The higher the display refresh rate the metaphorically "quieter" the computer. Discrete frames introduce latency, phantom array effect, and (on most displays) sample-and-hold blur. These don't exist in real life, so they weaken the illusion of the computer becoming part of your body, like a pencil or a hand tool. A computer that can be operated with minimum cognitive load needs a display refresh rate of at least 1000 Hz.
We had CRT displays that could easily do 100 to 120 Hz. Then we regessed to LCD panels that could do 60 Hz and it somehow became the performance target.
That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within.
Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more.
> I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.
But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying.
I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones).
We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage.
[1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)
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'.
It definitely is a thing at least, to pine for the "small web" [0].
I think as well, dissatisfaction with major social networks is pretty widespread, I don't know how often it comes.alongside a pining for something more "artisinal" though.
People pining for the small web are a narrow elite in modern society. They are generally people who frequently use a desktop computer and enjoy reading (and writing) longform text. Most internet users today use a phone for accessing the internet, a platform which tends to discourage the writing of longform text and even the reading thereof. This is why image and video platforms are so popular now, as you can see from people's internet use in public places. And even a text-based site like Reddit has seen comment lengths decline drastically from substantial paragraphs to 180-character quips.
It's very difficult these days in the EU. With all the regulations around age verification, the requirement to work with police, having a privacy and cookie policy, a moderation policy, all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom.
Some countries like Germany also require legal contact information (an Impressum). Technically it even applies to sites outside Germany that Germans can visit, though they don't really have a way of enforcing that. So basically if you have a website you're required to doxx yourself. The old web is not just being destroyed by big tech but by the politicians as well.
It's kinda time for a semi-darknet free from all the legislation. Tor is a bit too dark for it but it would be good to have some kind of anonimised hobby net that can escape all this red tape. Basically the free for all that the internet used to be in the late 90s.
> It's very difficult these days in the EU. With all the regulations around age verification, the requirement to work with police, having a privacy and cookie policy, a moderation policy, all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom.
I don't think that's true across EU. Seemingly very non-traditional forums, huge ones, stay online still today, many hosted within EU. Probably Flashback Forum is one of the oldest and biggest forums in Nordics, geared towards "freedom of speech" and still online today.
Sounds like it's very difficult in Germany indeed to host an anonymous or pseudoanonymous website/forum, but Germany is also not the entire EU or Europe.
> Some countries like Germany also require legal contact information (an Impressum). Technically it even applies to sites outside Germany that Germans can visit
I don't understand people bitching about Impressum like its some sort of German-only thing.
I am sure if you looked at the legislation of many countries, you would find similar requirements for companies to identify themselves. Off the top of my head you have Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK ... and probably the rest of the EU/EEA states as well. IIRC it is also a requirement in a number of Asian countries.
In reality requiring an Impressum (or equivalent in other countries) is no different to having to put identification information on a company's old-school letterhead. Its just good manners so that your customers/suppliers can know who they are dealing with.
Personally I dislike the US attitude of trying your damnest to hide any trace of your company's identifying or contact information from your website. ;)
> Its just good manners so that your customers/suppliers can know who they are dealing with.
That's the (widespread) issue, treating personal websites and online communities like businesses. Some are, but that's not something to encourage or assume.
I live in the Czech Republic, where you can buy a SIM card anonymously and build a website without identifying yourself. I don't see a good reason for other countries to not give their citizens the same freedom, and am vehemently against reducing freedom just because "other countries do it".
> I live in the Czech Republic ....build a website without identifying yourself
I am not familiar with Czech Republic law but out of curiosity I asked an LLM:
§ 435 of the Civil Code (Act no. 89/2012 Coll.)
The law explicitly says every podnikatel (entrepreneur/business) must include on all business documents and on information made publicly available through remote access (i.e. their website):
- the company's name (firma),
- its registered seat (sídlo) or place of business,
- its identification number (IČO) — the Czech equivalent of a company registration number,
- and if registered in the Commercial Register (obchodní rejstřík), the registration details including the file reference and section/insert (spisová značka, oddíl, vložka).
This is the summary provisions that was previously found in § 13a of the old Commercial Code (obchodní zákoník) and is now codified in the Civil Code.
