9 ms·

Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

249 points by logtempo 3y ago

k99x55 3y ago
The most underrated technology is the bicycle. It the least discriminatory mode of transport: it caters to all ages, almost-all abilities (1). It give you free exercise, its good for the environment, for the community, for the local economy (small commercial shops benefit from cycle infra, ask notjustbikes and search it) The reason we dont use the bicycle more often is because cars. Cars monopolized our streets taking most of the space making conditions too hostile for many to cycle. We then built cities (actually bulldozed cities) for the car and now distances are just too big (specially in the US). Build cities for people not machines. (1) I am including trikes and wheelchairs, and anything on wheels powered by humans.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And weather, some of us aren't into sweety arrival at the office, or completely soaked in water/snow. Yeah I know about clothes, snow spikes and such, no thanks.
  - ace_of_spades 3y ago
    There are also bikes with wind shields and roofs. Also battery powered acceleration support. Probably also heating if you are so inclined. Just saying bikes can be pretty comfortable if that’s what you need.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      At that point I will just get a car.
      - BizarroLand 3y ago
        Car is the path of least resistance, so it will always win out until something better comes along. Even if I lived in a 15 minute city, I would still want a car for when I want to go somewhere outside of the city.
  - drekk 3y ago
    ... people might sweat or get dirty if they had to bike their office commute, so the only logical option is to accelerate a climate controlled 1-2 ton metal room for each worker or we could reimagine commutes? they only exist because we redesigned our environments around cars.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Sure, when villages, towns and city outskirts get their businesses and proper jobs back, instead of being only available in the city centre.
    - k99x55 3y ago
      And with ebikes, you can easily do 20km (with hills) and not sweat too much. And ... you can always take a quick shower at the workplace no? Cycling is not a tour-de-france style of cycling, most ppl can easily cycle 20kmh without much effort... And why focus only on commute? Commutes benefit more from public transport. cycling is optimal for short distances, errand-type of trips: nearby shop, school, pharmacy etc
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Lucky are those with showers at the workplace.
logtempo 3y ago
Inspired by recent post about how bloated is the www today.
- schiffern 3y ago
  For historians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057
aaron695 3y ago
> Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings. Of course past tech, or more accurately past ideas, combined with todays technology can come back and be popular. Using high tech computers for material design, an internet system joining 8 billion people (3 billion by one degree), and a higher regard for life[1] we have managed to get 100 year old tech, solar panels and batteries working for remote water pumping for instance. (Not a great example since windmills are older) Real Low-tech is harder but fun. Why kick a ball around a field, that's stupid, but it's fun. Fruit walls are stupid, but fun and look cool, why be ultra rich if you can't build a few fruit walls and kick a ball around. Just don't confuse eating cake for what the real poor should be doing. [1] Windmill maintenance is too expensive because of OH&S
- atoav 3y ago
  > No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings. Doing/having/using less isn't automatically attractive. If we want people to embrace a more sustainable lifestyle a certain healthy amount of nostalgia and romanticism can help selling it. These (mental) images are not without power and reason — we live in a consumer society where everybody is bombarded with images of desire, images that are usually about buying and owning things or traveling somewhere. I don't think you can win against that kind of indoctrination by not using images at all. And not all of the lowtech stuff there is just flashy romanticism. E.g. the article about balcony solar without battery makes sense. Now what is low tech will always be graded on a curve. Compared to no electronics that is pretty high tech. Your ball is pretty high tech compared to just playing with conifer cones. As a kid that grew up in the alps we usually played with what was availabe wherever we went and that was a lot of fun. But how do you make that attractive to people who grew up in places where they wouldn't even let you walk home alone after school and put a tablet in your paws as soon as you opened your mouth? The answer is romanticisim.
tivert 3y ago
The dithered images make me feel like I'm reading something from 1994, which is not a bad thing.
- pjerem 3y ago
