6 ms·

The slab and the permacomputer

80 points by akkartik 5y ago

one_off_comment 5y ago
Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. I like the idea of not having to worry about hardware when I'm more interested in software. But there's a certain amount of control that's given up when you relinquish ownership of the hardware. I don't like the idea of paying for things in a service model. I'm approaching this from a personal perspective, not a business perspective. I'm completely comfortable with reducing my business's risk and liability by buying into hardware as a service. But I'm not as inclined to trust it for personal computing.
- aviatorspoon 5y ago
  > Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. This is the point that the author makes in the second part of their post. Quote: "The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices."
  - toss1 5y ago
    Yup, it's kind of the analogue of: "Not your keys, not your coin" So, something like: "not your chips, not your code"? This also really reminds me of the absolute squandering of resources by "modern" systems - old x86 DOS systems with 1/16,000 the memory and processing power were literally more responsive for everyday use than the mountians of framework junk we run on today. There is a lot of headroom left to downsize and create very useful machines.
    - infogulch 5y ago
      "not your chips, not your data" & "not your software, not your data"
      - toss1 5y ago
        definite improvement!
  - drdeca 5y ago
    I misread this as “the operators G, A, and M” rather than “their”, and thought that this was going to be about some like, combinators of some kind allowing for expressing something about what computation (on what data) you want to outsource the running of run, in terms of 3 operators. Like, some sort of verifiable computing kind of deal. Because I hadn’t read the quotation carefully (as otherwise I would have caught the part about depreciation notices before reading the article).
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. At some point, Microgoogazon transitions to being manufacturers and/or operators of the hardware, and the (perhaps nominal) ownership devolves to some variation on a public utility like electricity.
aviatorspoon 5y ago
Great article. I see this trend too: the systems powering the modern world are increasingly featureful, complicated, centralised into a few hands, and this will likely continue. I'm a keen developer and user in this world, and recognize the vast users this world provides for. At the same time, I appreciate a back-to-basics approach that emphasizes systems that can be understood and controlled by individuals and small communities: * Hardware that has open specs: Pinephone, Pinebook, Raspberry Pi, ... * Open source OSs: Linux desktop, Linux mobile, Lineage OS. * https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/ and https://www.bootstrappable.org/ https://www.bootstrappable.org/, allowing trust to be distributed. * Monorepo based OSs: NixOS, Guix. * Gemini, rather than the web: web browsers are now beyond reasonable understanding/control for small communities. * Mastodon rather than Twitter. * Projects that are community driven. * XMPP/Matrix over Signal/Discord/FB. I choose to live within this world for my personal world where possible. It's not as featureful, and that's fine.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  "... by individuals and small communities" almost invariably means "by experienced developers who want a playground." Slab vs cloud is a non-issue. The real issue is technocracy vs humanity. Currently we have no human computing of any kind. Non-experts have two choices: being monitored in as many different ways as is practical in order to be carpet-bombed with targeted ads and (increasingly) fake news. Or being forced into endless tinkering with opaque systems that sort-of work some of the time, maybe, and require expert knowledge for installation and configuration. That's it. There is nothing else on the table. It's one or the other - and often both. So when I read a phrase like "Google's largesse" I'm not sure what the point of the article is. There is no largesse. And there's also no real choice for most users. The independent dev community could change this, but it seems permanently attached to the wrong end of the telescope, looking at computing from the comfort of its tool- and toy-making treadmill. "Why should an ordinary user care about this?" isn't asked nearly as often as it should be. And "Don't you understand the tech is fun to play with?" is not the right answer. Many of the biggest innovations in computing happened because someone asked that question. For some reason the entire industry seems to have stopped asking it. Except when there's an obvious possibility an answer can be monetised. And while that's certainly a reason, it's not necessarily the best reason.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Permacomputing continues to be a baffling concept for me for a variety of reasons. The goals of permacomputing seem ill-defined and highly specific to the community developing these ideas. This would be fine, but these goals are created with sweeping manifesto-like moral and ethical verbiage. To bring it back to this article: > You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements Less power than what? Are current low-power SOCs not enough? Do we need even lower power? What exactly _is_ the power budget and where do we see this deployed? Why would they need to be hardy against the elements; books certainly are _not_. > The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head. I mean, whose head? A kernel programmer can probably hold a very different set of things in their head than a network engineer than a web programmer and so on. One person's "easy" is another person's "hard". So how do we define "hold in their head"? > Basically every computer