Consumer Protection Act (Act no. 634/1992 Coll.) — adds requirements when you sell to consumers online: business's name and address, ADR (out-of-court dispute resolution) body information, delivery/payment terms, and — for online marketplaces — how offers are ranked, etc.
I then did a quick Google to attempt to validate the LLM and it seems this is indeed true, I found https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2012-89 and putting it through Google Translate, §435 is pretty clear that publication of name and address is required.
Yes, I have a business registration and have to include personal details in a bunch of places. But if do things as a natural person, those requirements don't apply (and it's even simpler for people without a business registration).
Assuming that summary is accurate: it specifically talks about businesses, so the requirements presumably don't apply to a personal website, which is what the post you were responding to was about.
Well that's probably because Germany is one of the few countries that actually enforces it. I'm in Spain and I've helped build some websites and none of them had anything like this. But in Spain there's a huge difference between law and enforcement so many laws don't actually matter in practice. Whereas in Germany they do try to enforce it even outside of their borders.
> it's a very naive thing to think that it's just "customers/suppliers" looking at who they're dealing with
Its still no excuse.
Nobody forces anybody to start a business.
If somebody chooses to start a business then they should do grown-up things like having insurance and complying with the law – which includes publishing their business's contact details.
The legal and good manners reasons for publishing a business's contact details far out-weigh any negative ones.
I am sure I am not the only person on this planet who associates alarm bells with small/medium businesses that try to hide their contact details on their website. As a customer it rings alarm bells that they are going to be a pain the neck to deal with if something goes wrong – if a business is trying to bypass such fundamental requirements, then it makes you think about how they feel about e.g. consumer rights law in relation to handling returns.
>all that crap that the politicians force not just on the big ones that need it but also the little forum run by the one kid in his bedroom
It's bad enough but not quite as bad as you claim. Article 19 of the DSA exempts small websites from the most onerous and expensive rules that big platforms have to comply with.
That's only the DSA, it's only a small part of web regulation in the EU.
Overall there is very little in the way of exceptions for small businesses. Similarly with the EPR / PPWR changes that went into effect on the 12th of August, a lot of owner-operated microbusinesses have had to stop shipping to many EU countries due to the crazy costs of registration (which has to be done in each individual EU country no less, totally contrary to the idea of the EU): https://ppwrconnect.com/blog/ppwr-applies-12-august-2026-who...
Some artists send only one padded envelope to some countries (or none, in some years) and have to deal with hundreds of euros of registration cost for some countries. It's ridiculous. There's 2 little pieces of relief for microbusiness but most of the crazy red tape applies.
The problem with their regulation is that the big ones that were meant to be targeted (e.g. Google and Meta) have plenty of lawyers to sidestep all the regulation, and the small initiatives are all killed because they don't have such capabilities. We're still tracked by Google and Meta everywhere.
And then there was the 3 euro per product type surcharge on small packets, making it impossible for small artists to buy items that cost 20-30 cents a piece. Legislation lobbied for by the big buck chains like Lidl and Ahold.
To be honest I'm now strongly in favour of reeling in the EU project to simply some economic treaties and easy movement of people because they've become a stringpuppet for big business lobby. Definitely not some big federal state (we've seen where that path leads in America)
I share your frustration, but won't restricting the EU only cause barriers to trade to grow?
A surprising amount needs to be unified in order to have fully free trade, and I see unwillingness to lose existing national structures as a big problem in today's EU.
Yes, GDPR with the right to be forgotten and being able to request which of your data is being processed is very hard on small organizations and volunteers.
You get a request for which data is processed from a user and suddenly you have to spend 8 hours in paper archives to find if the weekly charity mailing has ever mentioned this person by their full name.
I run one. It's pretty good. I don't run any adverts, which confers the advantage that Google doesn't really list it anywhere because they can't make money off the users.
It's pretty easy to do these days. I won't drop a link to it unless anyone really wants to discuss old Range Rovers, but it runs forum software called FlaskBB which is worth a play.
> 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.
Yes I noticed that chat apps have kinda taken over the role of social media. At least for the usecase of staying in touch with friends.
I'm sure why too though, it's because all social media push these algorithmic feeds on us meaning we get bombarded with shit we didn't choose to follow.
With chat apps we can once again communicate with just the people we want without all the crap being shoved in between.