  What’s cool is that they dithered the images to voluntarily to make them as small (in bytes) as possible. So it’s visual nice but it also is coherent with their editorial and with the choice to host on a solar powered server. Everything is explained here : https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... I think that just this set of choices transforms this somehow classic blog into something special. Maybe some sort of technical art. Somehow it’s the living proof that in a low-tech world, we don’t have to ditch the internet, just transform it.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and specifically I'm wondering if we couldn't do even better if we had custom file formats specifically for two-bit grayscale images (or heck, even one-bit black-and-white images). For example, the OP is using PNG, but I'm wondering if there would be a material difference if, say, you had a format that didn't assume that you ultimately wanted 3 or 4 bytes per pixel. But maybe compression makes this moot?
Dansvidania 3y ago
Frugality is a quality on which we have collectively given up in the technology field, sadly.
- ornornor 3y ago
  And this habit is what keeps us on the treadmill of work work work because we can’t afford to stop: we think we need all this crap and the only way to get it (and replace it every 3 years) is to work more.
  - Ylpertnodi 3y ago
    I don't own much, but I do gotta pay a mortgage for where I don't keep it.
    - ornornor 3y ago
      Sure, I was saying you can live on a third of a paycheck or you can live on 150% of a paycheck. One gives you quite a bit more freedom than the other (numbers arbitrary but you hopefully get the idea)
      - chefandy 3y ago
        People say you can live on 1/3 of a paycheck but is that really true? No matter how clever I got with my cuts, I could never trim that much without losing either the payment information or signature line.
        BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
        Depends a lot on the size pf the paycheck. You can live on half a paycheck if you earn at least 6 figures and don’t have student loans. Most people i know who make 6 figures wouldn’t want to live that lifestyle though.
        3y ago
tazu 3y ago
Anyone else driven crazy by the opacity decreasing on hover? I feel like it should be the opposite...
Razengan 3y ago
> Low-tech > "How to build a small solar power system" The definition of "low tech" clearly varies over time :)
navane 3y ago
What a beautiful website on mobile. The font, the colors, the layout.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
txutxu 3y ago
Booting a modern laptop, something I do every day, is the anti-low-tech paradigm. Just my motherboard BIOS is 50348032 bits. And it doesn't provide many options, I think the other way around, it hides many options on purpose. Then there is an i7 processor... a whole beast itself against simplicity. With its Intel Management Engine, it's microcode updates, etc. Secure boot? UEFI? VT extensions? TPM? NFC? graphics initialization? OK, so far, we've code and material to fill the whole life of an engineer, and we didn't reach still the OS bootloader. Ah, the bootloader, who remembers lilo... here we go with grub. Go read it's source code, and return back to explain me everything that is in there... see you in 3 months only for this. Here it goes, the kernel. A thing that normal users don't see or touch. More than 30 Million of lines of code more. I won't talk about complexity here, but this project can really say it's "batteries included". The same you get an old obscure filesystem/protocol nobody uses, than proc/mem/i-o/netowrk schedulers for supercomputers. Blobs, firmware, more graphics stuff, observability, wifi, storage, a whole word in itself and everything comes up in microseconds. There is such initram thingy, which is another "mini" (not mini in lines of code) operative system. Busybox? xD look at that. Now, here it comes... the low-tech king: systemd! our love-hated init system (only init? well you already know). Now, here we can start the operative system (which may not bee too simple), we could be talking for years, of each of the micro-components that help to launch the base OS services until you get to the login page. Depending on the distro... we're skipping a hell of complexity (it's not the same the ps aux of an ubuntu desktop, than the ps aux of a minimal system). Let's skip it, let's skip hundreds of software components and phone home stuff. The auth part, gives for a few years more of reading code, talk about, skipping plugins and optional stuff. Then you can get a window manager or a desktop environment (so a week or some months of code more), running over Xorg (do you think it's simple?) or Wayland (you can devote your life until you own this part). And now... let's launch a "web browser". I will stop here, we won't finish if we go deep into the browser complexity. Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of snow. The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.
- galdosdi 3y ago
  Maybe if you run the Arachne web browser for MS-DOS on an older non-UEFI intel machine, you might be approaching something where one person could still understand the whole sequence
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
Interesting magazine. Not to detract from its content - but are any of those technologies really low tech? Old computers, solar panels, and the various generators all rely on exceptionally advanced science and technology. It would take decades of research to recreate them from scratch. It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.
- jalict 3y ago
