I dream of quieter computing | Hacker News Reader

I dream of quieter computing

henry.codes

129 pointsSir_Twist121 comments

>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates

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.

I mean CRT is inherently bulky, it's hard not to see why LCD panels became popular.

To sellers, yes. The drop of visual quality when the top-down LCD push began was staggering.

Depended very much on the CRTs used, there were very wide gaps in quality.

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.

To buyers as well. I don't recall the switch to LCDs being particularly pushed, though I was admittedly quite young at the time. Especially keep in mind that people today are generally comparing the absolute top-tier of CRTs which were not what the average person had.

(Another thing to keep in mind is that the systems of the time generally could not drive the kinds of resolutions and framerates that make those CRTs shine in some of today's comparisons. At the time the difference in quality in practice was lower because of this)

Was there a top-down push? In general, people on average never really actually liked CRT displays all that much. They are annoyingly deep; they are heavy; the screen is flickery, or not quite pin sharp, or both; they use up a lot of power; they fail in annoying ways, and they're expensive to fix - and they have magnets in them.

I had multiple mediocre-to-crappy CRTs in the 90s and 00s and was glad to move away from them. I think the last one I owned was even one of the fabled trinitrons, and it was acceptable.

> 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)

DVI or not didn't matter that much when your VGA had a good RAMDAC, and you had a good cable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMDAC

Which of course you could only see in direct comparison. Which most ppl didn't have the opportunity to do, so you needed experience instead to judge that. Which most ppl also didn't have, because they've been exposed to cheap stuff only.

Had a Samtron 15" and the LCD that replaced it was very washed out. Commercial users in India kept them for 15+ years.

After 15 minutes at crt my eyes were watering, not so for lcd

Now that you mention it, 60Hz was considered poor on a CRT. 85 was the target.

But that was because of flicker. AFAIK, 60Hz video frame rate was considered acceptable, but on a CRT the video frame rate was also the flicker rate and 60Hz was too low for flicker.

CRT flicker is equally visible when frame rate is the same as refresh rate as when it differs. 60Hz CRTs were never good. 60Hz was only considered "acceptable" because people didn't know any better at the time. At least you didn't suffer with 50Hz CRTs using the same fast phosphors like the PAL regions did.

We don't need faster refresh rates, we need slower phosphor.

https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=832

We need faster refresh rates. Slow phosphors also cause unnatural visual artifacts. 1000Hz is roughly the point where you get motion quality that, except for a rare few test signals (e.g. multiplexed displays), is easily mistaken for reality.

Naw, we just need better software and slower computers, like the PDP-1, that don't require such fast refresh rates, just slow phosphor.

But slow computers still need fast and reliable user interfaces, like radial pie menus.

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20...

The computer shown in that video is a much more advanced and faster PDP-7, talking to an even bigger and faster Titan mainframe over a custom network!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

It proves that slow computers can still be usable with better software, and that today's unusable computers are pissing away enourmous amounts of power, but still suck.

Edit: I just showed you a video of a computer with a light pen. Did you check that out? It's only two minutes, and I made it to musically highlight PIXIE, because most people don't want to sit through silent hours of the original digitized films from Cambridge.

PIXIE is not one box. It is a network distributed CAD workstation (1967–1972) -- like AJAX, but with P7 two-layer cascade phosphor on a 16ADP7A radar tube instead of HTML:

Interactive front end: DEC PDP-7 + Type 340 CRT. Real-time drawing, light pen, radial "control lightbuttons", graph model in core.

Compute / storage host: Titan (Cambridge’s Ferranti/ICT Atlas 2 prototype). RAINBOW apps: CONN, COMPACT, PLOT, LADAN circuit analysis, file store.

Wire between them: Wiseman link (Cambridge custom) + Lang's supervisor software. Move typed ring-structure models blocklet-by-blocklet.

Word size: 18 bits. Core (PIXIE design target): 8K words — "only 8K of 18 bit words ... no auxiliary storage".

