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Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#41

Post by ben_w »

p_l wrote: post #39
blueflow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 swit…

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).

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#42

Post by spurgu »

npteljes wrote: post #18
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #13

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#43

Post by olyjohn »

nicolas_t wrote: post #30
blueflow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#44

Post by derbOac »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #13

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…

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".

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#45

Post by inciampati »

overtomanu wrote: post #33
npteljes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Yes, life is complex literally!! Even our DNA has lot of "unused"/"dormant" code

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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#46

Post by p_l »

ben_w wrote: post #41
p_l wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 swit…

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 fr…

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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#47

Post by tooltechgeek »

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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#48

Post by phreeza »

derbOac wrote: post #44
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #13

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…

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 att…

I think that tension is basically their whole thing.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#49

Post by roughly »

txutxu wrote: post #12

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 init…

> 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.

Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies

#50

Post by tonyarkles »

olyjohn wrote: post #43
nicolas_t wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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

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