  More like adjacent keywords & topics: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html There are loads of activity on perma- and frugal computing on https://merveilles.town/ https://merveilles.town/ #indieweb movement also has a lot of roots in similar ideologies with people going into lowtech -- so I would also check that out, but that is a pretty massive hole to dig into already :-)
- npteljes 3y ago
  I feel the same. It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example. So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.
  - spurgu 3y ago
    > It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example. Solar is not low-tech but I think you need to view it from the point of being able to have a computer and internet at all, in which case you'll need some form of electricity generation. For hunting you don't need a firearm, bow and arrow does the job just fine for most game. > So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general. Yup. Lots of elementary stuff like do you really need to heat your whole house in the winter or could you just use a blanket (or some other form of localized heating) where you spend 95% of your time. Stuff like most people won't give much consideration to because the tech is there, it's easy to use and it's cheap.
SamWhited 3y ago
Looks like it's a sunny day at the moment, but check out the website after it's been overcast for a day or two. The background (which just looks yellow right now) doesn't always look that way and it's really cool when the battery is at partial charge!
louwrentius 3y ago
I’ve built a bike generator (badly), inspired by low-tech magazine. Previously I made my blog solar-powered also inspired by what low-tech magazine built. I love the site.
a_gnostic 3y ago
> This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline https://archive.is/CFrk2 https://archive.is/CFrk2
tooltechgeek 3y ago
I think at some point people get tired of so much turnover of technology that doesn’t correlate with much improvement in quality of life (i.e. the latest phones are probably marginally better than older ones) sometimes it even feels like one is forever forced to upgrade computers, operating systems, etc, with minimal improvements. For me that pointed me towards hobbies that are lower tech such as working with hand tools, or crafts that occasionally use tech (i.e. 3d printing) but the higher tech is not the main point to the projects.
- wholinator2 3y ago
  Honestly at this point I've ceased to see even marginal improvements and now observe almost exclusively regressions. They keep taking away functionality, maybe the CPU is faster but my ability to accurately manage the device i own to my personal specifications is forever being reduced. I've encountered many settings that claim to have been "moved" since upgrading windows that just are no longer there. But the old control panel controls that would've given me enough information to proceed debugging are replaced with soft cornered, sterile, white boxes with single toggles, giving the absolute minimum of information possible, and refusing to provide any means of forcing it to elaborate further! Every app i use consistently gets worse every update, especially social media. I had been saying it for years, but even my non tech friends now are beginning to agree with me which tells me it must be getting really bad. It seems that every piece of software that can be updated synchronously to the entire population of users enjoys a brief period of success as it actually gets more usable, before inevitably being consumed by profit interests and falling deeper and deeper down the engagement and micro transaction rabbit hole.
  - pxmpxm 3y ago
    I must be getting old or something, because that is my sentiment exactly. Every (forced for bullshit CVE reasons, zomg state actors are after my cat photo collection with $1mio 0days) upgrade introduces yet another user-adverse change aimed at either merchandising something I don't care about, selling my data or changing my existing configs to default back to one of the two formerly mentioned avenues. Also it's mildly terrifying this dynamic is now pervading things outside of general computing - there are people on this very forum that cargo cult forced "security upgrade" mentality for things like tvs and appliances, without having the slightest idea about the real revenue motives that drive this. Here's a hint: whirpool doesn't give a f about your wifi washer the day after you bought it; any money/engineering time spent on OTA updates is done strictly to sell you a new washer.
spencerf 3y ago
There is a sister site “no-tech” magazine which is what I think many people on this site think of when they think of low tech. https://www.notechmagazine.com/ https://www.notechmagazine.com/
ris 3y ago
I read this blog for years but more recently got tired of its gimmicky contrarianism. I've lost count of the number of "alternative" energy solutions it has breathlessly presented which, to anyone with a calculator and a basic understanding of physics, can't possibly make sense. e.g. the sister no-tech magazine still has an article up on the GravityLight https://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/01/how-to-design-more-powerful-gravity-powered-lights.html https://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/01/how-to-design-more-po... That's not to say it's not occasionally informative about obscure technologies of the past.

