[HN Gopher] Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past ...
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Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
Author : logtempo
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-03-17 00:56 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
| logtempo wrote:
| Inspired by recent post about how bloated is the www today.
| schiffern wrote:
| For historians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39729057
| aaron695 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The dithered images make me feel like I'm reading something from
| 1994, which is not a bad thing.
| pjerem wrote:
| 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/#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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Frugality is a quality on which we have collectively given up in
| the technology field, sadly.
| ornornor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I don't own much, but I do gotta pay a mortgage for where I
| don't keep it.
| ornornor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ornornor wrote:
| Like I said, actual numbers vary I was just illustrating
| with an arbitrary 1/3 and 150%. Generally speaking, tend
| towards 0 rather than infinity.
| Dansvidania wrote:
| noice
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Don't start at the edges, start at the center
| mouzogu wrote:
| sustainability, degrowth, frugality...these are choices of
| privilege.
|
| you can only call for less when you have more than enough.
|
| if you're poor you are already living in degrowth and
| frugality.
| osmsucks wrote:
| Yes? That's the whole point.
|
| 100 years ago it was unthinkable for common people to eat red
| meat every day, they just couldn't afford it. Today, we are
| privileged enough that we can afford to do so, but just
| because we can it doesn't mean we should. It's not good for
| you.
|
| Same happens in the tech world: we can afford to buy new tech
| devices to keep up with the bloat that inevitably envelops
| most things, but should we?
| hkt wrote:
| Degrowth is an economic doctrine, not a way of life. One part
| of it is the idea that there is enough wealth to go round,
| even within planetary resource boundaries, and that
| distributing it is more important than growing it. It is a
| very very valid criticism of the current system, but it isn't
| a critique or a choice of individuals, it is about political
| economy.
| logtempo wrote:
| sure, the question"If I can, should I?" it suppose that you
| have a choice. If you have no choice, there is no questions
| :D
|
| that said, a good counter-exemple is wood stove efficiency.
| There are simple design that are more efficient than a
| firecamp, and very cheap. In some cases you can do a lot more
| with a little bit of more(sometimes less), so it's worth it.
| brohee wrote:
| In the IoT world you often still count bytes and milliwatts.
| Less so when plugged to the grid.
| tazu wrote:
| Anyone else driven crazy by the opacity _decreasing_ on hover? I
| feel like it should be the opposite...
| Razengan wrote:
| > _Low-tech_
|
| > _" How to build a small solar power system"_
|
| The definition of "low tech" clearly varies over time :)
| navane wrote:
| What a beautiful website on mobile. The font, the colors, the
| layout.
| txutxu wrote:
| 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.
| lambdaba wrote:
| > The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.
|
| Yet my present computer can do far more than the one I had, say
| 30 years ago, when things were "simpler".
| blueflow wrote:
| I keep an old Thinkpad around running Windows XP. Its some
| 512MHz CPU, so not really that fast. But: It boots faster,
| the UI feels less sluggish, you can tell apart buttons from
| inert text, and launching Age of Empires I and restarting my
| savegame takes like 5 seconds.
|
| I keep this Laptop as living proof that computers did indeed
| get shittier.
| hkt wrote:
| I'm on a thinkpad x230t from over a decade ago, running
| Linux. It is a bit less vintage than yours, but I can
| confirm that for the princely sum of PS200 on ebay, I can
| run a window manager and pretty much any software I want.
|
| It replaced a PS1500 starbook, which stopped powering on
| about a month after the warranty expired.
|
| Not quite the same point as you, but I'll agree on
| something: old hardware that lasts is miraculous.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I remember when windows xp came out. It felt so slow on my
| celeron 300 mhz (overclocked though) with a geforce 256,
| sluggish to a point that I happily switched to gentoo. Of
| course your Thinkpad most likely came late in the windows
| xp lifecycle so it feels snappier but the user experience
| when windows xp came out was anything but fast.
| olyjohn wrote:
| To be fair. Celerons were really terrible. I ran them for
| a long time (even was running dual celerons on a board at
| one point) and overclocked the crap out them. Then I
| switched to an actual Pentium 3 chip and it blew them
| away. Never went back.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > even was running dual celerons
|
| Another member of the ABIT BP6 club! My friends could not
| believe that I could play Counterstrike and burn a CD at
| the same time :D
| p_l wrote:
| Depends a lot on what you run.
|
| Anything involving web? Uh.
