7 ms·

The Joy of Slow Computing

126 points by xj9 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago
It was an interesting and different kind of article. I particularly loved his attack on companies' claims to democratize some function. I know there's two meanings to the word but we're better off using (verbally and as consumers) the more important one. They're just cheapening the concept for profit. The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I had this experience using little-known and semi-custom OS's for high security setups. The secure system lacked access to so much stuff. Yet, it had enough stuff on it to be useful and content-proxies were easy enough to build. I occasionally wanted a certain program, Youtube video, or whatever. Yet, my system did exactly what I designed it to do, nothing more and nothing less. And, like the author, I was happy with it rather than disappointed. It's a strange, good feeling which I'm not sure most people experience while using their computers. Of course, with KVM switch, I could always go right back to a full Windows/Linux system if I couldn't resist the urge or needed to do something modern. We can have the best of both worlds.
- Retra 11y ago
  "Democracy" is the reason I hate most of the music I hear.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I would reply to that but it's easy to misinterpret a statement like that. What do you mean by that?
    - hueving 11y ago
      The popular stuff is what is frequently played which is what appeals to the lowest common denominator.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        Ahh. Yeah that makes plenty of sense lol. I agree for many pop songs.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    And it's your friends who know you well enough to bring you music you do enjoy hearing.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Actually, no, because there's only a small subset overlapping the music we enjoy.
      - qnaal 11y ago
        all that means is your friendsmaking strategy could be optimized wrt music recommendation
- yoz-y 11y ago
  For me "democracy" in this context is used as social equality and commonness (both are dictionary definitions). As such, I think that "democratising" and "making cheaper for profit" are far from being mutually exclusive. Companies use the word democratising because of a lack of a better word I assume. Nevertheless, and this is apparent from the article, the biggest price to pay for Slow Computing is to consecrate it a bunch of your time. Of course you can deploy your own cloud rather than use, say Dropbox, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn how stuff works, even more so if you are not a computer engineer. Most people don’t have time for that. In my opinion, most profit is made when the goals of both parties are aligned. A company will make more money if the product they offer remains useful for their clients. The offer of these companies is "you will be able to use this stuff with ease" -> democratisation.
  - sukilot 11y ago
    Sandstorm.io and others are trying to free cloud computing.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    You're right about the equality aspect of things getting cheaper. We discussed this on Schneier's blog. It's compatible with "make accessible to everyone" definition. I think, playing devil's advocate, my counter was that we often don't get the same thing because we lack the quality, support, or privacy of prior, paid solutions. My Gmail, Dropbox, and so on are selling me out. My MyKolab and secure hosting solution cost a bit more with totally different effect. I think the "features" are getting democratized by most of these companies but other critical aspects don't. They don't either because they cost too much to implement or too much profit will be lost by opportunities to sell users out. So, as part of it gets democratized, a serious loss happens as either a tradeoff or straight subversion. The original it isn't democratized: only a watered-down, less trustworthy version which may or may not be a good deal. More good ones all the time, at least. :) Thoughts?
mark_l_watson 11y ago
As much as I enjoy playing with my Linux, OS X, and Windows 8.1 laptops, I have thought of going the free and privacy enhanced mode of Linux, running my OwnCloud, etc. The thing that holds me back is that I really rely on my Android smartphone for being able to SSH to a server anytime, write, and generally work on most stuff, only slower. The problem is that smart phones track us, even with custimization and are not free software. Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions?
- girvo 11y ago
  > Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions? One of the things I considered quite a while ago, was getting a "feature phone" that allowed Bluetooth PAN -- a way of tethering via Bluetooth to it. This would allow me to get a feature phone with hopefully less tracking than our modern-day smartphones, but carry around an Android (or Ubuntu, perhaps?) tablet. That's the other thing you could look into -- while the baseband is still not free and open, Ubuntu Phones themselves are. As far as I'm aware there are no proprietary parts of it, unlike Android (not AOSP).
