Comment by 600frogs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 600frogs | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't tell if I love this piece or hate this piece.

On the one hand, it really kicked off my imagination, and I started to yearn for absolute computing simplicity and efficiency. A world where I can run absolutely anything I want off of a Raspberry Pi Zero and a small battery pack. I even spent half an hour looking into the most lightweight GUI toolkits available, to start to contribute to this vision.

On the other hand... it all seems so futile, and out-of-touch with reality. In the real world, I need to pick the best tool for the job at work, regardless of the philosophy of the tool. And in my spare time, I can't help but feel like it's a pointless endeavour. I'm not living on a boat, and I'm not working on a Raspberry Pi. Why rewrite the software I use into something more lightweight when I can just use the software without consequence now, and save all that pain?

Plus, there's a certain amount of 1. pretentiousness and 2. hypocrisy that I read in the article, that I don't want to touch with a 10 foot pole. Using your own time system is nothing more than a "I want to be different" gesture. I honestly can't see the benefit at all, despite his explanation. If you want to do 2 week sprints, just do a 2 week sprint. If you want to work to 40 minute Pomodoros, just do 40 minute Pomodoros. The main benefit that I can see is the element of mysticism to seeing things on the wiki timestamped as `14X05`, to add to the feeling that this is some other-worldly operation going on that's just out of reach. Yet he scoffs at the interview for suggesting it's an aesthetic thing.

Regarding the hypocrisy - Devine preaches for energy efficiency and simplicity above all else, then writes half his tools using <canvas> on a bloated web browser. It doesn't quite stack up for me.

I mean, sure, he’s living a life out of a Wes Anderson film, free from kids/family/house/whatever.

I quite like the idea of numbering sprints A-Z, though. One thing I’ve noticed at work with sprints and dates is that time marches on and it feels like an abstraction, an endless future and cycle.

26 sprints, a, b, c, d, ..., z, well, that’s something with a clear start and finish, a sequence we’ve internalized from a very young age. You get to R or S, you start thinking, whoa, not many sprints left for me to finish some big goals. I think it could help focus team members a bit.

I definitely get having distinct sprints and seeing where you are at in the bigger picture, but this can absolutely be achieved without distancing yourself from the rest of the human race who are all using a different timekeeping system. It's just arbitrary contrarianism in my eyes. Keep 2 week sprints, label them A-Z, but use standard timestamps so the rest of the world can join in.

I like your comment because i can see the ambivalence between the hobbyist curious to see where this path leads to and the "pragmatist" wondering whether this path is worth even thinking about.

> I'm not living on a boat, and I'm not working on a Raspberry Pi. Why rewrite the software I use into something more lightweight when I can just use the software without consequence now, and save all that pain?

There is a very real trend of people in the computerspace who are applying the "questions" that climate change and working towards a more sustainable world ask us: much like in the physical world, doing always more is a mistake and if we can do what we need to do with fewer resources, then changing our tools to reach this state is a worthy goal in itself. Not only because we should reduce our usage of resources and energy and make sure our tools last longer than the single-digit years they usually do in computerland, but also because if/when TheCollapse (TM) finally comes we won't have access to the latest and shiniest tech anymore so we'll have to make do with what we come up with, and that's going to be old computers and phones lying around unused.

So as always it's a question of priorities: if you don't consider resources usage and climate change as an important enough issue, doing what they're doing will always remain in the domain of hobbyists enjoying their little fun, just like those people who build the most insane programs with fewer characters than are in this very comment.

I'm absolutely on your side in theory - big bloated layers on bloated layers for a Todo list app grinds my gears more than you can imagine, but moving back to more primitive tools and inconvenience in the name of climate change seems like such a tiny drop in the ocean as to be a pointless sacrifice.

There's also the question of prepping, but I'm a chronic optimist, so I don't think a true collapse is coming in my lifetime. And if does, there's always that CollapseOS which was posted here a year or so ago to get me through. Though thinking about it - I think perhaps whether or not I can browse HN during the apocalypse will be the least of my worries.

I think the more compelling argument against the project trajectory being sustainable is the ongoing growth of the platform that's being built and the resulting terrarium problem. Uxn isn't just a 100rabbits thing now, but a community of collaborators...and the things that platform does are really pretty trivial "dawn-of-microcomputing" things in most respects. So you end up in a space where it could have been accomplished in an emulator and tooling that already existed, but this sanctified "simpler" codebase was made instead, and now it's seeing gradual, irresistible growth, such that it will inevitably go beyond the needs of its creators at some point if it continues like this. PICO-8, the original "fantasy console" billed as such, has also grown, its execution model has changed multiple times, it's added significant new features. At some point you will want to configure the emulator, and when you configure the emulator the uniform experience starts to slip away - allowing features for recontextualization is more accessible, more powerful. The quaint little terrarium you thought you had under your control grows back into the jungle of computing again.

This is a quandary that has occupied my attention for the past year: what's actually sustainable in computing? But the answer, when I came to it, is simple: formats and protocols, all the way down. Endianness, word sizes, textual encodings, state machine I/O signals, and forms of structured data on up to parsable source documents of various kinds. Everyone's always like "just use JSON" or "just use a PNG" or "just write an HTTP request". Formats are where all the real power is, and they do things platforms can't.

And the format's never really the whole codebase. Wherever you have "the code" you have the platform. If you just describe a "simple" stack machine's code and I/O and then proceed to build a massive amount of stuff on it, what you most likely have is an underdocumented platform. When you go to build a game on that, you still build an engine, and the engine implements some rendering algorithms, specifies a timestep, and reads some assets. That's a more completely specified medium that could be turned into a simple format of its own, which indicates that the fantasy console was just a method of constraining the engine. But you could start by defining the rules of a constrained engine instead, no?

And that's kind of where my thoughts have gone. It's irrelevant whether it's on Javascript or hand-tuned assembly or a VM: the actual progress is made when you can stop indulging your inner Microsoft by building platforms, but it's so, so hard to avoid doing that.

Beautifully put. Do you have a community where you talk about this stuff?

> I need to pick the best tool for the job at work

the best tool isn't the best on the market but often the one currently at hand. Imagine cooking – my knives are like that. Decent but definitively not high end.

Agreed, but that only hammers home the point even more - I don't have time to mine the ore and smelt the iron and fashion the perfect knife tailored to me when I've got deadlines to hit and there's a perfectly good knife ready to be used on the wall.

Funny you mentioned hammer. I only have a hammer hanging on the wall. Im gonna use that to slice my onions. Is what my mind drifted to...

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