[HN Gopher] The slab and the permacomputer
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The slab and the permacomputer
Author : akkartik
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-10-26 03:12 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (society.robinsloan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (society.robinsloan.com)
| aviatorspoon wrote:
| Great article.
|
| I see this trend too: the systems powering the modern world are
| increasingly featureful, complicated, centralised into a few
| hands, and this will likely continue.
|
| I'm a keen developer and user in this world, and recognize the
| vast users this world provides for.
|
| At the same time, I appreciate a back-to-basics approach that
| emphasizes systems that can be understood and controlled by
| individuals and small communities:
|
| * Hardware that has open specs: Pinephone, Pinebook, Raspberry
| Pi, ...
|
| * Open source OSs: Linux desktop, Linux mobile, Lineage OS.
|
| * https://reproducible-builds.org/ and
| https://www.bootstrappable.org/, allowing trust to be
| distributed.
|
| * Monorepo based OSs: NixOS, Guix.
|
| * Gemini, rather than the web: web browsers are now beyond
| reasonable understanding/control for small communities.
|
| * Mastodon rather than Twitter.
|
| * Projects that are community driven.
|
| * XMPP/Matrix over Signal/Discord/FB.
|
| I choose to live within this world for my personal world where
| possible. It's not as featureful, and that's fine.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| "... by individuals and small communities" almost invariably
| means "by experienced developers who want a playground."
|
| Slab vs cloud is a non-issue. The real issue is technocracy vs
| humanity.
|
| Currently we have no human computing of any kind. Non-experts
| have two choices: being monitored in as many different ways as
| is practical in order to be carpet-bombed with targeted ads and
| (increasingly) fake news. Or being forced into endless
| tinkering with opaque systems that sort-of work some of the
| time, maybe, and require expert knowledge for installation and
| configuration.
|
| That's it. There is nothing else on the table. It's one or the
| other - and often both.
|
| So when I read a phrase like "Google's largesse" I'm not sure
| what the point of the article is.
|
| There is no largesse. And there's also no real choice for most
| users.
|
| The independent dev community could change this, but it seems
| permanently attached to the wrong end of the telescope, looking
| at computing from the comfort of its tool- and toy-making
| treadmill.
|
| "Why should an _ordinary_ user care about this? " isn't asked
| nearly as often as it should be. And "Don't you understand the
| tech is fun to play with?" is not the right answer.
|
| Many of the biggest innovations in computing happened because
| someone asked that question. For some reason the entire
| industry seems to have stopped asking it.
|
| Except when there's an obvious possibility an answer can be
| monetised. And while that's certainly a reason, it's not
| necessarily the _best_ reason.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I see your point, but I have some half-formed doubts. I
| apologize for a possibly incoherent reply.
|
| > _The independent dev community could change this, but it
| seems permanently attached to the wrong end of the telescope,
| looking at computing from the comfort of its tool- and toy-
| making treadmill._
|
| In defense of the tool makers: the reason corporate IT can
| cater to regular users so well is because they can throw a
| lot of warm bodies at the problem. The tools we use in this
| industry are shit, but it doesn't matter when you can use
| hordes of developers as a protein substitute for better
| tooling.
|
| I believe the road for "independent dev" software usable by
| masses starts with better tools, and better tools for making
| tools.
|
| Additionally, I think "most of the biggest innovations in
| computing" actually happened because of toy-making treadmill.
| Even in the startup world, a common advice is to scratch your
| own itch - it often leads to something that's widely useful.
|
| > _" Why should an ordinary user care about this?" isn't
| asked nearly as often as it should be. And "Don't you
| understand the tech is fun to play with?" is not the right
| answer._
|
| In defense of the "independent dev community": perhaps we
| care a little bit _too much_ about ordinary users? The way I
| see it, most modern software is dumbed down, lowest-common-
| denominator toys, whose sole purpose is to sell well and /or
| sell their users out. Tech-savvy people, and even less savvy
| users who care about getting things done, are now considered
| a niche too small to care for. While there are some
| businesses still working on "power user" tools, the platforms
| themselves - operating systems - are being optimized for
| unsophisticated users, dumbed down and locked down.
|
| Again, I believe most of the biggest innovations, the ones
| helping everyone, start with engineers scratching their own
| itch. To the extent it's becoming harder, all users lose out.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Again, I believe most of the biggest innovations, the
| ones helping everyone, start with engineers scratching
| their own itch. To the extent it's becoming harder, all
| users lose out.
|
| I really disagree. I think engineers scratching their own
| itch leading down to trickle-down tooling is what a lot of
| independent devs _like to believe_, but that it's motivated
| mostly by self-importance. I think the utter failure of the
| FOSS desktop is proof that devs are motivated to work on
| things they find fun and that these things do _not_
| necessarily translate to things that general users want to
| use.
|
| > Even in the startup world, a common advice is to scratch
| your own itch - it often leads to something that's widely
| useful.
|
| I think that's bad advice. That's the _kind_ of advice that
| leads to things like the hundreds of now-dead clothes
| washing startups or valet parking startups. And while
| endless VC rounds blunt this, at least startups have some
| form of market pressure to have people use their software.
|
| > In defense of the "independent dev community": perhaps we
| care a little bit too much about ordinary users?