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    Thanks, a Ubuntu Phone is a good idea.
    - collyw 11y ago
      I have an Ubuntu phone. Not sure exactly what is in there but there are definitely some packages borrowed from Android.
- paulfurtado 11y ago
  Are you worried about OS level privacy or baseband proccessor-level privacy?
  - spacehome 11y ago
    Yes.
GuiA 11y ago
Neat article. It's good to see non-programmers get some of the value that FOSS brings. I have a fancy aluminium unibody laptop and the latest shiny phone and all that, but I also keep a couple of netbooks at home on which I run archlinux + xmonad. I do almost everything in the terminal; I wrote a lot of my own tools to e.g. read twitter, my email, manage my todo lists, etc. In a high level language with a wide variety of libraries like Python, it requires very little effort to get stuff running if you're a programmer, and you quickly get a nice foundation to customize your own software and workflows. You can get things to integrate in ways that would be nigh impossible to do with other software. For instance, on one of my netbooks, my terminal's color palette changes with the time of the day (i.e. dark on white at night, white on dark during the day) and time of the year (green + red colorscheme on Christmas day!), which in turn propagates to all of my terminal apps to achieve a consistent look. It's absolutely useless, but tons of fun! The only non terminal program I use is surf, a minimalistic tabless web browser which helps you focus and not get too distracted. All in all, I really like my setup - it'd be impractical to use it at my job, but I could see myself using it exclusively at a different stage of my life. At the end of the day, most of what I do is write {code|prose}. I have a side project to clean up my setup and release it as an open source project for other people to use, but time is lacking. Although really, most of the fun comes from building your own environment. A good source of inspiration (despite the silly name) is the /r/unixporn subreddit - the screenshots there tend to encapsulate nicely the kind of basic yet pleasant aesthetic that such a setup can offer. For many years, everyone wanted their Linux desktop to be as flashy as what the professional OSs were promising (remember Compiz, Beryl, Project Looking Glass, etc.?) - but I think a Linux environment is best when it plays to its own strengths. A couple nitpicks regarding the article because I'm a nerd :) > Instead of relying on rich kids in a Googleplex somewhere, Slow Computing works best when we’re employing people nearby, like Jamie McClelland, to adapt open tools to local needs. He’s my farmer; May First is my CSA. Does the author realize that there is a non-negligible overlap between contributors to the software he praises and the rich kids from the Googleplex? >Despite its scale, the original amateurism of Linux is alive and well; once, when a student was helping me set up my computer for a lecture at his college, he told me that he’d helped design Ubuntu’s icons. What a gauche formulation that needlessly diminishes the work of the student. Not a nitpick: Sudo room in Oakland is great. If you're in the Bay Area, check it out. I started going there when I lived in Oakland a couple years ago because noisebridge was too far away and becoming too... unfriendly, and I was not disappointed. One of the main things I miss about living in Oakland for sure.
roguelynn 11y ago
Huh interesting- never heard of May First/People Link. Anyone have any comments on it? Concept seems appealing.
teekert 11y ago
This article puts into words how I have always felt but never could explain. Slow computing, a nice term. It is indeed about awareness, and very much about taking ownership. When I got Nginx running HTTPS with a valid cert, or sent my first mail with postfix/dovecot/roundcube it felt like I did it and that I owned the server and the software. Getting it all working taught me a lot about the fundamentals of the internet. It was a long, slow process though. But very enjoyable and rewarding. Recently I moved away from Gmail/Google calendar for my own mail server and ownCloud, sadly nobody I know understands my euphoric feelings... this writer does.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Spent 10+ years trying to grok music on my own, I understand the bliss of finally seeing the big picture. I wish it was mentioned more often, but things are mostly what they should be.
hyperpallium 11y ago
\tangent There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. - Turing Worse than built-in obsolescense, we are the agents of our redundancy... and the end of all our coding shall be to return to the place where we began, unneeded.
ommunist 11y ago
I appreciate author's effort in explaining the useful fashion, and I wonder whether he enlightens us about his mobile phone.
PaulRobinson 11y ago
