6 ms·

I dream of quieter computing

129 points by Sir_Twist 1mo ago

rao-v 1mo ago
Esp32s with eink displays are pretty much this
mmackh 1mo ago
A lot of folks will tell you that computers with less features are the the answer, but over the past couple of years I’ve come to realise that how we interact (keyboard and mouse) with computers now is only one way to do it. There’s something about building distraction-free computing, that doesn’t have to be less. I’ve been building something over the past five years, that puts an entire smart home into one device - sensors and microcontrollers have come incredibly far to make it feel a little bit like magic. What I’m getting at is - what if the environment provides input to the computer and not us directly? This would be one way of exploring quieter computing.
- andai 1mo ago
  What does that look like? It decides which HN link to render based on the angle of the sun?
  - mmackh 1mo ago
    It makes the world your canvas, but the device itself is intentionally screen-less. When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen? Usually this involves a chain of devices, working together inside a blackbox running on an OS that no one single person can understand. What if all the cruft is abstracted away, and you can actually program and script in highly abstracted APIs what is going to happen. And that logic will last you for years. Or you tell an LLM and it writes the logic (code) for you. Having the logic run local makes the experience easier to reason about - now and in the future. So yes, you can write code that calculates the angle of the sun and fire off a web request or email to send you an interesting HN link. But you can do much more... [Edit] Again, this is only one approach that changes how we process input to reach a desired output.
    - whilenot-dev 1mo ago
      > And that logic will last you for years. A lot of desires that require computation might not be so "logical" in nature, at least not in the automation kind of things. I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities, like reading news/ebooks, watching shows/movies, listening to music, gaming, clothing/furniture shopping, going into all kinds of rabbit holes etc. The HN link from GP was such an example. How could any automation through other physical input help there? Sure, there is vector similarity and recommendation engines, but how could any sensor interpret my aesthetics and my desires to belong/grasp/play/participate? That sounds exactly like the empty sci-fi promises that current AI companies are betting on.
      - mmackh 1mo ago
        "I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities" Couldn't agree more. And phones with a touchscreen have been optimised on this axis (ppi, stereo speakers, fps, oled, latency, etc.) Examples of logic that you want to last for years: devices you set up for your parents to notify you when they get up in the morning. Or that their air quality and temperature is ok. By logic, I mean source code that determines the behaviour of the device.
    - walrus01 1mo ago
      > When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen? Usually this involves a chain of devices, working together inside a blackbox running on an OS that no one single person can understand. A fair bit of this can already be implemented with a workflow that looks like: Sensors -> zigbee or zwave -> home assistant Or Internet based data -> home assistant (weather, external data, the humidity sensor at your local airport might be more accurate than the one on your deck, etc). And then open source extensions/tools built into home assistant to cause things to happen, send external signals, run scripts, call APIs, talk to a local LLM, etc. It's very much not a black box of opaque closed source software, rather the opposite, and it has a very active and technically knowledgeable enthusiast development community behind it. If we posit for a minute that the data acquisition into locally-run system problem is not impossible to solve, then all kinds of things can be built atop that to serve your own unique home preferences. > Having the logic run local At the smallest scale people are doing this on raspberry pi, though I have seen people have much more satisfactory results on something with somewhat more system resources like an Intel N150 CPU based mini PC with 12GB RAM. Going a bit up a bit in budget from there, people are running home assistant and frigate together on the same tiny system that is a KVM hypervisor (again all open source, no black boxes involved), so that Frigate can have a GPU passed through to it for image object detection/video analysis pipelines.
- bpev 1mo ago
  Somewhat related, but I bought a "minimalist phone" recently, and there are edges everywhere (for example, the most recent is not supporting adding a contact from a .vcf file someone texted me). Some features make a phone feel MORE minimalist, by erasing edges. Maybe my understanding of minimalism is different from other people, but my experience makes me feel that maybe there are a significant number of "minimalist" or "distraction-free" brands that are really just using it as a justification to sell incomplete products, rather than products that are minimal with intentionality.