Me too. Like maybe we could convert to DC at the breaker box so I didn't have to be haunted by the squealing capacitors in all of the power supplies that are scattered around my house.
It's the coils that squeal, they're the only part that has anything that can move mechanically.
In the olden days of the late 80s when I had a high school job at weekends repairing TVs there was a particular family of Bang and Olufsen TVs where you had to desolder a choke in the power supply, smear it all full of some sort of resinous goo (they recommended a particular epoxy; I found that Isopon car body filler was the gold standard, setting into slightly flexible polyester that didn't fall off or crack).
Within the repair industry it had been nicknamed "Beobuzz", after all the other "Beo<something>" products.
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.
> 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.
A fair bit of this can already be implemented with a workflow that looks like:
Sensors -> zigbee or zwave -> home assistant
Or Internet based data -> home assistant (weather, external data, the humidity sensor at your local airport might be more accurate than the one on your deck, etc).
And then open source extensions/tools built into home assistant to cause things to happen, send external signals, run scripts, call APIs, talk to a local LLM, etc.
It's very much not a black box of opaque closed source software, rather the opposite, and it has a very active and technically knowledgeable enthusiast development community behind it.
If we posit for a minute that the data acquisition into locally-run system problem is not impossible to solve, then all kinds of things can be built atop that to serve your own unique home preferences.
> Having the logic run local
At the smallest scale people are doing this on raspberry pi, though I have seen people have much more satisfactory results on something with somewhat more system resources like an Intel N150 CPU based mini PC with 12GB RAM.
Going a bit up a bit in budget from there, people are running home assistant and frigate together on the same tiny system that is a KVM hypervisor (again all open source, no black boxes involved), so that Frigate can have a GPU passed through to it for image object detection/video analysis pipelines.
Home assistant gets updated quite frequently and so does the OS that runs beneath it. My point is that the chain you are describing here can be (is) one single device, with no outside dependencies that runs the logic on a room level. Quieter computing is if it works without the constant upkeep.
Indeed I think there is a lot of work remaining to be done to make a 'it just updates itself and everything is fine' workflow for home assistant as a container on top of a linux-based platform that a completely non technical user never has to worry about.
Basically something that requires no more level of technical sophistication (zero) than an xbox series x updating its operating system, which requires nothing more than a user to click "okay" and wait for it to reboot, if you power on an xbox and bring it onto the network and its software is several months out of date.
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.
"I use a lot of computing for entertainment purposes and leisure activities"
Couldn't agree more. And phones with a touchscreen have been optimised on this axis (ppi, stereo speakers, fps, oled, latency, etc.)
Examples of logic that you want to last for years: devices you set up for your parents to notify you when they get up in the morning. Or that their air quality and temperature is ok.
By logic, I mean source code that determines the behaviour of the device.
I don't feel threatened, I just think you and the webpage are stupid. I love how you jump STRAIGHT to transphobia at the slightest pushback. I'm pro trans rights, just anti-idiot. And by idiot i mean anybody that want people that dont agree with them to die.
I'm almost suspecting that you are not a true trans activist, because it's easier to think that comments like this are trolling. Atleast that would make sense.
totally outside of the scope of this tech website but genuine question: assuming you fixed you heart successfully, would you ever be guiding others to die?
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.
The higher the display refresh rate the metaphorically "quieter" the computer. Discrete frames introduce latency, phantom array effect, and (on most displays) sample-and-hold blur. These don't exist in real life, so they weaken the illusion of the computer becoming part of your body, like a pencil or a hand tool. A computer that can be operated with minimum cognitive load needs a display refresh rate of at least 1000 Hz.
Even a now obsolete HP ZR2240w (24" 1920x1200@60Hz) was a huge upgrade from a 21" Hitachi Superscan Supreme https://crtdatabase.com/crts/hitachi/hitachi-superscan-21-cm...
That thing was at least Trinitron equivalent, if not better, because it lacked the thin wires holding the mask from within.
Now you are talking about the start of all that, OFC there were bad and cheap ones, but there was also very good stuff from the beginning by Eizo, Sharp, NEC, and many more.
Just as with CRTs.
I don't miss them.
But going from, say, a Sony Trinitron CRT [1] to one the first LCD was a huge step backwards, which is what GP is saying.