|
| A lot of things definitely got way faster though, they just
| are things that neither switched to most inefficient
| (computing wise) ways of doing it (Electron GUI) nor pay
| the "high resolution" tax.
|
| My first _own_ computer could hold the entire final
| displayed framebuffer in less than 1MB. The display I use
| right now requires a bit over 32.5 MB to do so, and switch
| towards more and more hires raster bitmap as method of
| drawing interfaces means it 's schlepping probably over
| half a gigabyte every frame.
|
| But things that don't need that? Even for python
| development (not running jobs, interactive development) my
| recent switch from Kaby Lake i5 to Zen4 resulted in
| noticeable speedup. Despite the previous machine already
| having NVMe SSDs etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| The web being slow is an example of UI in general
| becoming slow.
|
| My experience over the years has been that UI frameworks
| are _very fun to write_ but we 'd all be better off if
| our managers said "no" to them -- vanilla HTML is _very_
| fast, as is UIKit.
|
| Likewise for development, while Interface Builder gets
| flack for the file format making it hard to collaborate
| or even to code review, actually using it to implement a
| UI from the design team is fast and easy compared both to
| UIKit in code and to SwiftUI (and SwiftUI is better than
| some of the other programmatic UI frameworks I've seen,
| though it also loses points for a WYSIWYG editor that
| gives up if you look at the keyboard wrong).
| p_l wrote:
| The web is slow because it's used in ways that it's not
| exactly designed for.
|
| This means that even when you try your best, you can end
| up with very complex code paths for doing things that
| would be handled through simpler ways in "proper" GUI
| framework.
|
| It's not really a dig at browser engines - they are very
| optimized. But they are very optimized because otherwise
| it would be even more unbearably slow.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not complaining about the browsers themselves either.
|
| IIRC, almost every UI widget in iOS and Mac OS (even way
| back to 68k) and VisualBasic and Java is a rectangular
| interaction region, even if the appearance is circular.
|
| A <div> with a background image and an on-click, on-
| mouse-move etc. handlers, can replicate the look and
| behaviour with _much_ lower complexity than even the
| React _tutorials_ I 've done (I assume that React is even
| more complex in production?)
|
| Last tech conference I went to, there was a talk on how
| to boost website performance by loading your JS in a
| particular order -- at that point, I think you're better
| off with a website being an img and <img> and <map> and
| everything more than that being done on the server. Not
| that this is a good idea, just less bad than having so
| much JS you need to re-order it to keep load times down.
|
| jQuery seems nice, from what little of it I've seen in
| practice.
| adrian_b wrote:
| While that is true, most of the current complexity has
| nothing to do with enabling the present computers to do far
| more.
|
| Most of the complexity is caused either by the need to
| provide backward compatibility or by the fact that the many
| parties who design the components of a computer had very
| different ideas about which is the right way to design them
| (so many compatibility layers are required) or by the fact
| that the manufacturers insist on implementing various
| additional features that are not really needed, because they
| may be useful for them even if they are harmful for the final
| owner of the computer.
|
| Many of the most horrible features of the modern computers
| have been caused by the fact that Microsoft could not be
| bothered to implement in their operating systems certain
| features whose right place was inside the OS and Intel has
| kept piling workarounds over workarounds in their CPUs, one
| more ugly than the other, like the System Management Mode and
| the Management Engine.
| npteljes wrote:
| The system is the result of the structure and power
| distribution of the entities that built it. Another compounding
| factor is that I don't think any of the creators had
| "simplicity" on the forefront, when building their respective
| part of the system. So, yes, the end result is not simple.
|
| As for reading the code or anything like that, I don't think I
| would have managed even a C64, and that's, I think, way simpler
| than the modern computer you described. So I've been lost for a
| long time.
|
| Life is just complex.
| overtomanu wrote:
| Yes, life is complex literally!!
|
| Even our DNA has lot of "unused"/"dormant" code
| inciampati wrote:
| Not really, in that all parts of the DNA can and do
| interact with proteins and lncRNA in the cell. Where in
| code there can be truly unused portions which are _only_
| copied, in the cell all bits are functional. The reason we
| say they are unused /junk/dormant is that we have extremely
| limited ability to observe the system in its totality.
| dekhn wrote:
| Nope, there's definitely junk that is non-functional.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of
| snow. The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it
| gets_
|
| a sentiment already expressed in 1963!