249 points by logtempo 3y ago

The most underrated technology is the bicycle. It the least discriminatory mode of transport: it caters to all ages, almost-all abilities (1). It give you free exercise, its good for the environment, for the community, for the local economy (small commercial shops benefit from cycle infra, ask notjustbikes and search it) The reason we dont use the bicycle more often is because cars. Cars monopolized our streets taking most of the space making conditions too hostile for many to cycle. We then built cities (actually bulldozed cities) for the car and now distances are just too big (specially in the US). Build cities for people not machines. (1) I am including trikes and wheelchairs, and anything on wheels powered by humans.

pjmlp 3y ago
And weather, some of us aren't into sweety arrival at the office, or completely soaked in water/snow. Yeah I know about clothes, snow spikes and such, no thanks.
- ace_of_spades 3y ago
  There are also bikes with wind shields and roofs. Also battery powered acceleration support. Probably also heating if you are so inclined. Just saying bikes can be pretty comfortable if that’s what you need.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    At that point I will just get a car.
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      Car is the path of least resistance, so it will always win out until something better comes along. Even if I lived in a 15 minute city, I would still want a car for when I want to go somewhere outside of the city.
- drekk 3y ago
  ... people might sweat or get dirty if they had to bike their office commute, so the only logical option is to accelerate a climate controlled 1-2 ton metal room for each worker or we could reimagine commutes? they only exist because we redesigned our environments around cars.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Sure, when villages, towns and city outskirts get their businesses and proper jobs back, instead of being only available in the city centre.
  - k99x55 3y ago
    And with ebikes, you can easily do 20km (with hills) and not sweat too much. And ... you can always take a quick shower at the workplace no? Cycling is not a tour-de-france style of cycling, most ppl can easily cycle 20kmh without much effort... And why focus only on commute? Commutes benefit more from public transport. cycling is optimal for short distances, errand-type of trips: nearby shop, school, pharmacy etc
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Lucky are those with showers at the workplace.

logtempo 3y ago

Inspired by recent post about how bloated is the www today.

schiffern 3y ago
For historians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057

aaron695 3y ago

> Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings. Of course past tech, or more accurately past ideas, combined with todays technology can come back and be popular. Using high tech computers for material design, an internet system joining 8 billion people (3 billion by one degree), and a higher regard for life[1] we have managed to get 100 year old tech, solar panels and batteries working for remote water pumping for instance. (Not a great example since windmills are older) Real Low-tech is harder but fun. Why kick a ball around a field, that's stupid, but it's fun. Fruit walls are stupid, but fun and look cool, why be ultra rich if you can't build a few fruit walls and kick a ball around. Just don't confuse eating cake for what the real poor should be doing. [1] Windmill maintenance is too expensive because of OH&S

atoav 3y ago
> No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings. Doing/having/using less isn't automatically attractive. If we want people to embrace a more sustainable lifestyle a certain healthy amount of nostalgia and romanticism can help selling it. These (mental) images are not without power and reason — we live in a consumer society where everybody is bombarded with images of desire, images that are usually about buying and owning things or traveling somewhere. I don't think you can win against that kind of indoctrination by not using images at all. And not all of the lowtech stuff there is just flashy romanticism. E.g. the article about balcony solar without battery makes sense. Now what is low tech will always be graded on a curve. Compared to no electronics that is pretty high tech. Your ball is pretty high tech compared to just playing with conifer cones. As a kid that grew up in the alps we usually played with what was availabe wherever we went and that was a lot of fun. But how do you make that attractive to people who grew up in places where they wouldn't even let you walk home alone after school and put a tablet in your paws as soon as you opened your mouth? The answer is romanticisim.

tivert 3y ago

The dithered images make me feel like I'm reading something from 1994, which is not a bad thing.

pjerem 3y ago
What’s cool is that they dithered the images to voluntarily to make them as small (in bytes) as possible. So it’s visual nice but it also is coherent with their editorial and with the choice to host on a solar powered server. Everything is explained here : https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h... I think that just this set of choices transforms this somehow classic blog into something special. Maybe some sort of technical art. Somehow it’s the living proof that in a low-tech world, we don’t have to ditch the internet, just transform it.
- kibwen 3y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and specifically I'm wondering if we couldn't do even better if we had custom file formats specifically for two-bit grayscale images (or heck, even one-bit black-and-white images). For example, the OP is using PNG, but I'm wondering if there would be a material difference if, say, you had a format that didn't assume that you ultimately wanted 3 or 4 bytes per pixel. But maybe compression makes this moot?

