[deleted]
Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
51–60 of 81 posts
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#52I 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 to…
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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#53There 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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nope, there's definitely junk that is non-functional.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 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 and 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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#56Booting 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…
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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#57Frugality is a quality on which we have collectively given up in the technology field, sadly.
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.
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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#58Interesting 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.
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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#59I 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.
Re: Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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.
Don’t start at the edges, start at the center