The slab and the permacomputer
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The slab and the permacomputer
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Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#2Although 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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#3Great 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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#4Although 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…
> 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."
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#5Great 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…
"... 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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#6Although 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…
> 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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#7Although 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…
> 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. T…
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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#8Although 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…
> 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. T…
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).
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#9Great 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…
"... 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 force…
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.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#10Permacomputing 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.