I'm not sure I like the idea of calling the use of open source tools "slow computing", and connecting it up in people's minds the way we think about a middle-class fashion. Or maybe I'm just concerned about the middle class hipsters choosing open source tools ironically or without thought. It might give it an air of exclusion it does not - can not - deserve. I don't want open source tools to become equivalent to a mini penny farthing. But if it makes people sit up and think the way Whole Foods and the organic food movement has, well, maybe it could work.
- mauricemir 11y ago
  Especially as 99.99% of HPC clusters are running Linux or some unix variant. So this dual Xenon 72 Core system is slow - Subs are so cute just like 6 year olds pretending to be like mommy and daddy
- cafard 11y ago
  Ironically or without thought might last until the first time the going gets tricky, don't you think?
- sukilot 11y ago
  Hipster: someone who enjoys something I like in a way I don't like.
- dTal 11y ago
  I don't think you need to worry. If people are picking open source tools purely because they're cool, then that means they're cool, and that's an enormous victory. I've also thought that "organic" would be a cute way to brand Free software, but then again "organic" food is usually more expensive...
radoslawc 11y ago
Article however good, and making valid points (I'm so to speak "slow computerist" myself) is a bit chaotic. "with Ubuntu, a free-and-open operating system managed by a U.K.-based company and a large network of volunteers. It’s one of the more user-friendly variants of Linux, which first appeared in 1991 when a student at the University of Helsinki wrote his own version of a then-popular operating system invented at AT&T in the 1970s." what appeared first? Linux or Ubuntu? Linus "wrote" Ubuntu? Can't really tell from this mess. And it's GNU/Linux or Linux distribution not version btw. "Emacs, a program first developed in the mid-’70s that runs on a text-only terminal screen." Well back in the days sure, for past I guess 20 years it has GUI version. "There are no fonts or wizards. But it displays multiple files side-by-side and plays Tetris." No fonts?
chriswarbo 11y ago
> The May First team has a record of resistance to snooping law enforcement agencies; over the phone, McClelland told me about the security system they’d built around the servers, which relays its data outside U.S. borders. Hmm... If I remember correctly, sending data outside the US will cause the US security agencies to treat it as "foreign", and hence a legitimate target for surveillance.
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  Yes, but this is only one of the excuses US Security Agencies use to target traffic, and there are enough other excuses that almost all traffic is eligible for surveillance. Legal approaches such as those taken by the EFF and ACLU have a lot of value, but I don't think a legal approach of trying to keep your traffic legally un-tappable is going to work. It's clear that the NSA et al are above the law and unconcerned with your rights, so until that is fixed, it's too easy to fall into a "grey" area where they have an excuse to monitor your traffic. Fundamentally this is an approach that tries to make it so the NSA won't surveil your traffic, which places an unearned amount of trust in the NSA. I think a better approach makes it so that they can't surveil your traffic--and for this there are only technical solutions. Part of this is making sure that the NSA can't spy on who you are talking to, and every solution I know of to that bouncing traffic across multiple servers. I would be very skeptical of such a system that didn't bounce traffic overseas.
m-i-l 11y ago
Interesting to see open source called "slow computing" (not quite what I expected when I clicked on the link). I've never been a big fan of the use of the word "slow" in the various slow movements though. I know the slow movements started with "slow food" and that was chosen to contrast with "fast food", but it does have connotations relating to physical speed, and I think that could be particularly misleading applied to computing. I prefer "thoughtful computing", "thoughtful food", "thoughtful parenting" etc. Too late to change now though.
mwcampbell 11y ago
I think the author glorifies the archaic interface of Emacs too much, particularly since he doesn't need it for its original purpose as a programmer's editor. I wonder why he doesn't just use LibreOffice; it's equally free.
omouse 11y ago
>Eric Schmidt doesn’t care if I’m using Emacs Actually, yes he does especially if you use GNU/Linux because that runs the world. The importance of free/open source is so great that if the popular libraries switched to a proprietary license a lot of companies would go bankrupt paying the license fees.
- seiji 11y ago
  Licensing is the reason all the Apple GNU tools are forever stuck on old versions now. Once the tools moved to GPLv3, Apple stopped updating them. Check out how old your version of /bin/bash is on a completely up-to-date OS X machine.