andai 1mo ago
I tried clicking the "#551A8B streaks" link, looking forward to reading a rant about websites overriding link color (and link underlines to boot!) But I was bamboozled! The link wasn't a link. It was just colored text! My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. That said, this is a very cool website.
bibabaloo 1mo ago
There's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.
- walrus01 1mo ago
  > Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate. Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar. I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
  - wolvoleo 1mo ago
    Yes I noticed that chat apps have kinda taken over the role of social media. At least for the usecase of staying in touch with friends. I'm sure why too though, it's because all social media push these algorithmic feeds on us meaning we get bombarded with shit we didn't choose to follow. With chat apps we can once again communicate with just the people we want without all the crap being shoved in between.
userbinator 1mo ago
..and I dream of less activist sites.
- setnone 1mo ago
  yeah all i can see now is this creator wants a bunch of visitors dead, in cursive
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - yawpitch 1mo ago
    Oh wow, someone on a tech site that doesn’t know how OR works!
    - fragmede 1mo ago
      Wait, shit. It's OR, not XOR. Instructions unclear. Am dead.
      - yawpitch 1mo ago
        Instructions perfectly clear: fail to do the first hing, do the second thing. Nothing precludes you doing both, you just don’t need to.
  - adultSwim 1mo ago
    I am more focused on Rem'mie Fells than Lea Thomas.
- yawpitch 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
tietjens 1mo ago
I expected this to be literally about quieter computers.
- __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
  Me too. Like maybe we could convert to DC at the breaker box so I didn't have to be haunted by the squealing capacitors in all of the power supplies that are scattered around my house.
  - bob1029 1mo ago
    I think most of the squealing actually comes from DC-DC conversion.
    - __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
      Huh, I figured there had to be AC in there somewhere because otherwise where is the frequency coming from? Or is there a conversion to AC somewhere in the middle of a DC-DC conversion? I had assumed you could achieve it with just resistors. I am ignorant about the physical nature of electronics.
      - bob1029 1mo ago
        The AC is 50/60Hz. You wouldn't hear that. What happens is that the AC is rectified to DC and then it is chopped up at many kHz (10-100). The idea being that the higher the frequency, the smaller the inductors, capacitors and transformers can be. Even if the switching frequency is ultrasonic, it can still excite audible mechanical effects in windings of transformers and other elements to create the canonical coil whine. This effect depends on certain ranges of duty cycle (system load) creating periodic spikes in power.
        __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
        Hmm, that makes sense. I'm not sure if understanding this thing I hate will make me hate it any less, but thanks for the explanation!
ktallett 1mo ago
Often we are missing something in that we don't need to change what we use quite so regularly. We can learn to enjoy tech of the past and still find it useful today. It would both be better for the planet and satisfy our realisation that constant upgrades and changes aren't always needed or even better. Does a Canon S90 suddenly take bad photos or take photos that can't be printed? No, of course not, and that's a decade old. Can you still write on a Thinkpad X201? Yes of course. If anything, that keyboard is far better.
mrob 1mo ago
>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates The higher the display refresh rate the metaphorically "quieter" the computer. Discrete frames introduce latency, phantom array effect, and (on most displays) sample-and-hold blur. These don't exist in real life, so they weaken the illusion of the computer becoming part of your body, like a pencil or a hand tool. A computer that can be operated with minimum cognitive load needs a display refresh rate of at least 1000 Hz.
- anilakar 1mo ago
  We had CRT displays that could easily do 100 to 120 Hz. Then we regessed to LCD panels that could do 60 Hz and it somehow became the performance target.
  - Avicebron 1mo ago
    I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.
    - krige 1mo ago
      To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
        Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality. Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within. Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more. Just as with CRTs. I don't miss them.