used to be like that, up until the 1980s or so; Were they? Documentation and manuals were expensive and hard to find. There was no place to ask questions and receive answers like forums or StackOverflow. Computing time was scarce. Only in _hindsight_, now that we have web pages describing these older architectures and their machine code available at our fingertips do these architectures seem easily comprehensible. But at the time, with computer time being scarce and manuals being expensive, this mostly wasn't the case. (This is my other problem with permacomputing, the weird Lindy-effect exoneration.) > I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires … I mean, if I were larping as the monk protagonist of a post-apocalyptic movie sure, but otherwise I don't see how this is desirable. I'd take permacomputing more seriously if it actually defined terms like "lower power" (how many mW is "low") and then tried to actually motivate why these things tie into their vision of permacomputing. EDIT: I also _always_ get downvoted without explanation when I raise anti-permacomputing viewpoints which also leaves a bad taste in my mouth when discussing this topic.
- ffhhj 5y ago
  Don't know why you get downvoted, but I agree will all your points. Maybe instead of "low power" they mean a sustainable energy source so it's perma-nent. Also since data storage is constantly moving to be more volatile, complex to decode and distributed in space, we might want to start encoding our knowledge as the ancient civilizations did, in stone, but with some easy to decode language (think Voyager probe). That would be permastorage. Imagine a future civilization unearthing the secrets to reach microplatics pollution, or nuclear annihilation.. er well, not sure about that.
bob229 5y ago
Ethereum is not useful in fact like all crypto nonsense it is useless
varelse 5y ago
Seems to me most people don't actually need a "world computer" but what they do need is access to their computers from anywhere in the world. If you have good bandwidth to those computers that's possible today.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
brundolf 5y ago
Maybe this exists, but what would a non-blockchain "distributed cloud" look like? Bittorrent, but for compute instead of just storage/transfer. You might need some kind of central authority orchestrating it all, almost certainly to manage payments at least. I'm just wondering how the world's consumer computers stand up against megacorp data-centers when you mash them all together. Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow. I'm imagining an individual or org could download a daemon, start it up on a spare machine (or a workstation with spare cycles!) and just get paid over time as people run lambdas/workers on their hardware. Of course you'd need some really intense sandboxing, but that seems like it could be solvable. Or maybe it isn't, and that's the reason this doesn't exist.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- machinerychorus 5y ago
  > Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow. Isn't this essentially what browser+js does? you download someones code and execute it locally. Reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ however, after typing that out I think I see what you really meant: if I'm running something compute intense, why can't I just borrow cpu from a couple neighbors instead of going all the way to the datacenter? Sandboxing would be important, but it would also be pretty hard to build applications that really take advantage of this model. concurrency on one machine is hard enough!
  - brundolf 5y ago
    Containers, and especially lambdas, have made the units of the cloud more and more granular. I don't think you'd have to think about concurrency any more than you already do
nemo1618 5y ago
Surprised to see no mention of Urbit, which sits somewhere between Uxn and Linux. Holding Urbit's OS in your head would certainly be more challenging than Uxn, but it's still doable. When something breaks, you can actually fix it yourself (I have). That's a refreshing feeling.
mikewarot 5y ago
If you could take a computer, and reliably select a subset of resources and give only those to a process, it would scratch a lot of itches in the world. Mainframes have been doing this since 1967 with MFT, and its successors. It's highly unfortunate that this can't seem to be done in systems with millions of times the compute resources, decades later. /s
rbanffy 5y ago
This got me thinking. The same way a lot of people defend access to clean water, healthcare and others as fundamental rights, there will be a point when we’ll need to consider the capacity to run computational workloads a fundamental right as well.
the_other 5y ago
An observation from an Apple fan/addict/drone follows: The minor visual tweaks which arrived in macOS 11 and iOS 14, to me, evoke a similar sense of "slab" computing. I saw it in the merging of UI tooling; in the visual and operational related-ness of widgets across the two operating systems; with the tiny details like the hazy amorphous backgrounds and the flattening of "windows"; with the gentle deprecation of "system" UI (making the menubar recede); most especially with the expansion of cross-device tooling - your current state with many document types can move with you from device to device. The visual similarities are nothing to do with "merging the operating systems". Apple likely won't do that - they tie the OS to the hardware, the form factor, the principle input/output mechanisms. The similarities are about providing consistent experience and interfacing across different operating systems. It's probably also a bit about "branding" Apple's version and approach to "slab" computing. Apple are already embracing this "slab" idea, already have it working across a growing number of applications and device types, in a way that non-nerds can use it with minimal set-up.

