are straightforward options to have it done (e.g. take it to an Apple Store), and even as a non-technical person, you can set up a new device without help with very basic skills. Maybe that kind of self-reliance isn't the most helpful kind in a pandemic or SHTF scenario, or the very cheapest way to solve one's computing needs, but it's viable and way easier than what TFA outlines.

loup-vaillant 6y ago
"Self reliance" that depends on a walled garden doesn't sound very self reliant to me. On the contrary, it increases your dependency on a for-profit juggernaut, whose interests are aligned with yours only insofar as your interests increase their revenue. Tolerating such helplessness is not for everybody.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  What are you going to do, build your own phone?
  - dijit 6y ago
    There's a reasonable trade-off to be made, because no, I'm not going to make my own phone (or CPU, for that matter) - But I shouldn't have to. If a device conforms to standards, and is not dependent on a vendor to support it to keep it functional, then I have achieved self-reliance of some kind. Consider for a moment a PC from 20 years ago, in fact, I have one: An AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 1G of ram. Now, this is not a "real" computer today, certainly not supported by anyone or anything- except for FOSS software which actually still runs, I can use the latest encryption schemes (and, yeah, they're slow) and interact with the world. I can even play the videos that I have on my harddisk which are no longer provided by any streaming service.
    - dividedbyzero 6y ago
      The trade-off in this case is hundreds or thousands of hours of learning the ins and outs of Linux, hardware, etc., and still having to put in work to keep all of this running and secure. If all you want to do is some occasional light browsing, use that banking app safely (that won't even run on Linux), look at photos and share them with others, write the occasional letter – why go through all of this? Unless this is your job or hobby, it feels weirdly out of touch to expect everyone and their mother to do this. It would feel like a huge disservice to them if that was all that IT could offer them as a solution to their needs. Besides, is it really that desirable to keep hardware that old running for so long, outside of industry or some specific niches? It's doable, with a lot of effort and asceticism, but I'd rather have a recent device with all the convenience and horsepower and battery life and energy efficiency those have.
      - dijit 6y ago
        Sure, nobody is taking that from you. Much like stoicism doesn’t mean Christians have to die; I fundamentally believe that the time cost you ascribe to owning your own system is the same. Running an “old” computer is definitely not “learn the internal of Linux” as you seem to imply. The difference is you make changes on your terms. One need look not much further than Windows UI paradigms or the movement to touch optimised operating systems to understand that we need to incrementally learn as time passes through us. Regardless, this does nothing to speak of our movement to subscription services and “cloud”-optimised programs which have a heavy reliance on an internet connection. Computers from 20 years ago are a thing that can work because they were not built to exist in an ecosystem. You say you draw value in the ecosystem, I say that it should be a choice you can make.
massysett 6y ago
Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS devices. iOS automatically detects the printer on the network, no installation needed. MacOS is also about as seamless. On the other hand I recently acquired a Windows 10 PC due to work-from-home and it was trouble-ridden. The auto-detect failed and I had a hard time installing drivers when it did fail. I have an easier time printing from my old Thinkpad running an out-of-date Debian. Hard to believe that Windows is still this primitive. It’s disappointing.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > Newer printers absolutely Just Work over wifi, at least with iOS and macOS devices. Not my experience at all.
  - mattius 6y ago
    Same here. I have a year old Cannon laser printer. While I've never had issues getting it to connect to WiFi, it's useless if multicast isn't enabled on the network. This lowers my speeds significantly. Without it the printer refuses to cooperate, even if I manually enter the IP address into a client. My network equipment is Ubiquiti which serves a mixture of Mac and Windows clients. Disabling multicast with an exception for the printers MAC address doesn't work either.
- bserge 6y ago
  Never had a problem with HP and Canon on Windows, tbh. Even Wifi just works.
grawprog 6y ago