jtrn 1mo ago
What a wholsome and inclusive site. Page title reads “fix your heart or die”. Spread the love indeed.
- adultSwim 1mo ago
  This is my sincere response.
- kuloku 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - setnone 1mo ago
    totally outside of the scope of this tech website but genuine question: assuming you fixed you heart successfully, would you ever be guiding others to die?
  - jtrn 1mo ago
    [flagged]
- userbinator 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- scuppernong 1mo ago
  it's a quote from twin peaks if that matters
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
lproven 1mo ago
From a few months ago and highly relevant: https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  That's a great article too. I hope we'll see it comig back frontpage once in a while. He differentiates between "things that last" (knowledge that transfers) and the rest... Something has to be said about dodging a lot of the last shiny new tech that's going to invariably be tomorrow's long lost and not regretted turd. I make my friends laugh when I say that if there's one tech I know nothing about I don't feel bad because... I think of all the long gone things I never bothered learning. Just think about the graveyard of crap you're better off for never having wasting one cycle learning: tech is full of it. It makes people smile but they know deep down it's true: most of the noise shall disappear. Don't feel bad about not knowing it all: just look ten years in the mirror at all that was shiny and new and that's now totally obsolete. It's literally how I cope with not knowing it all. And I somehow managed to bet, for three decades, on techs that did stay a very long time. For example I adopted Linux in the very early Slackware days: I did dive all in and learned all that I could. And I've been using Linux on the desktop (and on my laptops and on my servers and on my VMs etc.) ever since. Hypervisors and hardware-virt? Bought the first consumer mobo that supported it and was running Xen happily more than two decades ago. Much less sexy but: one day I ran into one my best friend who had left the city and he told me "I found this new language, it's called Java, it's going to be big" and I did dive into Java. Only certification I ever got: Sun Certified Java Programmer. It was was it was (the cert), nothing stellar. But it was obvious Java was here to stay. Then I saw a post on HN in the very early Clojure days: I decided I had to learn Clojure. It's not the most used language but, darn, is it stable (and on top of the JVM, mostly: so the Java thing helped). I'm using Emacs since so long I don't exactly remember when (I did try it when I discovered Linux, back when Emacs took 45 minutes or something like that to compile on my 486 but really adopted it only later on). I basically use the same window manager and same windows layout (and virtual desktops) since 15 years: when I upgrade my Linux distro, I just reuse my configuration. Monitor is 9 years old (38" 3840x1600, I love it because I can do many different layouts, including 3x 1280x1600 side by side "columns). Chair is 13 years old (out of warranty since one year) and still going strong. Keyboard is 10 years old: Happy Hacking Keyboard. It's a fast-paced, ever evolving world and all that helps brings some quietness. P.S: as for present techs, you bet I'm using LLMs: three subscriptions and lately I'm support for my less-tech savvy brother who's running models locally using GPU passthrough on a Proxmox rig I helped him set up. But I like to think I'm using them in a sane way: not drinking the kool-aid.
frgturpwd 1mo ago
weird hill(s) to die on
znpy 1mo ago
> of handmade websites viewed on hackable hardware but what if I don't what to hack my hardware? what if instead for me my hardware is just a tool i use from time to time to open my banking stuff, send/receive email to keep in touch with friends, watch movies and in my spare time i do other stuff? what if instead of hacking my hardware i want to go swimming, or take care of my garden, or cook or play the piano? articles like this make me chuckle nowadays because we in the tech industry assume most people are like us. they aren't. for them computers are just a tool. the less they get nagged by their tools, the better. unironically, that's why apple has so much success. apple's hardware is as far as you can get from hackability. they fix in place a lot of degrees of freedom (both in hardware and in software) and in exchange you get tools that work very well and very reliably. the author of this post should really touch grass more often. (i know i'll be downvoted for writing this, i don't care).
VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago
>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates As it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s all the same. I don't understand what this article is talking about.
never_inline 1mo ago
Five paragraphs of saying almost nothing.