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35851599
| p_l wrote:
| Honestly, I think a lot of the parts that people complain about
| aren't actually as complex as they seem - but they are the
| _surface visible_ parts. And lack of knowledge and nostalgia
| glasses sometimes make people unaware of how complex things
| _used_ to be.
|
| A lot of underappreciated thing with boot firmware these days
| is that what is presented to you as end user is absolutely not
| connected to what options are actually possible. Also tons of
| complex and quirky code just to get the CPU and memory to the
| point of running other code. IIRC there's bits of code spanning
| early CPU reset _and_ intel IME that are necessary to prevent
| the CPU from destroying itself, at least on some models.
| Similarly on AMD PSP.
|
| Some of them will be disabled because the hw physically doesn't
| support them, or can result in weird behaviour that isn't going
| to be something you like, or effectively brick things.
|
| Another part is that it allows real proper modularity of an
| open platform, at least on the vendor side. Add a new device
| that requires special driver? No longer you have to spend a
| long time just to integrate a blob, there's a standard API/ABI
| whether the driver is closed or open source. ACPI provides tons
| of ways to just specify the details of where something is and
| how to connect it. I love a lot about openpower, but PetitBoot
| is effectively less open if only because there's no possibility
| to use add-in card requiring drivers that wasn't already
| compiled into flash. With UEFI it works.
|
| UEFI is honestly in many ways less complex than previous
| systems (no more hooking into tape drive boot sequence),
| especially since there's much less that _needs_ to be in SMM
| block except for things required by hw (an example: some CPUs
| required SMM code for changing _certain_ power levels, because
| the OS level API doesn 't expose the low-level details like
| enforcing a synchronization point on all CPUs or low level
| internal registers).
|
| If you use UEFI, you also don't need to implement whole complex
| (and IBM PC _incompatible_ ) craziness that is GRUB (or NTLDR
| with its ARC firmware emulation, or non-UEFI WINLDR which
| emulates chunk of UEFI...) - n.b. the last linux bootloader
| that properly handled IBM PC compatibility was LILO if
| installed in appropriate way (read: not how distros did it).
|
| TPM and Secure Boot are reasonably easy parts of the whole
| thing. NFC and smartcards are also things that are reasonable
| for single engineer to grasp.
|
| There's less visible, though some people remember about it,
| complexity that is enforced on us by corporate interests - big
| part of why AMD PSP is closed source is the same reason AMD was
| unable to open source some of the HDMI code recently - both AMD
| PSP and Intel IME are part of implementing "Secure Media Path",
| aka DRM bullshit for MPAA (HDCP and its DisplayPort
| equivalent). It's also why various DRM systems don't fully
| support fully open systems (for example normal linux distros,
| not ones that are built by vendor of a device with special
| blobs)
|
| Now, systemd I'll agree it takes a good idea but does with
| horrible implementation, and that's from someone who gave in
| and tries to use it fully (mainly because I have no time to
| implement an alternative).
|
| Wayland also makes in many ways life more complex than X11,
| OTOH XFree86 legacy of being lowest common denominator
| implementation even after reverting to X.Org means that people
| felt stuck.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Conway's law does not define a maximum size of a system.
|
| It simply defines that the systems as measured reflect the
| structure that created them.
|
| If you look at the software ecosystem as a whole, it is
| increasingly indivisible without the underlying structure,
| because interface types have been totally monopolized - you
| need a create a client-server REST/LAMP service with stateless
| agents consuming services
|
| That is to say if you wanted to build a technical service, but
| that does not comply with existing trends in engineering then
| you just don't exist
|
| Technology is social it's not simply mechanical
|
| Socially, we don't have holism as a goal. Cybernetics is
| socialism according to academia and increasing specialization
| means that nobody can fully understand the whole thing.
|
| Because nobody can understand the whole thing there are
| opportunities for fragility, and basically stuff to break
| catastrophically with nobody knowing how to fix it.
|
| I anticipate the next couple decades look like a lot of broken
| stuff that people rely on, that increasingly nobody knows how
| to fix
| roughly wrote:
| > The more it advances, the bigger and out of control it gets.
|
| This is largely due to path dependency - there's a required
| amount of "bigness" and complexity to do the things we want to
| do, but it's substantially lower than the amount we have,
| because we're not starting from zero, we're building on what we
| already have. You can see this everywhere - telecom lines
| follow old train lines, keyboard layouts mirror old typewriter
| layouts, desktop file system layouts mirror old mainframe
| layouts.