I did wait for the first LCD with DVI support before switching: for the difference in crispyness between an analog video cable and a DVI one was night and day (I also won many points when I helped friend set up a startup in southern california and we realized one person out of two had picked the VGA cable instead of the DVI one when setting up its desk / computer: so with the CTO late at night we went through every PC and changed all those with VGA cables to the DVI ones).
We're not saying modern days flat monitors aren't better than old CRTs: we're saying the first flat screens were complete suckage.
[1] even though on a Trinitron you could see two faint horizontal lines (Trinitron were still amazing)
https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=832
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.
It definitely is a thing at least, to pine for the "small web" [0].
I think as well, dissatisfaction with major social networks is pretty widespread, I don't know how often it comes.alongside a pining for something more "artisinal" though.
[0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31807854
Artisnal means "the algorithm" is written in PDP-10 assembly language and MACLISP, and the "editor" and "messenger" is written in TECO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759887
Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" of March 31, 1987.
It was waaaay more than just reported to the local sysadmin, and almost got UCB kicked off the ARPANET.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759965
Keith Lynch documented why "History of the Net is Important":
https://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
Some countries like Germany also require legal contact information (an Impressum). Technically it even applies to sites outside Germany that Germans can visit, though they don't really have a way of enforcing that. So basically if you have a website you're required to doxx yourself. The old web is not just being destroyed by big tech but by the politicians as well.
It's kinda time for a semi-darknet free from all the legislation. Tor is a bit too dark for it but it would be good to have some kind of anonimised hobby net that can escape all this red tape. Basically the free for all that the internet used to be in the late 90s.
I don't think that's true across EU. Seemingly very non-traditional forums, huge ones, stay online still today, many hosted within EU. Probably Flashback Forum is one of the oldest and biggest forums in Nordics, geared towards "freedom of speech" and still online today.
Sounds like it's very difficult in Germany indeed to host an anonymous or pseudoanonymous website/forum, but Germany is also not the entire EU or Europe.
I don't understand people bitching about Impressum like its some sort of German-only thing.
I am sure if you looked at the legislation of many countries, you would find similar requirements for companies to identify themselves. Off the top of my head you have Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, UK ... and probably the rest of the EU/EEA states as well. IIRC it is also a requirement in a number of Asian countries.
In reality requiring an Impressum (or equivalent in other countries) is no different to having to put identification information on a company's old-school letterhead. Its just good manners so that your customers/suppliers can know who they are dealing with.
Personally I dislike the US attitude of trying your damnest to hide any trace of your company's identifying or contact information from your website. ;)
That's the (widespread) issue, treating personal websites and online communities like businesses. Some are, but that's not something to encourage or assume.
I live in the Czech Republic, where you can buy a SIM card anonymously and build a website without identifying yourself. I don't see a good reason for other countries to not give their citizens the same freedom, and am vehemently against reducing freedom just because "other countries do it".
I am not familiar with Czech Republic law but out of curiosity I asked an LLM:
I then did a quick Google to attempt to validate the LLM and it seems this is indeed true, I found https://www.zakonyprolidi.cz/cs/2012-89 and putting it through Google Translate, §435 is pretty clear that publication of name and address is required.it's a very naive thing to think that it's just "customers/suppliers" looking at who they're dealing with
not to mention if you're not paying enough for a whole company etc., you need to put your home address there iirc.
Its still no excuse.
Nobody forces anybody to start a business.
If somebody chooses to start a business then they should do grown-up things like having insurance and complying with the law – which includes publishing their business's contact details.
The legal and good manners reasons for publishing a business's contact details far out-weigh any negative ones.
I am sure I am not the only person on this planet who associates alarm bells with small/medium businesses that try to hide their contact details on their website. As a customer it rings alarm bells that they are going to be a pain the neck to deal with if something goes wrong – if a business is trying to bypass such fundamental requirements, then it makes you think about how they feel about e.g. consumer rights law in relation to handling returns.
It's bad enough but not quite as bad as you claim. Article 19 of the DSA exempts small websites from the most onerous and expensive rules that big platforms have to comply with.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng
Overall there is very little in the way of exceptions for small businesses. Similarly with the EPR / PPWR changes that went into effect on the 12th of August, a lot of owner-operated microbusinesses have had to stop shipping to many EU countries due to the crazy costs of registration (which has to be done in each individual EU country no less, totally contrary to the idea of the EU): https://ppwrconnect.com/blog/ppwr-applies-12-august-2026-who...