Core (likely installed): 8K–16K (GUIDE: "here likely 16K").

Cycle time: ~1.75 µs. ~571K cycles/s.

Addressing: 13-bit + indirect bit.

Registers: One accumulator + link bit.

DEC made lots of "instruction sets in a chassie" extension boxes, and Wiseman at Cambridge rolled his own network with its own custom instructions.

Extended Arithmetic Element: Type 177 EAE. Multiply, divide, shifts, normalize (64xxxx op family in listing).

Precision incremental display: Type 340. Required — second processor + DMA display file.

Light pen: Type 370. Pen flag IOTs; diagnostic 7-78-M in pdp-7 reference.

Symbol generator: Type 342. 6-bit character codes → stroke sequences in display file.

Subroutine option: Type 347. DJS / DJP — display jump-to-subroutine (subpictures as display subroutines)

Titan link interface: Cambridge custom (Wiseman) Undocumented IOTs: LCF, LSF, LKE, LLB6, LLB18, LRB18, LLAM, LSA, LKD — networking as instructions.

The 340 display was an amazing ensembel of hardware, and could plug into a PDP-1 as well. The SIMH emulator supports it well.

Model: DEC Type 340 Precision Incremental CRT System (H-340, Nov 1964).

Tube lineage: Type 30E → 16ADP7A radar tube, P7 phosphor, 1024×1024 address grid.

CPU coupling: Cycle steal / data break — 340 fetches display words from PDP-7 core while CPU runs.

Vector timing: ~1.5 µs incremental vectors (vs Type 30 ~50 µs per CPU-plotted dot).

Display word types: Parameter, point, vector, vector-continue, increment, character; with 347: DJS/DJP subroutines.

Light pen: Per-word pen-enable bits; tracking uses cross + recovery spiral (~2× cross size) — spec in Ch. 5.

The 340 executes its own instruction set in memory (display file = program). PIXIE’s subpictures are literally display subroutines — Myer & Sutherland’s "wheel of reincarnation".

The Titan mainframe it communicated woth was another story, a big deal at the time! It ran RAINBOW: BCPL + FORTRAN analysis (e.g. LADAN), file store, COMPACT/PLOT/CONN/CONNMAP pipeline.

Identity: Ferranti/ICT Atlas 2 prototype; Cambridge name Titan (1964–Oct 1973).

Word size: 48 bits (8×6-bit chars or 2×24-bit halfwords).

Core growth: 32K → 64K → 128K words.

Addressing: Base/limit registers; user address ORed with base (not added).

“Cache”: Tunnel-diode operand slave store — Cambridge claims first cache.

Software “instructions”: Up to 512 extracodes (supervisor code in main store).

OS: Titan Supervisor / Cambridge Multiple-Access System — public 22 Mar 1967.

Storage: Two Data Products 16M-word discs; tape; card/punch.

Terminals: Cambridge 64-line multiplexor — 73 registered, 26 simultaneous; modems from 1967.

I've been able to gather together and shared all this information about it, thanks to an ongoing discussion with Heinz Lemke, the guy operating the lightpen in the video. He has recently unearthed 128 pages of PIXIE source code in PDP-7 assembly source and octal machine language, and we're scanning it in, and working on reincarnating it with SIMH and a virtual lightpen!

You can get away with slower refresh rate if you're using keyboard input only, but keyboard input is annoyingly restrictive for many common tasks. Anything involving graphics (even just looking at graphics, e.g. zooming in on a graph) is much easier with a mouse.

> Anything involving graphics (even just looking at graphics, e.g. zooming in on a graph) is much easier with a mouse.

Anything that involves manipulating a viewport is better with a joystick like device (spacemouse) and anything that involves tracing is better done with a pen. A mouse (and trackpad) is just a cheaper solution, not a better one.

The classic paper about this topic is:

Buxton, W. (1983). Lexical and Pragmatic Considerations of Input Structures. Computer Graphics, 17 (1), 31-37.

https://www.billbuxton.com/lexical.html

TL;DR: "It's complicated."