I'm sorry but this reads like an advertisement for Apple products. On an article about computer self reliance your comment summarizes to 'Why bother learning any of that stuff, just get an iPad and an iPhone and let it do everything for you, it can't be fixed or repaired, but hey just take it to an Apple store, and don't worry about that technical mumbo jumbo' It's not a different kind of self-reliance, it's using a locked down, device that doesn't let you ever learn self reliance. Can you call it self reliance if a person never learns to take the training wheels off their bike?
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  Why would training wheels increase reliance on other people? As I understand it, that is what self-reliance is about: Not being dependent on others overmuch to solve one's problems. If that training wheels bike gets them from A to B for just a few rides, and cost/benefit of learning it properly just doesn't work out for them, they'll look silly, but otherwise ... fine if it works for them? That wouldn't fly for a bike courier, but then, most people aren't professionals using self-managed IT either, and employers pay specialists to do this properly. I believe most people only need their private devices for very light usage. I'm not very familiar with Android tablets and the people in my set of anecdata all got iPads, so that skews my perception towards Apple I guess; I didn't intend to sound like an Apple ad. Personally, I'm a strong adherent of "whatever works best" when it comes to computing products, and I'm quite opposed to sticking to one camp or other out of principle. I'm sure all of this is perfectly viable with Samsung devices as well, I believe they actually have a walk-in service point where I live, but I lack the first-hand experience. At any rate, there are those people who will not invest the time and effort to become capable sysadmins, for whom the learning curve will be far too steep and tall, who may be fluent in a language for which little good studying material is available, those who'd stop too early and just be dangerous, and those who invariably end up with a dozen shady toolbars if left to their own devices and can't be taught otherwise – and lots of those who only need their devices for some light usage in their private time, hence couldn't justify spending so much of their spare time on making things work. Computing is basic infrastructure like automotive mobility nowadays; people expect being able to operate a car with very basic technical knowledge, why should computers be different? I believe these people do gain a measure of autonomy and security from buying into one of those ecosystems. Less problems to begin with (devices/OSes are harder to break), issues are easier to fix. If that doesn't suffice, less reliance on unreliable third parties like shady "computer repair" shops or that acquaintance who knows computer stuff, instead there's a place to turn to for help that operates on actual processes and is pretty dependable to produce some solution, even if it might not be the cheapest, fastest, or best one, whether that's a Samsung Service Point or an Apple Store or whatever others offer. Maybe that doesn't strictly qualify as self-reliance, but it would seem to be an improvement regardless. And as the "guy who knows computer stuff" for way too many people, it selfishly feels like a big improvement for me, since I'm no longer needed in that capacity. I'm getting very much out of touch with Windows, anyway, and haven't been able to help at all a few times of late; fixing aging laptops can be fiendishly hard.
ip26 6y ago
I'm a strongly DIY sort of person, but I do think we'll inevitably go that direction. Think of cars. Once, repairing your own car was a very valuable skill because they broke all the time. Now, they still break, but it's so rare and so complicated that it's not worth developing that skillset for most. You could look at it from a different angle- a certain degree of reliability is a core feature for most products. We tolerate poor reliability when a new product category completely outmodes another (cars vs horses, computers vs typewriters) but as the new product matures, consumers as a group quickly shift to preferring reliability over bleeding edge performance.
- type0 6y ago
  > repairing your own car was a very valuable skill because they broke all the time. Now, they still break, but it's so rare and so complicated that it's not worth developing that skillset for most. Not just that, but often skills aren't even enough, you need special tools to do the job. Those don't transfer well between the models and there's electronics in every freaking thing, you can't repair those, the cost's are climbing for each part.

bullen 6y ago

I'm making my final computer:http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235

hawski 6y ago
I don't understand what you're trying to describe there. A raspberry-pi as your computer? It's too vague and pictures seem to not correlate with this short text.
- bullen 6y ago
  Basically, the rasperry 4 has 2 GFlops/watt and that's as good as it will get. So I'm transitioning to raspberry that powers it's own screen for a 15W computer that can run 40 hours with a 50Ah lead-acid battery.