|
| It mirrors evolution in that way - the path taken is the
| cheapest path from the current location, not the ideal path,
| which is why a giraffe has the same number of bones in its neck
| as you do.
|
| I've actually been interested recently in what it would look
| like to have a truly modern software & hardware stack built
| from the ground up for modern computing - I feel like there
| were attempts at this in the 90s (BeOS comes to mind), but even
| something like ChromeOS was basically Linux under the hood. It
| feels like the industry's decided what we have is Good Enough,
| and that's a bit of a shame, because you're right, it's really
| quite a ball of spaghetti.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| A minimal Alpine Linux install is what -- 10MB?
|
| A minimal Debian/AlmaLinux install is closer to 1G.
|
| What did we gain with 100X the space, larger attack surface,
| and configuration complexity?
|
| Even hardware is this way...
|
| Look at the weight and power requirements of a SFF PC.
|
| Then look at a blade server... Still requires heavy steel
| case, heavier than SFF PC because it's larger, only job is to
| fit into heavy steel enclosure. Enclosure requires beefy
| steel rack to handle weight.
|
| Every layer makes logical sense but the end result does not!!
|
| Older NAS servers held multiple 3.5" drives (heavy),
| requiring big power supply. Now a plastic clip holds NVMe
| drives onto a motherboard -- no steel!
| logtempo wrote:
| computers are complex indeed. That said, I don't think lowtech
| philsophy is about browsing HN with a Macintosh II. It does
| have this "get things done simple" branch, but also the ecology
| side of it, the reflexion about the relationship with
| technology, its social component, eventually the sovereignty we
| have over technology and its sustainability.
| galdosdi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| logtempo wrote:
| I agree with your second paragraph. I think the bait of
| "lowtech" name is thinking that the main goal is doing AI
| with stick and mud. It's one of the goal (ofc not literally
| ), but the most important one is showing alternative and
| inviting people to think about what is really "technology"
| and its implications. Mainly because browsing a website hide
| a ton of processes that one user don't have to think about
| it.
| hkt wrote:
| The magazine goes in to more than that, solar/old tech stuff is
| included (I would think) because at this stage, disengaging
| from tech effectively excludes people from society. So I read
| it as meaning "within the boundaries of remaining included in
| society, how low tech can we go?" and the conclusion is
| seemingly "we can host a high traffic site on a battery powered
| raspberry pi".
|
| The other stuff in the magazine is very low tech indeed: their
| articles on hot water bottles, pedal power, very early solar
| power, and agriculture among others are exceptionally
| interesting and I'd recommend reading them.
| derbOac wrote:
| Yeah I was going to say something similar, but you put it more
| succinctly.
|
| It seems the message is really about efficiency and
| sustainability, not necessarily about low tech. Also, framing
| it as being about low tech sort of helps things but also hurts
| things.
|
| For example, I was really interested to read the article about
| bicycles, and think they make a set of excellent points, points
| that don't seem to get enough attention in the cycling
| community. But my guess is the cycling community (to the extent
| there even is one cycling community), often (although not
| always) focused on the latest and greatest tech, would respond
| more to a bike being marketed as ultra-durable or upgradeable
| and efficient than being "low tech".
| phreeza wrote:
| I think that tension is basically their whole thing.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Lowresourcetechmagazine.com is too long domain name, no?
|
| But yeah, "doing more with less" is the focus here. Skip
| unnecessary cruft. Not so much avoid using (high) tech stuff.
|
| Also note that in the realm of computing (or even general
| electronics), high-tech IS frugal, if used appropiately. Thx to
| Moore's law, switch-mode power supplies, RPi style computers
| (or microcontrollers on the low end), e-paper / OLED displays &
| similar fancy stuff. Doing _without_ those would be wasteful,
| imho.
| Ekaros wrote:
| If you have electricity you are not really in realm of low
| tech. I would consider mechanical human powered(not bike with
| generator) to be low tech. And those might make sense if you
| value that type of thing and don't want easiest way out...
| SamWhited wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes
| offline
|
| https://archive.is/CFrk2
| tooltechgeek wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| specproc wrote:
| This may be a good time to give Linux a go as a daily driver,
| if that's possible.
|
| I made the switch a year or so ago, and it's been really
| refreshing having my laptop not treat me in the way you
| describe.
| spencerf wrote:
| 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/
| ris wrote:
| 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-po...
|
| That's not to say it's not occasionally informative about obscure
| technologies of the past.
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