Dansvidania 3y ago

Frugality is a quality on which we have collectively given up in the technology field, sadly.

ornornor 3y ago
And this habit is what keeps us on the treadmill of work work work because we can’t afford to stop: we think we need all this crap and the only way to get it (and replace it every 3 years) is to work more.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  I don't own much, but I do gotta pay a mortgage for where I don't keep it.
  - ornornor 3y ago
    Sure, I was saying you can live on a third of a paycheck or you can live on 150% of a paycheck. One gives you quite a bit more freedom than the other (numbers arbitrary but you hopefully get the idea)
    - chefandy 3y ago
      People say you can live on 1/3 of a paycheck but is that really true? No matter how clever I got with my cuts, I could never trim that much without losing either the payment information or signature line.
      - BehindBlueEyes 3y ago
        Depends a lot on the size pf the paycheck. You can live on half a paycheck if you earn at least 6 figures and don’t have student loans. Most people i know who make 6 figures wouldn’t want to live that lifestyle though.
        3y ago

tazu 3y ago

Anyone else driven crazy by the opacity decreasing on hover? I feel like it should be the opposite...

Razengan 3y ago

> Low-tech > "How to build a small solar power system" The definition of "low tech" clearly varies over time :)

navane 3y ago

What a beautiful website on mobile. The font, the colors, the layout.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

txutxu 3y ago

Booting a modern laptop, something I do every day, is the anti-low-tech paradigm. Just my motherboard BIOS is 50348032 bits. And it doesn't provide many options, I think the other way around, it hides many options on purpose. Then there is an i7 processor... a whole beast itself against simplicity. With its Intel Management Engine, it's microcode updates, etc. Secure boot? UEFI? VT extensions? TPM? NFC? graphics initialization? OK, so far, we've code and material to fill the whole life of an engineer, and we didn't reach still the OS bootloader. Ah, the bootloader, who remembers lilo... here we go with grub. Go read it's source code, and return back to explain me everything that is in there... see you in 3 months only for this. Here it goes, the kernel. A thing that normal users don't see or touch. More than 30 Million of lines of code more. I won't talk about complexity here, but this project can really say it's "batteries included". The same you get an old obscure filesystem/protocol nobody uses, than proc/mem/i-o/netowrk schedulers for supercomputers. Blobs, firmware, more graphics stuff, observability, wifi, storage, a whole word in itself and everything comes up in microseconds. There is such initram thingy, which is another "mini" (not mini in lines of code) operative system. Busybox? xD look at that. Now, here it comes... the low-tech king: systemd! our love-hated init system (only init? well you already know). Now, here we can start the operative system (which may not bee too simple), we could be talking for years, of each of the micro-components that help to launch the base OS services until you get to the login page. Depending on the distro... we're skipping a hell of complexity (it's not the same the ps aux of an ubuntu desktop, than the ps aux of a minimal system). Let's skip it, let's skip hundreds of software components and phone home stuff. The auth part, gives for a few years more of reading code, talk about, skipping plugins and optional stuff. Then you can get a window manager or a desktop environment (so a week or some months of code more), running over Xorg (do you think it's simple?) or Wayland (you can devote your life until you own this part). And now... let's launch a "web browser". I will stop here, we won't finish if we go deep into the browser complexity. Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of snow. The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.

galdosdi 3y ago
Maybe if you run the Arachne web browser for MS-DOS on an older non-UEFI intel machine, you might be approaching something where one person could still understand the whole sequence

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

Interesting magazine. Not to detract from its content - but are any of those technologies really low tech? Old computers, solar panels, and the various generators all rely on exceptionally advanced science and technology. It would take decades of research to recreate them from scratch. It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.