80 points by akkartik 5y ago

Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. I like the idea of not having to worry about hardware when I'm more interested in software. But there's a certain amount of control that's given up when you relinquish ownership of the hardware. I don't like the idea of paying for things in a service model. I'm approaching this from a personal perspective, not a business perspective. I'm completely comfortable with reducing my business's risk and liability by buying into hardware as a service. But I'm not as inclined to trust it for personal computing.

aviatorspoon 5y ago
> Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. This is the point that the author makes in the second part of their post. Quote: "The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices."
- toss1 5y ago
  Yup, it's kind of the analogue of: "Not your keys, not your coin" So, something like: "not your chips, not your code"? This also really reminds me of the absolute squandering of resources by "modern" systems - old x86 DOS systems with 1/16,000 the memory and processing power were literally more responsive for everyday use than the mountians of framework junk we run on today. There is a lot of headroom left to downsize and create very useful machines.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    "not your chips, not your data" & "not your software, not your data"
    - toss1 5y ago
      definite improvement!
- drdeca 5y ago
  I misread this as “the operators G, A, and M” rather than “their”, and thought that this was going to be about some like, combinators of some kind allowing for expressing something about what computation (on what data) you want to outsource the running of run, in terms of 3 operators. Like, some sort of verifiable computing kind of deal. Because I hadn’t read the quotation carefully (as otherwise I would have caught the part about depreciation notices before reading the article).
webmaven 5y ago
> Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware. At some point, Microgoogazon transitions to being manufacturers and/or operators of the hardware, and the (perhaps nominal) ownership devolves to some variation on a public utility like electricity.

aviatorspoon 5y ago

Great article. I see this trend too: the systems powering the modern world are increasingly featureful, complicated, centralised into a few hands, and this will likely continue. I'm a keen developer and user in this world, and recognize the vast users this world provides for. At the same time, I appreciate a back-to-basics approach that emphasizes systems that can be understood and controlled by individuals and small communities: * Hardware that has open specs: Pinephone, Pinebook, Raspberry Pi, ... * Open source OSs: Linux desktop, Linux mobile, Lineage OS. * https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/ and https://www.bootstrappable.org/ https://www.bootstrappable.org/, allowing trust to be distributed. * Monorepo based OSs: NixOS, Guix. * Gemini, rather than the web: web browsers are now beyond reasonable understanding/control for small communities. * Mastodon rather than Twitter. * Projects that are community driven. * XMPP/Matrix over Signal/Discord/FB. I choose to live within this world for my personal world where possible. It's not as featureful, and that's fine.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
"... by individuals and small communities" almost invariably means "by experienced developers who want a playground." Slab vs cloud is a non-issue. The real issue is technocracy vs humanity. Currently we have no human computing of any kind. Non-experts have two choices: being monitored in as many different ways as is practical in order to be carpet-bombed with targeted ads and (increasingly) fake news. Or being forced into endless tinkering with opaque systems that sort-of work some of the time, maybe, and require expert knowledge for installation and configuration. That's it. There is nothing else on the table. It's one or the other - and often both. So when I read a phrase like "Google's largesse" I'm not sure what the point of the article is. There is no largesse. And there's also no real choice for most users. The independent dev community could change this, but it seems permanently attached to the wrong end of the telescope, looking at computing from the comfort of its tool- and toy-making treadmill. "Why should an ordinary user care about this?" isn't asked nearly as often as it should be. And "Don't you understand the tech is fun to play with?" is not the right answer. Many of the biggest innovations in computing happened because someone asked that question. For some reason the entire industry seems to have stopped asking it. Except when there's an obvious possibility an answer can be monetised. And while that's certainly a reason, it's not necessarily the best reason.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

