Surprised to see no mention of Urbit, which sits somewhere between Uxn and Linux. Holding Urbit's OS in your head would certainly be more challenging than Uxn, but it's still doable. When something breaks, you can actually fix it yourself (I have). That's a refreshing feeling.
The slab and the permacomputer
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#22Great 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…
> "... by individuals and small communities" almost invariably means "by experienced developers who want a playground."
I acknowledge this.
> "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.
I have spoken to friends and family and they are perfectly happy with their mainstream computing choices.
I acknowledge that my preference for back-to-basics is partly due to fun. I'm not trying to change minds. I enjoy this small paradise for hackers.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 downsiz…
"not your chips, not your data" & "not your software, not your data"
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#24Maybe this exists, but what would a non-blockchain "distributed cloud" look like? Bittorrent, but for compute instead of just storage/transfer. You might need some kind of central authority orchestrating it all, almost certainly to manage payments at least. I'm just wondering how the world's consumer computers stand up against megacorp data-centers when you mash them all together. Certainly the "edge" could be even c…
> Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow.
Isn't this essentially what browser+js does? you download someones code and execute it locally. Reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1367/
however, after typing that out I think I see what you really meant: if I'm running something compute intense, why can't I just borrow cpu from a couple neighbors instead of going all the way to the datacenter?
Sandboxing would be important, but it would also be pretty hard to build applications that really take advantage of this model. concurrency on one machine is hard enough!
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#25Maybe this exists, but what would a non-blockchain "distributed cloud" look like? Bittorrent, but for compute instead of just storage/transfer. You might need some kind of central authority orchestrating it all, almost certainly to manage payments at least. I'm just wondering how the world's consumer computers stand up against megacorp data-centers when you mash them all together. Certainly the "edge" could be even c…
> Certainly the "edge" could be even closer to the end user than data centers would allow. Isn't this essentially what browser+js does? you download someones code and execute it locally. Reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/1367/ however, after typing that out I think I see what you really meant: if I'm running something compute intense, why can't I just borrow cpu from a couple neighbors instead of going all the…
Containers, and especially lambdas, have made the units of the cloud more and more granular. I don't think you'd have to think about concurrency any more than you already do
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#26If you could take a computer, and reliably select a subset of resources and give only those to a process, it would scratch a lot of itches in the world. Mainframes have been doing this since 1967 with MFT, and its successors.
It's highly unfortunate that this can't seem to be done in systems with millions of times the compute resources, decades later. /s
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#27This got me thinking. The same way a lot of people defend access to clean water, healthcare and others as fundamental rights, there will be a point when we’ll need to consider the capacity to run computational workloads a fundamental right as well.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#28An observation from an Apple fan/addict/drone follows:
The minor visual tweaks which arrived in macOS 11 and iOS 14, to me, evoke a similar sense of "slab" computing. I saw it in the merging of UI tooling; in the visual and operational related-ness of widgets across the two operating systems; with the tiny details like the hazy amorphous backgrounds and the flattening of "windows"; with the gentle deprecation of "system" UI (making the menubar recede); most especially with the expansion of cross-device tooling - your current state with many document types can move with you from device to device. The visual similarities are nothing to do with "merging the operating systems". Apple likely won't do that - they tie the OS to the hardware, the form factor, the principle input/output mechanisms. The similarities are about providing consistent experience and interfacing across different operating systems. It's probably also a bit about "branding" Apple's version and approach to "slab" computing.
Apple are already embracing this "slab" idea, already have it working across a growing number of applications and device types, in a way that non-nerds can use it with minimal set-up.
Re: The slab and the permacomputer
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 downsiz…
"not your chips, not your data" & "not your software, not your data"
definite improvement!