A lot of folks will tell you that computers with less features are the the answer, but over the past couple of years I’ve come to realise that how we interact (keyboard and mouse) with computers now is only one way to do it.
There’s something about building distraction-free computing, that doesn’t have to be less. I’ve been building something over the past five years, that puts an entire smart home into one device - sensors and microcontrollers have come incredibly far to make it feel a little bit like magic. What I’m getting at is - what if the environment provides input to the computer and not us directly? This would be one way of exploring quieter computing.
It makes the world your canvas, but the device itself is intentionally screen-less. When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen? Usually this involves a chain of devices, working together inside a blackbox running on an OS that no one single person can understand. What if all the cruft is abstracted away, and you can actually program and script in highly abstracted APIs what is going to happen. And that logic will last you for years. Or you tell an LLM and it writes the logic (code) for you. Having the logic run local makes the experience easier to reason about - now and in the future.
So yes, you can write code that calculates the angle of the sun and fire off a web request or email to send you an interesting HN link. But you can do much more...
[Edit] Again, this is only one approach that changes how we process input to reach a desired output.
A lot of desires that require computation might not be so "logical" in nature, at least not in the automation kind of things.
I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities, like reading news/ebooks, watching shows/movies, listening to music, gaming, clothing/furniture shopping, going into all kinds of rabbit holes etc. The HN link from GP was such an example.
How could any automation through other physical input help there? Sure, there is vector similarity and recommendation engines, but how could any sensor interpret my aesthetics and my desires to belong/grasp/play/participate?
That sounds exactly like the empty sci-fi promises that current AI companies are betting on.
There's precedent here in things like fast food vs. farm to table, mass produced goods vs arts and craft, digital photography vs film. Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'. Maybe it's because the internet is seen more as a tool than something to experience. Or maybe it's because we're still early in the 'mass produced internet' age. Or maybe network effects make transitioning away from the big networks to smaller ones difficult, unless you're only communicating with online-first groups. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the future, because right now it certainly seems like things are trending in the opposite direction.
> Yet at least in my social circle, I don't really hear anyone pining for an 'artisan internet'.
In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate.
Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar.
I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
Often we are missing something in that we don't need to change what we use quite so regularly. We can learn to enjoy tech of the past and still find it useful today. It would both be better for the planet and satisfy our realisation that constant upgrades and changes aren't always needed or even better.
Does a Canon S90 suddenly take bad photos or take photos that can't be printed? No, of course not, and that's a decade old.
Can you still write on a Thinkpad X201? Yes of course. If anything, that keyboard is far better.
There’s something about building distraction-free computing, that doesn’t have to be less. I’ve been building something over the past five years, that puts an entire smart home into one device - sensors and microcontrollers have come incredibly far to make it feel a little bit like magic. What I’m getting at is - what if the environment provides input to the computer and not us directly? This would be one way of exploring quieter computing.
So yes, you can write code that calculates the angle of the sun and fire off a web request or email to send you an interesting HN link. But you can do much more...
[Edit] Again, this is only one approach that changes how we process input to reach a desired output.
A lot of desires that require computation might not be so "logical" in nature, at least not in the automation kind of things.
I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities, like reading news/ebooks, watching shows/movies, listening to music, gaming, clothing/furniture shopping, going into all kinds of rabbit holes etc. The HN link from GP was such an example.
How could any automation through other physical input help there? Sure, there is vector similarity and recommendation engines, but how could any sensor interpret my aesthetics and my desires to belong/grasp/play/participate?
That sounds exactly like the empty sci-fi promises that current AI companies are betting on.
In network engineering and telecom infrastructure circles, there's already a near universal opinion that big walled garden mass market social media (facebook, instagram, twitter, whatever) are permanently ruined and good only for shitposting. Or keeping up with posts from boomer generation / older gen-x relatives who don't know any better and won't use any other method to communicate.
Anything serious has moved into things like private Signal groups where the participants all know each other, and similar.
I also find it interesting to see people who started in-depth technical use of the internet well after 2010 "discovering" the concept of self hosting and running some of their own infrastructure, or even getting entirely fed up and removing anything google or microsoft (or similar subscription based) from their lives entirely. These are people who weren't there in the early days of the Internet and are now voluntarily choosing to say "no thanks" to lots of easy to use, subscriber-forever cloud based business models.
Does a Canon S90 suddenly take bad photos or take photos that can't be printed? No, of course not, and that's a decade old.
Can you still write on a Thinkpad X201? Yes of course. If anything, that keyboard is far better.
But I was bamboozled! The link wasn't a link. It was just colored text! My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
That said, this is a very cool website.