Permacomputing continues to be a baffling concept for me for a variety of reasons. The goals of permacomputing seem ill-defined and highly specific to the community developing these ideas. This would be fine, but these goals are created with sweeping manifesto-like moral and ethical verbiage. To bring it back to this article: > You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements Less power than what? Are current low-power SOCs not enough? Do we need even lower power? What exactly _is_ the power budget and where do we see this deployed? Why would they need to be hardy against the elements; books certainly are _not_. > The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head. I mean, whose head? A kernel programmer can probably hold a very different set of things in their head than a network engineer than a web programmer and so on. One person's "easy" is another person's "hard". So how do we define "hold in their head"? > Basically every computer used to be like that, up until the 1980s or so; Were they? Documentation and manuals were expensive and hard to find. There was no place to ask questions and receive answers like forums or StackOverflow. Computing time was scarce. Only in _hindsight_, now that we have web pages describing these older architectures and their machine code available at our fingertips do these architectures seem easily comprehensible. But at the time, with computer time being scarce and manuals being expensive, this mostly wasn't the case. (This is my other problem with permacomputing, the weird Lindy-effect exoneration.) > I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires … I mean, if I were larping as the monk protagonist of a post-apocalyptic movie sure, but otherwise I don't see how this is desirable. I'd take permacomputing more seriously if it actually defined terms like "lower power" (how many mW is "low") and then tried to actually motivate why these things tie into their vision of permacomputing. EDIT: I also _always_ get downvoted without explanation when I raise anti-permacomputing viewpoints which also leaves a bad taste in my mouth when discussing this topic.

ffhhj 5y ago
Don't know why you get downvoted, but I agree will all your points. Maybe instead of "low power" they mean a sustainable energy source so it's perma-nent. Also since data storage is constantly moving to be more volatile, complex to decode and distributed in space, we might want to start encoding our knowledge as the ancient civilizations did, in stone, but with some easy to decode language (think Voyager probe). That would be permastorage. Imagine a future civilization unearthing the secrets to reach microplatics pollution, or nuclear annihilation.. er well, not sure about that.

bob229 5y ago

Ethereum is not useful in fact like all crypto nonsense it is useless

varelse 5y ago

Seems to me most people don't actually need a "world computer" but what they do need is access to their computers from anywhere in the world. If you have good bandwidth to those computers that's possible today.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

brundolf 5y ago

Maybe this exists, but what would a non-blockchain "distributed cloud" look like? Bittorrent, but for compute instead of just storage/transfer. You might need some kind of central authority orchestrating it all, almost certainly to manage payments at least. I'm just wondering how the world's consumer computers stand up against megacorp data-centers when you mash them all together. Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow. I'm imagining an individual or org could download a daemon, start it up on a spare machine (or a workstation with spare cycles!) and just get paid over time as people run lambdas/workers on their hardware. Of course you'd need some really intense sandboxing, but that seems like it could be solvable. Or maybe it isn't, and that's the reason this doesn't exist.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
machinerychorus 5y ago
> Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow. Isn't this essentially what browser+js does? you download someones code and execute it locally. Reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/ however, after typing that out I think I see what you really meant: if I'm running something compute intense, why can't I just borrow cpu from a couple neighbors instead of going all the way to the datacenter? Sandboxing would be important, but it would also be pretty hard to build applications that really take advantage of this model. concurrency on one machine is hard enough!
- brundolf 5y ago
  Containers, and especially lambdas, have made the units of the cloud more and more granular. I don't think you'd have to think about concurrency any more than you already do

nemo1618 5y ago

Surprised to see no mention of Urbit, which sits somewhere between Uxn and Linux. Holding Urbit's OS in your head would certainly be more challenging than Uxn, but it's still doable. When something breaks, you can actually fix it yourself (I have). That's a refreshing feeling.

mikewarot 5y ago

If you could take a computer, and reliably select a subset of resources and give only those to a process, it would scratch a lot of itches in the world. Mainframes have been doing this since 1967 with MFT, and its successors. It's highly unfortunate that this can't seem to be done in systems with millions of times the compute resources, decades later. /s

rbanffy 5y ago

This got me thinking. The same way a lot of people defend access to clean water, healthcare and others as fundamental rights, there will be a point when we’ll need to consider the capacity to run computational workloads a fundamental right as well.

the_other 5y ago

An observation from an Apple fan/addict/drone follows: The minor visual tweaks which arrived in macOS 11 and iOS 14, to me, evoke a similar sense of "slab" computing. I saw it in the merging of UI tooling; in the visual and operational related-ness of widgets across the two operating systems; with the tiny details like the hazy amorphous backgrounds and the flattening of "windows"; with the gentle deprecation of "system" UI (making the menubar recede); most especially with the expansion of cross-device tooling - your current state with many document types can move with you from device to device. The visual similarities are nothing to do with "merging the operating systems". Apple likely won't do that - they tie the OS to the hardware, the form factor, the principle input/output mechanisms. The similarities are about providing consistent experience and interfacing across different operating systems. It's probably also a bit about "branding" Apple's version and approach to "slab" computing. Apple are already embracing this "slab" idea, already have it working across a growing number of applications and device types, in a way that non-nerds can use it with minimal set-up.