Some artists send only one padded envelope to some countries (or none, in some years) and have to deal with hundreds of euros of registration cost for some countries. It's ridiculous. There's 2 little pieces of relief for microbusiness but most of the crazy red tape applies.
The problem with their regulation is that the big ones that were meant to be targeted (e.g. Google and Meta) have plenty of lawyers to sidestep all the regulation, and the small initiatives are all killed because they don't have such capabilities. We're still tracked by Google and Meta everywhere.
And then there was the 3 euro per product type surcharge on small packets, making it impossible for small artists to buy items that cost 20-30 cents a piece. Legislation lobbied for by the big buck chains like Lidl and Ahold.
To be honest I'm now strongly in favour of reeling in the EU project to simply some economic treaties and easy movement of people because they've become a stringpuppet for big business lobby. Definitely not some big federal state (we've seen where that path leads in America)
A surprising amount needs to be unified in order to have fully free trade, and I see unwillingness to lose existing national structures as a big problem in today's EU.
Absolutely, but the context was small online forums. I don't disagree with the gist of your general criticism.
You get a request for which data is processed from a user and suddenly you have to spend 8 hours in paper archives to find if the weekly charity mailing has ever mentioned this person by their full name.
It's pretty easy to do these days. I won't drop a link to it unless anyone really wants to discuss old Range Rovers, but it runs forum software called FlaskBB which is worth a play.
It is a slow, ugly, overcomplicated mess designed by people who do not know how threading works and don't know how to do email properly. Yuck.
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.
I'm sure why too though, it's because all social media push these algorithmic feeds on us meaning we get bombarded with shit we didn't choose to follow.
With chat apps we can once again communicate with just the people we want without all the crap being shoved in between.
https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing
In the olden days of the late 80s when I had a high school job at weekends repairing TVs there was a particular family of Bang and Olufsen TVs where you had to desolder a choke in the power supply, smear it all full of some sort of resinous goo (they recommended a particular epoxy; I found that Isopon car body filler was the gold standard, setting into slightly flexible polyester that didn't fall off or crack).
Within the repair industry it had been nicknamed "Beobuzz", after all the other "Beo<something>" products.
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 fair bit of this can already be implemented with a workflow that looks like:
Sensors -> zigbee or zwave -> home assistant
Or Internet based data -> home assistant (weather, external data, the humidity sensor at your local airport might be more accurate than the one on your deck, etc).
And then open source extensions/tools built into home assistant to cause things to happen, send external signals, run scripts, call APIs, talk to a local LLM, etc.
It's very much not a black box of opaque closed source software, rather the opposite, and it has a very active and technically knowledgeable enthusiast development community behind it.
If we posit for a minute that the data acquisition into locally-run system problem is not impossible to solve, then all kinds of things can be built atop that to serve your own unique home preferences.
> Having the logic run local
At the smallest scale people are doing this on raspberry pi, though I have seen people have much more satisfactory results on something with somewhat more system resources like an Intel N150 CPU based mini PC with 12GB RAM.
Going a bit up a bit in budget from there, people are running home assistant and frigate together on the same tiny system that is a KVM hypervisor (again all open source, no black boxes involved), so that Frigate can have a GPU passed through to it for image object detection/video analysis pipelines.
Home assistant gets updated quite frequently and so does the OS that runs beneath it. My point is that the chain you are describing here can be (is) one single device, with no outside dependencies that runs the logic on a room level. Quieter computing is if it works without the constant upkeep.
Basically something that requires no more level of technical sophistication (zero) than an xbox series x updating its operating system, which requires nothing more than a user to click "okay" and wait for it to reboot, if you power on an xbox and bring it onto the network and its software is several months out of date.
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.
Couldn't agree more. And phones with a touchscreen have been optimised on this axis (ppi, stereo speakers, fps, oled, latency, etc.)
Examples of logic that you want to last for years: devices you set up for your parents to notify you when they get up in the morning. Or that their air quality and temperature is ok.
By logic, I mean source code that determines the behaviour of the device.
I'm almost suspecting that you are not a true trans activist, because it's easier to think that comments like this are trolling. Atleast that would make sense.
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.