126 points by xj9 11y ago

It was an interesting and different kind of article. I particularly loved his attack on companies' claims to democratize some function. I know there's two meanings to the word but we're better off using (verbally and as consumers) the more important one. They're just cheapening the concept for profit. The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I had this experience using little-known and semi-custom OS's for high security setups. The secure system lacked access to so much stuff. Yet, it had enough stuff on it to be useful and content-proxies were easy enough to build. I occasionally wanted a certain program, Youtube video, or whatever. Yet, my system did exactly what I designed it to do, nothing more and nothing less. And, like the author, I was happy with it rather than disappointed. It's a strange, good feeling which I'm not sure most people experience while using their computers. Of course, with KVM switch, I could always go right back to a full Windows/Linux system if I couldn't resist the urge or needed to do something modern. We can have the best of both worlds.

Retra 11y ago
"Democracy" is the reason I hate most of the music I hear.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I would reply to that but it's easy to misinterpret a statement like that. What do you mean by that?
  - hueving 11y ago
    The popular stuff is what is frequently played which is what appeals to the lowest common denominator.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Ahh. Yeah that makes plenty of sense lol. I agree for many pop songs.
- ddingus 11y ago
  And it's your friends who know you well enough to bring you music you do enjoy hearing.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Actually, no, because there's only a small subset overlapping the music we enjoy.
    - qnaal 11y ago
      all that means is your friendsmaking strategy could be optimized wrt music recommendation
yoz-y 11y ago
For me "democracy" in this context is used as social equality and commonness (both are dictionary definitions). As such, I think that "democratising" and "making cheaper for profit" are far from being mutually exclusive. Companies use the word democratising because of a lack of a better word I assume. Nevertheless, and this is apparent from the article, the biggest price to pay for Slow Computing is to consecrate it a bunch of your time. Of course you can deploy your own cloud rather than use, say Dropbox, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn how stuff works, even more so if you are not a computer engineer. Most people don’t have time for that. In my opinion, most profit is made when the goals of both parties are aligned. A company will make more money if the product they offer remains useful for their clients. The offer of these companies is "you will be able to use this stuff with ease" -> democratisation.
- sukilot 11y ago
  Sandstorm.io and others are trying to free cloud computing.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  You're right about the equality aspect of things getting cheaper. We discussed this on Schneier's blog. It's compatible with "make accessible to everyone" definition. I think, playing devil's advocate, my counter was that we often don't get the same thing because we lack the quality, support, or privacy of prior, paid solutions. My Gmail, Dropbox, and so on are selling me out. My MyKolab and secure hosting solution cost a bit more with totally different effect. I think the "features" are getting democratized by most of these companies but other critical aspects don't. They don't either because they cost too much to implement or too much profit will be lost by opportunities to sell users out. So, as part of it gets democratized, a serious loss happens as either a tradeoff or straight subversion. The original it isn't democratized: only a watered-down, less trustworthy version which may or may not be a good deal. More good ones all the time, at least. :) Thoughts?

mark_l_watson 11y ago

As much as I enjoy playing with my Linux, OS X, and Windows 8.1 laptops, I have thought of going the free and privacy enhanced mode of Linux, running my OwnCloud, etc. The thing that holds me back is that I really rely on my Android smartphone for being able to SSH to a server anytime, write, and generally work on most stuff, only slower. The problem is that smart phones track us, even with custimization and are not free software. Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions?

girvo 11y ago
> Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions? One of the things I considered quite a while ago, was getting a "feature phone" that allowed Bluetooth PAN -- a way of tethering via Bluetooth to it. This would allow me to get a feature phone with hopefully less tracking than our modern-day smartphones, but carry around an Android (or Ubuntu, perhaps?) tablet. That's the other thing you could look into -- while the baseband is still not free and open, Ubuntu Phones themselves are. As far as I'm aware there are no proprietary parts of it, unlike Android (not AOSP).
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  Thanks, a Ubuntu Phone is a good idea.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I have an Ubuntu phone. Not sure exactly what is in there but there are definitely some packages borrowed from Android.
paulfurtado 11y ago
Are you worried about OS level privacy or baseband proccessor-level privacy?
- spacehome 11y ago
  Yes.