129 points by Sir_Twist 1mo ago

rao-v 1mo ago

Esp32s with eink displays are pretty much this

A lot of folks will tell you that computers with less features are the the answer, but over the past couple of years I’ve come to realise that how we interact (keyboard and mouse) with computers now is only one way to do it. There’s something about building distraction-free computing, that doesn’t have to be less. I’ve been building something over the past five years, that puts an entire smart home into one device - sensors and microcontrollers have come incredibly far to make it feel a little bit like magic. What I’m getting at is - what if the environment provides input to the computer and not us directly? This would be one way of exploring quieter computing.

andai 1mo ago
What does that look like? It decides which HN link to render based on the angle of the sun?
- mmackh 1mo ago
  It makes the world your canvas, but the device itself is intentionally screen-less. When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen? Usually this involves a chain of devices, working together inside a blackbox running on an OS that no one single person can understand. What if all the cruft is abstracted away, and you can actually program and script in highly abstracted APIs what is going to happen. And that logic will last you for years. Or you tell an LLM and it writes the logic (code) for you. Having the logic run local makes the experience easier to reason about - now and in the future. So yes, you can write code that calculates the angle of the sun and fire off a web request or email to send you an interesting HN link. But you can do much more... [Edit] Again, this is only one approach that changes how we process input to reach a desired output.
  - whilenot-dev 1mo ago
    > And that logic will last you for years. A lot of desires that require computation might not be so "logical" in nature, at least not in the automation kind of things. I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities, like reading news/ebooks, watching shows/movies, listening to music, gaming, clothing/furniture shopping, going into all kinds of rabbit holes etc. The HN link from GP was such an example. How could any automation through other physical input help there? Sure, there is vector similarity and recommendation engines, but how could any sensor interpret my aesthetics and my desires to belong/grasp/play/participate? That sounds exactly like the empty sci-fi promises that current AI companies are betting on.
    - mmackh 1mo ago
      "I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities" Couldn't agree more. And phones with a touchscreen have been optimised on this axis (ppi, stereo speakers, fps, oled, latency, etc.) Examples of logic that you want to last for years: devices you set up for your parents to notify you when they get up in the morning. Or that their air quality and temperature is ok. By logic, I mean source code that determines the behaviour of the device.
  - walrus01 1mo ago
    > When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen? Usually this involves a chain of devices, working together inside a blackbox running on an OS that no one single person can understand. A fair bit of this can already be implemented with a workflow that looks like: Sensors -> zigbee or zwave -> home assistant Or Internet based data -> home assistant (weather, external data, the humidity sensor at your local airport might be more accurate than the one on your deck, etc). And then open source extensions/tools built into home assistant to cause things to happen, send external signals, run scripts, call APIs, talk to a local LLM, etc. It's very much not a black box of opaque closed source software, rather the opposite, and it has a very active and technically knowledgeable enthusiast development community behind it. If we posit for a minute that the data acquisition into locally-run system problem is not impossible to solve, then all kinds of things can be built atop that to serve your own unique home preferences. > Having the logic run local At the smallest scale people are doing this on raspberry pi, though I have seen people have much more satisfactory results on something with somewhat more system resources like an Intel N150 CPU based mini PC with 12GB RAM. Going a bit up a bit in budget from there, people are running home assistant and frigate together on the same tiny system that is a KVM hypervisor (again all open source, no black boxes involved), so that Frigate can have a GPU passed through to it for image object detection/video analysis pipelines.
bpev 1mo ago
Somewhat related, but I bought a "minimalist phone" recently, and there are edges everywhere (for example, the most recent is not supporting adding a contact from a .vcf file someone texted me). Some features make a phone feel MORE minimalist, by erasing edges. Maybe my understanding of minimalism is different from other people, but my experience makes me feel that maybe there are a significant number of "minimalist" or "distraction-free" brands that are really just using it as a justification to sell incomplete products, rather than products that are minimal with intentionality.

