Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past technologies
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
It the least discriminatory mode of transport: it caters to all ages, almost-all abilities (1). It give you free exercise, its good for the environment, for the community, for the local economy (small commercial shops benefit from cycle infra, ask notjustbikes and search it)
The reason we dont use the bicycle more often is because cars. Cars monopolized our streets taking most of the space making conditions too hostile for many to cycle. We then built cities (actually bulldozed cities) for the car and now distances are just too big (specially in the US).
Build cities for people not machines.
(1) I am including trikes and wheelchairs, and anything on wheels powered by humans.
Yeah I know about clothes, snow spikes and such, no thanks.
Even if I lived in a 15 minute city, I would still want a car for when I want to go somewhere outside of the city.
or we could reimagine commutes? they only exist because we redesigned our environments around cars.
Cycling is not a tour-de-france style of cycling, most ppl can easily cycle 20kmh without much effort...
And why focus only on commute? Commutes benefit more from public transport.
cycling is optimal for short distances, errand-type of trips: nearby shop, school, pharmacy etc
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.
I made the switch a year or so ago, and it's been really refreshing having my laptop not treat me in the way you describe.
Also it's mildly terrifying this dynamic is now pervading things outside of general computing - there are people on this very forum that cargo cult forced "security upgrade" mentality for things like tvs and appliances, without having the slightest idea about the real revenue motives that drive this. Here's a hint: whirpool doesn't give a f about your wifi washer the day after you bought it; any money/engineering time spent on OTA updates is done strictly to sell you a new washer.
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.
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 initialization?
OK, so far, we've code and material to fill the whole life of an engineer, and we didn't reach still the OS bootloader.
Ah, the bootloader, who remembers lilo... here we go with grub. Go read it's source code, and return back to explain me everything that is in there... see you in 3 months only for this.
Here it goes, the kernel. A thing that normal users don't see or touch. More than 30 Million of lines of code more. I won't talk about complexity here, but this project can really say it's "batteries included". The same you get an old obscure filesystem/protocol nobody uses, than proc/mem/i-o/netowrk schedulers for supercomputers. Blobs, firmware, more graphics stuff, observability, wifi, storage, a whole word in itself and everything comes up in microseconds.
There is such initram thingy, which is another "mini" (not mini in lines of code) operative system. Busybox? xD look at that.
Now, here it comes... the low-tech king: systemd! our love-hated init system (only init? well you already know).
Now, here we can start the operative system (which may not bee too simple), we could be talking for years, of each of the micro-components that help to launch the base OS services until you get to the login page.
Depending on the distro... we're skipping a hell of complexity (it's not the same the ps aux of an ubuntu desktop, than the ps aux of a minimal system). Let's skip it, let's skip hundreds of software components and phone home stuff.
The auth part, gives for a few years more of reading code, talk about, skipping plugins and optional stuff.
Then you can get a window manager or a desktop environment (so a week or some months of code more), running over Xorg (do you think it's simple?) or Wayland (you can devote your life until you own this part).
And now... let's launch a "web browser". I will stop here, we won't finish if we go deep into the browser complexity.
Modern hardware, software and engineering, are a big ball of snow. 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.
A minimal Debian/AlmaLinux install is closer to 1G.
What did we gain with 100X the space, larger attack surface, and configuration complexity?
Even hardware is this way…
Look at the weight and power requirements of a SFF PC.
Then look at a blade server… Still requires heavy steel case, heavier than SFF PC because it’s larger, only job is to fit into heavy steel enclosure. Enclosure requires beefy steel rack to handle weight.
Every layer makes logical sense but the end result does not!!
Older NAS servers held multiple 3.5” drives (heavy), requiring big power supply. Now a plastic clip holds NVMe drives onto a motherboard — no steel!
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 than the modern computer you described. So I've been lost for a long time.
Life is just complex.
Even our DNA has lot of "unused"/"dormant" code
a sentiment already expressed in 1963! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35851599
Yet my present computer can do far more than the one I had, say 30 years ago, when things were "simpler".
I keep this Laptop as living proof that computers did indeed get shittier.