jalict 3y ago
More like adjacent keywords & topics: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/permacomputing.html There are loads of activity on perma- and frugal computing on https://merveilles.town/ https://merveilles.town/ #indieweb movement also has a lot of roots in similar ideologies with people going into lowtech -- so I would also check that out, but that is a pretty massive hole to dig into already :-)
npteljes 3y ago
I feel the same. It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example. So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general.
- spurgu 3y ago
  > It's just another arbitrary, an inconsistent point in the tech tree of real life. Solar panel powered server is low tech, but a firearm is not, for example. Solar is not low-tech but I think you need to view it from the point of being able to have a computer and internet at all, in which case you'll need some form of electricity generation. For hunting you don't need a firearm, bow and arrow does the job just fine for most game. > So I think the point is to question the never-ending technological advance a bit, and especially its application to day-to-day life, which I think is good food for thought in general. Yup. Lots of elementary stuff like do you really need to heat your whole house in the winter or could you just use a blanket (or some other form of localized heating) where you spend 95% of your time. Stuff like most people won't give much consideration to because the tech is there, it's easy to use and it's cheap.

SamWhited 3y ago

Looks like it's a sunny day at the moment, but check out the website after it's been overcast for a day or two. The background (which just looks yellow right now) doesn't always look that way and it's really cool when the battery is at partial charge!

louwrentius 3y ago

I’ve built a bike generator (badly), inspired by low-tech magazine. Previously I made my blog solar-powered also inspired by what low-tech magazine built. I love the site.

a_gnostic 3y ago

> This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline https://archive.is/CFrk2 https://archive.is/CFrk2

tooltechgeek 3y ago

I think at some point people get tired of so much turnover of technology that doesn’t correlate with much improvement in quality of life (i.e. the latest phones are probably marginally better than older ones) sometimes it even feels like one is forever forced to upgrade computers, operating systems, etc, with minimal improvements. For me that pointed me towards hobbies that are lower tech such as working with hand tools, or crafts that occasionally use tech (i.e. 3d printing) but the higher tech is not the main point to the projects.

wholinator2 3y ago
Honestly at this point I've ceased to see even marginal improvements and now observe almost exclusively regressions. They keep taking away functionality, maybe the CPU is faster but my ability to accurately manage the device i own to my personal specifications is forever being reduced. I've encountered many settings that claim to have been "moved" since upgrading windows that just are no longer there. But the old control panel controls that would've given me enough information to proceed debugging are replaced with soft cornered, sterile, white boxes with single toggles, giving the absolute minimum of information possible, and refusing to provide any means of forcing it to elaborate further! Every app i use consistently gets worse every update, especially social media. I had been saying it for years, but even my non tech friends now are beginning to agree with me which tells me it must be getting really bad. It seems that every piece of software that can be updated synchronously to the entire population of users enjoys a brief period of success as it actually gets more usable, before inevitably being consumed by profit interests and falling deeper and deeper down the engagement and micro transaction rabbit hole.
- pxmpxm 3y ago
  I must be getting old or something, because that is my sentiment exactly. Every (forced for bullshit CVE reasons, zomg state actors are after my cat photo collection with $1mio 0days) upgrade introduces yet another user-adverse change aimed at either merchandising something I don't care about, selling my data or changing my existing configs to default back to one of the two formerly mentioned avenues. Also it's mildly terrifying this dynamic is now pervading things outside of general computing - there are people on this very forum that cargo cult forced "security upgrade" mentality for things like tvs and appliances, without having the slightest idea about the real revenue motives that drive this. Here's a hint: whirpool doesn't give a f about your wifi washer the day after you bought it; any money/engineering time spent on OTA updates is done strictly to sell you a new washer.

spencerf 3y ago

There is a sister site “no-tech” magazine which is what I think many people on this site think of when they think of low tech. https://www.notechmagazine.com/ https://www.notechmagazine.com/

ris 3y ago

I read this blog for years but more recently got tired of its gimmicky contrarianism. I've lost count of the number of "alternative" energy solutions it has breathlessly presented which, to anyone with a calculator and a basic understanding of physics, can't possibly make sense. e.g. the sister no-tech magazine still has an article up on the GravityLight https://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/01/how-to-design-more-powerful-gravity-powered-lights.html https://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/01/how-to-design-more-po... That's not to say it's not occasionally informative about obscure technologies of the past.