|
| Not really. Software devs are the last set of STEM-
| engineers that still insist on understanding _everything_
| and holding entire systems in their heads. Civil Engineers
| don't start by considering the subatomic forces that hold
| their materials together; automotive engineers don't
| understand every aspect of the software and combustion
| reaction that goes into their designs. Most engineers
| accept abstraction as a cost for building useful things.
|
| > The way I see it, most modern software is dumbed down,
| lowest-common-denominator toys, whose sole purpose is to
| sell well and/or sell their users out.
|
| "Sell well" is just a euphemism for "software that others
| use". Money is just the easiest metric to calculate for
| software being bought and sold, but metrics like "downloads
| per month" are just as impactful.
|
| Just like you didn't buy a new car and then spend days
| learning about how it works, most users of software don't
| want to either. That's not to say that there isn't a robust
| scene of modifying cars or building hobby cars, but that
| most people who drive cars for utility purposes don't care
| to pierce the abstraction veil of an automatic
| transmission, a brake pedal, and power steering. Most
| software users just want software that gets out of their
| way or enables to connect with others in novel ways. They
| don't care about how much energy their software uses (as
| long as it's affordable) or how "simple" it is or whether
| it uses Unix sockets or DBus or something.
| one_off_comment wrote:
| Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I
| could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google,
| Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware.
|
| I like the idea of not having to worry about hardware when I'm
| more interested in software. But there's a certain amount of
| control that's given up when you relinquish ownership of the
| hardware. I don't like the idea of paying for things in a service
| model.
|
| I'm approaching this from a personal perspective, not a business
| perspective. I'm completely comfortable with reducing my
| business's risk and liability by buying into hardware as a
| service. But I'm not as inclined to trust it for personal
| computing.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don 't know that
| I could trust it in practice as it will be companies like
| Google, Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware._
|
| At some point, Microgoogazon transitions to being manufacturers
| and/or operators of the hardware, and the (perhaps nominal)
| ownership devolves to some variation on a public utility like
| electricity.
| aviatorspoon wrote:
| > Although I like the spirit of this idea, I don't know that I
| could trust it in practice as it will be companies like Google,
| Amazon, and Microsoft that own the actual hardware.
|
| This is the point that the author makes in the second part of
| their post. Quote:
|
| "The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you
| shouldn't trust these slabs! Their operators, G -- and A -- and
| M -- and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature
| of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp.
| The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do
| they leave you with? Deprecation notices."
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup, it's kind of the analogue of: "Not your keys, not your
| coin"
|
| So, something like: "not your chips, not your code"?
|
| This also really reminds me of the absolute squandering of
| resources by "modern" systems - old x86 DOS systems with
| 1/16,000 the memory and processing power were literally more
| responsive for everyday use than the mountians of framework
| junk we run on today. There is a _lot_ of headroom left to
| downsize and create very useful machines.
| drdeca wrote:
| I misread this as " _the_ operators G, A, and M" rather than
| "their", and thought that this was going to be about some
| like, combinators of some kind allowing for expressing
| something about what computation (on what data) you want to
| outsource the running of run, in terms of 3 operators.
|
| Like, some sort of verifiable computing kind of deal.
|
| Because I hadn't read the quotation carefully (as otherwise I
| would have caught the part about depreciation notices before
| reading the article).
| bob229 wrote:
| Ethereum is not useful in fact like all crypto nonsense it is
| useless
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Permacomputing continues to be a baffling concept for me for a
| variety of reasons. The goals of permacomputing seem ill-defined
| and highly specific to the community developing these ideas. This
| would be fine, but these goals are created with sweeping
| manifesto-like moral and ethical verbiage.
|
| To bring it back to this article:
|
| > You already know the answers! They'd use less power; they'd be
| hardy against the elements
|
| Less power than what? Are current low-power SOCs not enough? Do
| we need even lower power? What exactly _is_ the power budget and
| where do we see this deployed? Why would they need to be hardy
| against the elements; books certainly are _not_.
|
| > The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS
| (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a
| person could hold in their head.
|
| I mean, whose head? A kernel programmer can probably hold a very
| different set of things in their head than a network engineer
| than a web programmer and so on. One person's "easy" is another
| person's "hard". So how do we define "hold in their head"?
|
| > Basically every computer used to be like that, up until the
| 1980s or so;
|
| Were they? Documentation and manuals were expensive and hard to
| find. There was no place to ask questions and receive answers
| like forums or StackOverflow. Computing time was scarce. Only in
| _hindsight_, now that we have web pages describing these older
| architectures and their machine code available at our fingertips
| do these architectures seem easily comprehensible. But at the
| time, with computer time being scarce and manuals being
| expensive, this mostly wasn't the case. (This is my other problem
| with permacomputing, the weird Lindy-effect exoneration.)
|
| > I find this totally evocative: it's easy to imagine future
| permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on
| artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be
| impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new
| model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like
| precious grimoires ...
|
| I mean, if I were larping as the monk protagonist of a post-
| apocalyptic movie sure, but otherwise I don't see how this is
| desirable.
|
| I'd take permacomputing more seriously if it actually defined
| terms like "lower power" (how many mW is "low") and then tried to
| actually motivate why these things tie into their vision of
| permacomputing.
|
| EDIT: I also _always_ get downvoted without explanation when I
| raise anti-permacomputing viewpoints which also leaves a bad
| taste in my mouth when discussing this topic.
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