It replaced a £1500 starbook, which stopped powering on about a month after the warranty expired.
Not quite the same point as you, but I'll agree on something: old hardware that lasts is miraculous.
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
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 switch towards more and more hires raster bitmap as method of drawing interfaces means it's schlepping probably over half a gigabyte every frame.
But things that don't need that? Even for python development (not running jobs, interactive development) my recent switch from Kaby Lake i5 to Zen4 resulted in noticeable speedup. Despite the previous machine already having NVMe SSDs etc.
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).
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.
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 <div> 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 <img> and <map> 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.
Most of the complexity is caused either by the need to provide backward compatibility or by the fact that the many parties who design the components of a computer had very different ideas about which is the right way to design them (so many compatibility layers are required) or by the fact that the manufacturers insist on implementing various additional features that are not really needed, because they may be useful for them even if they are harmful for the final owner of the computer.
Many of the most horrible features of the modern computers have been caused by the fact that Microsoft could not be bothered to implement in their operating systems certain features whose right place was inside the OS and Intel has kept piling workarounds over workarounds in their CPUs, one more ugly than the other, like the System Management Mode and the Management Engine.
1: Windows would be insanely fast and incredibly unlikely to ever bog down or bluescreen for any reason, and 95% of my gripes with it as an IT professional would vanish into digital smoke.
2: Microsoft would be eaten alive by all of the people and companies suddenly finding the money and time to switch to Linux/OSX or just plain refusing to upgrade because an old printer driver or some bit of obscure hardware that only 13 people in the world use won't work on the new windows kernel without an extensive rewrite and the company that made it doesn't exist anymore.
It simply defines that the systems as measured reflect the structure that created them.
If you look at the software ecosystem as a whole, it is increasingly indivisible without the underlying structure, because interface types have been totally monopolized - you need a create a client-server REST/LAMP service with stateless agents consuming services
That is to say if you wanted to build a technical service, but that does not comply with existing trends in engineering then you just don’t exist
Technology is social it’s not simply mechanical
Socially, we don’t have holism as a goal. Cybernetics is socialism according to academia and increasing specialization means that nobody can fully understand the whole thing.
Because nobody can understand the whole thing there are opportunities for fragility, and basically stuff to break catastrophically with nobody knowing how to fix it.
I anticipate the next couple decades look like a lot of broken stuff that people rely on, that increasingly nobody knows how to fix
A lot of underappreciated thing with boot firmware these days is that what is presented to you as end user is absolutely not connected to what options are actually possible. Also tons of complex and quirky code just to get the CPU and memory to the point of running other code. IIRC there's bits of code spanning early CPU reset and intel IME that are necessary to prevent the CPU from destroying itself, at least on some models. Similarly on AMD PSP.
Some of them will be disabled because the hw physically doesn't support them, or can result in weird behaviour that isn't going to be something you like, or effectively brick things.
Another part is that it allows real proper modularity of an open platform, at least on the vendor side. Add a new device that requires special driver? No longer you have to spend a long time just to integrate a blob, there's a standard API/ABI whether the driver is closed or open source. ACPI provides tons of ways to just specify the details of where something is and how to connect it. I love a lot about openpower, but PetitBoot is effectively less open if only because there's no possibility to use add-in card requiring drivers that wasn't already compiled into flash. With UEFI it works.
UEFI is honestly in many ways less complex than previous systems (no more hooking into tape drive boot sequence), especially since there's much less that needs to be in SMM block except for things required by hw (an example: some CPUs required SMM code for changing certain power levels, because the OS level API doesn't expose the low-level details like enforcing a synchronization point on all CPUs or low level internal registers).
If you use UEFI, you also don't need to implement whole complex (and IBM PC incompatible) craziness that is GRUB (or NTLDR with its ARC firmware emulation, or non-UEFI WINLDR which emulates chunk of UEFI...) - n.b. the last linux bootloader that properly handled IBM PC compatibility was LILO if installed in appropriate way (read: not how distros did it).
TPM and Secure Boot are reasonably easy parts of the whole thing. NFC and smartcards are also things that are reasonable for single engineer to grasp.