GuiA 11y ago

Neat article. It's good to see non-programmers get some of the value that FOSS brings. I have a fancy aluminium unibody laptop and the latest shiny phone and all that, but I also keep a couple of netbooks at home on which I run archlinux + xmonad. I do almost everything in the terminal; I wrote a lot of my own tools to e.g. read twitter, my email, manage my todo lists, etc. In a high level language with a wide variety of libraries like Python, it requires very little effort to get stuff running if you're a programmer, and you quickly get a nice foundation to customize your own software and workflows. You can get things to integrate in ways that would be nigh impossible to do with other software. For instance, on one of my netbooks, my terminal's color palette changes with the time of the day (i.e. dark on white at night, white on dark during the day) and time of the year (green + red colorscheme on Christmas day!), which in turn propagates to all of my terminal apps to achieve a consistent look. It's absolutely useless, but tons of fun! The only non terminal program I use is surf, a minimalistic tabless web browser which helps you focus and not get too distracted. All in all, I really like my setup - it'd be impractical to use it at my job, but I could see myself using it exclusively at a different stage of my life. At the end of the day, most of what I do is write {code|prose}. I have a side project to clean up my setup and release it as an open source project for other people to use, but time is lacking. Although really, most of the fun comes from building your own environment. A good source of inspiration (despite the silly name) is the /r/unixporn subreddit - the screenshots there tend to encapsulate nicely the kind of basic yet pleasant aesthetic that such a setup can offer. For many years, everyone wanted their Linux desktop to be as flashy as what the professional OSs were promising (remember Compiz, Beryl, Project Looking Glass, etc.?) - but I think a Linux environment is best when it plays to its own strengths. A couple nitpicks regarding the article because I'm a nerd :) > Instead of relying on rich kids in a Googleplex somewhere, Slow Computing works best when we’re employing people nearby, like Jamie McClelland, to adapt open tools to local needs. He’s my farmer; May First is my CSA. Does the author realize that there is a non-negligible overlap between contributors to the software he praises and the rich kids from the Googleplex? >Despite its scale, the original amateurism of Linux is alive and well; once, when a student was helping me set up my computer for a lecture at his college, he told me that he’d helped design Ubuntu’s icons. What a gauche formulation that needlessly diminishes the work of the student. Not a nitpick: Sudo room in Oakland is great. If you're in the Bay Area, check it out. I started going there when I lived in Oakland a couple years ago because noisebridge was too far away and becoming too... unfriendly, and I was not disappointed. One of the main things I miss about living in Oakland for sure.

roguelynn 11y ago

Huh interesting- never heard of May First/People Link. Anyone have any comments on it? Concept seems appealing.

teekert 11y ago

This article puts into words how I have always felt but never could explain. Slow computing, a nice term. It is indeed about awareness, and very much about taking ownership. When I got Nginx running HTTPS with a valid cert, or sent my first mail with postfix/dovecot/roundcube it felt like I did it and that I owned the server and the software. Getting it all working taught me a lot about the fundamentals of the internet. It was a long, slow process though. But very enjoyable and rewarding. Recently I moved away from Gmail/Google calendar for my own mail server and ownCloud, sadly nobody I know understands my euphoric feelings... this writer does.

agumonkey 11y ago
Spent 10+ years trying to grok music on my own, I understand the bliss of finally seeing the big picture. I wish it was mentioned more often, but things are mostly what they should be.

hyperpallium 11y ago

\tangent There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. - Turing Worse than built-in obsolescense, we are the agents of our redundancy... and the end of all our coding shall be to return to the place where we began, unneeded.

ommunist 11y ago

I appreciate author's effort in explaining the useful fashion, and I wonder whether he enlightens us about his mobile phone.