andai 1mo ago

I tried clicking the "#551A8B streaks" link, looking forward to reading a rant about websites overriding link color (and link underlines to boot!) But I was bamboozled! The link wasn't a link. It was just colored text! My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined. That said, this is a very cool website.

bibabaloo 1mo ago

There's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.

walrus01 1mo ago
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate. Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar. I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
- wolvoleo 1mo ago
  Yes I noticed that chat apps have kinda taken over the role of social media. At least for the usecase of staying in touch with friends. I'm sure why too though, it's because all social media push these algorithmic feeds on us meaning we get bombarded with shit we didn't choose to follow. With chat apps we can once again communicate with just the people we want without all the crap being shoved in between.

userbinator 1mo ago

..and I dream of less activist sites.

setnone 1mo ago
yeah all i can see now is this creator wants a bunch of visitors dead, in cursive
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- yawpitch 1mo ago
  Oh wow, someone on a tech site that doesn’t know how OR works!
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    Wait, shit. It's OR, not XOR. Instructions unclear. Am dead.
    - yawpitch 1mo ago
      Instructions perfectly clear: fail to do the first hing, do the second thing. Nothing precludes you doing both, you just don’t need to.
- adultSwim 1mo ago
  I am more focused on Rem'mie Fells than Lea Thomas.
yawpitch 1mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

tietjens 1mo ago

I expected this to be literally about quieter computers.

__MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
Me too. Like maybe we could convert to DC at the breaker box so I didn't have to be haunted by the squealing capacitors in all of the power supplies that are scattered around my house.
- bob1029 1mo ago
  I think most of the squealing actually comes from DC-DC conversion.
  - __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
    Huh, I figured there had to be AC in there somewhere because otherwise where is the frequency coming from? Or is there a conversion to AC somewhere in the middle of a DC-DC conversion? I had assumed you could achieve it with just resistors. I am ignorant about the physical nature of electronics.
    - bob1029 1mo ago
      The AC is 50/60Hz. You wouldn't hear that. What happens is that the AC is rectified to DC and then it is chopped up at many kHz (10-100). The idea being that the higher the frequency, the smaller the inductors, capacitors and transformers can be. Even if the switching frequency is ultrasonic, it can still excite audible mechanical effects in windings of transformers and other elements to create the canonical coil whine. This effect depends on certain ranges of duty cycle (system load) creating periodic spikes in power.
      - __MatrixMan__ 1mo ago
        Hmm, that makes sense. I'm not sure if understanding this thing I hate will make me hate it any less, but thanks for the explanation!

ktallett 1mo ago

Often we are missing something in that we don't need to change what we use quite so regularly. We can learn to enjoy tech of the past and still find it useful today. It would both be better for the planet and satisfy our realisation that constant upgrades and changes aren't always needed or even better. Does a Canon S90 suddenly take bad photos or take photos that can't be printed? No, of course not, and that's a decade old. Can you still write on a Thinkpad X201? Yes of course. If anything, that keyboard is far better.

mrob 1mo ago

>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates The higher the display refresh rate the metaphorically "quieter" the computer. Discrete frames introduce latency, phantom array effect, and (on most displays) sample-and-hold blur. These don't exist in real life, so they weaken the illusion of the computer becoming part of your body, like a pencil or a hand tool. A computer that can be operated with minimum cognitive load needs a display refresh rate of at least 1000 Hz.

anilakar 1mo ago
We had CRT displays that could easily do 100 to 120 Hz. Then we regessed to LCD panels that could do 60 Hz and it somehow became the performance target.
- Avicebron 1mo ago
  I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.
  - krige 1mo ago
    To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - LargoLasskhyfv 1mo ago
      Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality. Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm2112mu https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm... That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within. Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more. Just as with CRTs. I don't miss them.

jtrn 1mo ago

What a wholsome and inclusive site. Page title reads “fix your heart or die”. Spread the love indeed.