There's less visible, though some people remember about it, complexity that is enforced on us by corporate interests - big part of why AMD PSP is closed source is the same reason AMD was unable to open source some of the HDMI code recently - both AMD PSP and Intel IME are part of implementing "Secure Media Path", aka DRM bullshit for MPAA (HDCP and its DisplayPort equivalent). It's also why various DRM systems don't fully support fully open systems (for example normal linux distros, not ones that are built by vendor of a device with special blobs)
Now, systemd I'll agree it takes a good idea but does with horrible implementation, and that's from someone who gave in and tries to use it fully (mainly because I have no time to implement an alternative).
Wayland also makes in many ways life more complex than X11, OTOH XFree86 legacy of being lowest common denominator implementation even after reverting to X.Org means that people felt stuck.
you can only call for less when you have more than enough.
if you're poor you are already living in degrowth and frugality.
100 years ago it was unthinkable for common people to eat red meat every day, they just couldn't afford it. Today, we are privileged enough that we can afford to do so, but just because we can it doesn't mean we should. It's not good for you.
Same happens in the tech world: we can afford to buy new tech devices to keep up with the bloat that inevitably envelops most things, but should we?
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.
It's more about reusing/repurposing 'old' discarded tech. Or keeping high tech going as people would do in a post apocalyptic society.
The other stuff in the magazine is very low tech indeed: their articles on hot water bottles, pedal power, very early solar power, and agriculture among others are exceptionally interesting and I'd recommend reading them.
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".
But yeah, "doing more with less" is the focus here. Skip unnecessary cruft. Not so much avoid using (high) tech stuff.
Also note that in the realm of computing (or even general electronics), high-tech IS frugal, if used appropiately. Thx to Moore's law, switch-mode power supplies, RPi style computers (or microcontrollers on the low end), e-paper / OLED displays & similar fancy stuff. Doing without those would be wasteful, imho.
There are loads of activity on perma- and frugal computing on https://merveilles.town/
#indieweb movement also has a lot of roots in similar ideologies with people going into lowtech -- so I would also check that out, but that is a pretty massive hole to dig into already :-)
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.
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.
So it’s visual nice but it also is coherent with their editorial and with the choice to host on a solar powered server.
Everything is explained here :
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
I think that just this set of choices transforms this somehow classic blog into something special. Maybe some sort of technical art. Somehow it’s the living proof that in a low-tech world, we don’t have to ditch the internet, just transform it.
I love the site.
> "How to build a small solar power system"
The definition of "low tech" clearly varies over time :)
No, it's a romantic view of the past that ignores all the short comings.
Of course past tech, or more accurately past ideas, combined with todays technology can come back and be popular.
Using high tech computers for material design, an internet system joining 8 billion people (3 billion by one degree), and a higher regard for life[1] we have managed to get 100 year old tech, solar panels and batteries working for remote water pumping for instance. (Not a great example since windmills are older)
Real Low-tech is harder but fun. Why kick a ball around a field, that's stupid, but it's fun. Fruit walls are stupid, but fun and look cool, why be ultra rich if you can't build a few fruit walls and kick a ball around.
Just don't confuse eating cake for what the real poor should be doing.
[1] Windmill maintenance is too expensive because of OH&S
Doing/having/using less isn't automatically attractive. If we want people to embrace a more sustainable lifestyle a certain healthy amount of nostalgia and romanticism can help selling it.
These (mental) images are not without power and reason — we live in a consumer society where everybody is bombarded with images of desire, images that are usually about buying and owning things or traveling somewhere. I don't think you can win against that kind of indoctrination by not using images at all.
And not all of the lowtech stuff there is just flashy romanticism. E.g. the article about balcony solar without battery makes sense. Now what is low tech will always be graded on a curve. Compared to no electronics that is pretty high tech. Your ball is pretty high tech compared to just playing with conifer cones.
As a kid that grew up in the alps we usually played with what was availabe wherever we went and that was a lot of fun. But how do you make that attractive to people who grew up in places where they wouldn't even let you walk home alone after school and put a tablet in your paws as soon as you opened your mouth? The answer is romanticisim.