PaulRobinson 11y ago

I'm not sure I like the idea of calling the use of open source tools "slow computing", and connecting it up in people's minds the way we think about a middle-class fashion. Or maybe I'm just concerned about the middle class hipsters choosing open source tools ironically or without thought. It might give it an air of exclusion it does not - can not - deserve. I don't want open source tools to become equivalent to a mini penny farthing. But if it makes people sit up and think the way Whole Foods and the organic food movement has, well, maybe it could work.

mauricemir 11y ago
Especially as 99.99% of HPC clusters are running Linux or some unix variant. So this dual Xenon 72 Core system is slow - Subs are so cute just like 6 year olds pretending to be like mommy and daddy
cafard 11y ago
Ironically or without thought might last until the first time the going gets tricky, don't you think?
sukilot 11y ago
Hipster: someone who enjoys something I like in a way I don't like.
dTal 11y ago
I don't think you need to worry. If people are picking open source tools purely because they're cool, then that means they're cool, and that's an enormous victory. I've also thought that "organic" would be a cute way to brand Free software, but then again "organic" food is usually more expensive...

radoslawc 11y ago

Article however good, and making valid points (I'm so to speak "slow computerist" myself) is a bit chaotic. "with Ubuntu, a free-and-open operating system managed by a U.K.-based company and a large network of volunteers. It’s one of the more user-friendly variants of Linux, which first appeared in 1991 when a student at the University of Helsinki wrote his own version of a then-popular operating system invented at AT&T in the 1970s." what appeared first? Linux or Ubuntu? Linus "wrote" Ubuntu? Can't really tell from this mess. And it's GNU/Linux or Linux distribution not version btw. "Emacs, a program first developed in the mid-’70s that runs on a text-only terminal screen." Well back in the days sure, for past I guess 20 years it has GUI version. "There are no fonts or wizards. But it displays multiple files side-by-side and plays Tetris." No fonts?

chriswarbo 11y ago

> The May First team has a record of resistance to snooping law enforcement agencies; over the phone, McClelland told me about the security system they’d built around the servers, which relays its data outside U.S. borders. Hmm... If I remember correctly, sending data outside the US will cause the US security agencies to treat it as "foreign", and hence a legitimate target for surveillance.

copsarebastards 11y ago
Yes, but this is only one of the excuses US Security Agencies use to target traffic, and there are enough other excuses that almost all traffic is eligible for surveillance. Legal approaches such as those taken by the EFF and ACLU have a lot of value, but I don't think a legal approach of trying to keep your traffic legally un-tappable is going to work. It's clear that the NSA et al are above the law and unconcerned with your rights, so until that is fixed, it's too easy to fall into a "grey" area where they have an excuse to monitor your traffic. Fundamentally this is an approach that tries to make it so the NSA won't surveil your traffic, which places an unearned amount of trust in the NSA. I think a better approach makes it so that they can't surveil your traffic--and for this there are only technical solutions. Part of this is making sure that the NSA can't spy on who you are talking to, and every solution I know of to that bouncing traffic across multiple servers. I would be very skeptical of such a system that didn't bounce traffic overseas.

m-i-l 11y ago

Interesting to see open source called "slow computing" (not quite what I expected when I clicked on the link). I've never been a big fan of the use of the word "slow" in the various slow movements though. I know the slow movements started with "slow food" and that was chosen to contrast with "fast food", but it does have connotations relating to physical speed, and I think that could be particularly misleading applied to computing. I prefer "thoughtful computing", "thoughtful food", "thoughtful parenting" etc. Too late to change now though.

mwcampbell 11y ago

I think the author glorifies the archaic interface of Emacs too much, particularly since he doesn't need it for its original purpose as a programmer's editor. I wonder why he doesn't just use LibreOffice; it's equally free.

omouse 11y ago

>Eric Schmidt doesn’t care if I’m using Emacs Actually, yes he does especially if you use GNU/Linux because that runs the world. The importance of free/open source is so great that if the popular libraries switched to a proprietary license a lot of companies would go bankrupt paying the license fees.

seiji 11y ago
Licensing is the reason all the Apple GNU tools are forever stuck on old versions now. Once the tools moved to GPLv3, Apple stopped updating them. Check out how old your version of /bin/bash is on a completely up-to-date OS X machine.