adultSwim 1mo ago
This is my sincere response.
kuloku 1mo ago
[flagged]
- setnone 1mo ago
  totally outside of the scope of this tech website but genuine question: assuming you fixed you heart successfully, would you ever be guiding others to die?
- jtrn 1mo ago
  [flagged]
userbinator 1mo ago
[flagged]
scuppernong 1mo ago
it's a quote from twin peaks if that matters

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]

lproven 1mo ago

From a few months ago and highly relevant: https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing

TacticalCoder 1mo ago
That's a great article too. I hope we'll see it comig back frontpage once in a while. He differentiates between "things that last" (knowledge that transfers) and the rest... Something has to be said about dodging a lot of the last shiny new tech that's going to invariably be tomorrow's long lost and not regretted turd. I make my friends laugh when I say that if there's one tech I know nothing about I don't feel bad because... I think of all the long gone things I never bothered learning. Just think about the graveyard of crap you're better off for never having wasting one cycle learning: tech is full of it. It makes people smile but they know deep down it's true: most of the noise shall disappear. Don't feel bad about not knowing it all: just look ten years in the mirror at all that was shiny and new and that's now totally obsolete. It's literally how I cope with not knowing it all. And I somehow managed to bet, for three decades, on techs that did stay a very long time. For example I adopted Linux in the very early Slackware days: I did dive all in and learned all that I could. And I've been using Linux on the desktop (and on my laptops and on my servers and on my VMs etc.) ever since. Hypervisors and hardware-virt? Bought the first consumer mobo that supported it and was running Xen happily more than two decades ago. Much less sexy but: one day I ran into one my best friend who had left the city and he told me "I found this new language, it's called Java, it's going to be big" and I did dive into Java. Only certification I ever got: Sun Certified Java Programmer. It was was it was (the cert), nothing stellar. But it was obvious Java was here to stay. Then I saw a post on HN in the very early Clojure days: I decided I had to learn Clojure. It's not the most used language but, darn, is it stable (and on top of the JVM, mostly: so the Java thing helped). I'm using Emacs since so long I don't exactly remember when (I did try it when I discovered Linux, back when Emacs took 45 minutes or something like that to compile on my 486 but really adopted it only later on). I basically use the same window manager and same windows layout (and virtual desktops) since 15 years: when I upgrade my Linux distro, I just reuse my configuration. Monitor is 9 years old (38" 3840x1600, I love it because I can do many different layouts, including 3x 1280x1600 side by side "columns). Chair is 13 years old (out of warranty since one year) and still going strong. Keyboard is 10 years old: Happy Hacking Keyboard. It's a fast-paced, ever evolving world and all that helps brings some quietness. P.S: as for present techs, you bet I'm using LLMs: three subscriptions and lately I'm support for my less-tech savvy brother who's running models locally using GPU passthrough on a Proxmox rig I helped him set up. But I like to think I'm using them in a sane way: not drinking the kool-aid.

frgturpwd 1mo ago

weird hill(s) to die on

znpy 1mo ago

> of handmade websites viewed on hackable hardware but what if I don't what to hack my hardware? what if instead for me my hardware is just a tool i use from time to time to open my banking stuff, send/receive email to keep in touch with friends, watch movies and in my spare time i do other stuff? what if instead of hacking my hardware i want to go swimming, or take care of my garden, or cook or play the piano? articles like this make me chuckle nowadays because we in the tech industry assume most people are like us. they aren't. for them computers are just a tool. the less they get nagged by their tools, the better. unironically, that's why apple has so much success. apple's hardware is as far as you can get from hackability. they fix in place a lot of degrees of freedom (both in hardware and in software) and in exchange you get tools that work very well and very reliably. the author of this post should really touch grass more often. (i know i'll be downvoted for writing this, i don't care).

VCFundedGenYer 1mo ago

>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates As it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s all the same. I don't understand what this article is talking about.

never_inline 1mo ago

Five paragraphs of saying almost nothing.