TL;DR-but-not-illiterate:

Claim: How you spell a command (lexical) and how you move your body to do it (pragmatic -- device, gesture, layout) are different problems. Treating all "locators" as the same -- mouse, tablet, light pen, joystick -- is a design error.

Figure 1: Input devices sit in a grid by what they sense (position / motion / pressure) and how your hand moves. Light pens cluster with touch screens; mice with tablets; joysticks with trackballs. Different motor skills, not interchangeable.

Why mrob is wrong here: "Graphics need a mouse" assumes one cheap locator fits every graphics task. Buxton's point (and skydhash's): viewport pan/zoom wants isometric/spacemouse control; tracing wants a pen. A mouse is a compromise, not the default.

What PIXIE has to do with it: I already showed the right transducer: light pen on a vector display for tracing and radial lightbuttons. No 1000 Hz, no mouse. The 1969 demo is a pragmatic match; Buxton (1983) is the theory that says that match matters.

Buxton defines the terms Chunking: Good interfaces fuse actions into one gesture (pick up => drag => release). Pie menus and pen tracking are in that family -- syntax, tension, and closure enforced by the body, not remembered as steps.

Quieter computing isn't only slower phosphor or fewer Hz. It's also picking the right input device for the task instead of defaulting to mouse + glass.

Miyamoto closes the loop from the other end. He designs from the hands: start with the kinesthetics of the controller, how the thing feels before what it does.

Will Wright on Miyamoto: "Miyamoto starts from the kinesthetics of the controller. What is this thing going to feel like in my hands? Will I feel like I'm instinctively connected to this world? As opposed to, I've got sixteen buttons, and I'm trying to figure out which button does the super-thrust power-up, in which case it's very cerebral, kind of like learning to play the piano. Rather than, you know, just picking up a shovel and starting to dig."

Will Wright on Miyamoto, New Yorker profile "Master of Play":

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/master-of-play

And Miyamoto judges from the face. GDC 2007 keynote: "What I always try to envision is the face of the player when he or she is experiencing the game, not any individual part of the game."

I've posted about his two GDC keynotes before, with links to all the videos (1999 full, 2007 parts 1-6, the wife-o-meter) and my transcription of the face-of-the-player passage. They bracket an amazing time in game development history, 1999-2007, and every word is profound:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918255

Shigeru Miyamoto GDC 1999 Keynote (Full):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2Pf5F2acI

The grandfather and granddaughter moment, GDC 2007 Part 3 at 12m29s:

https://youtu.be/SY3a4dCBQYs?t=12m29s

Buxton is the theory, Miyamoto is the practice: pick the transducer with your hands, verify it with the player's face. Watch Heinz Lemke's hands and face in the 1969 PIXIE film and you can score the interface without reading a word of the thesis.

Flight of the PIXIE, 1969 light pen and radial menus on the PDP-7:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

Heinz (the guy in the the video demonistrating the PIXIE system he wrote) recently wrote me:

>Hope it doesn’t surprise you, that the use of a light pen in combination with the radial menus of PIXIE are very much related to the activity of a typical technical draftsman of the 1950’s. During that time and in the beginning of the 1960’s, I was such a technical draftsman in a number of companies in Germany, see attached a typical drawing from 1960 (few days ago digitised from a 1m by 2,5m drawing).

>What you may observe in this drawing is the frequent use of special symbols such as circles, squares, arrows, valves, nuts and bolts, etc. These are usually entered into the drawing (on a vertically positioned but slightly tilted drawing board) with a pencil at one hand and a special template with symbols held at the other hand. In PIXIE, I simply translated this into the light pen with the templates being simulated by a radial menu of symbols (PIXIE’s control light buttons) that can be dynamically adapted to the technical content of the drawing. Both, the light pen and the template can then be operated with one hand, leaving the other hand free to enter data, for example on the TTY.

>If at the same time the drawing gestures and drawing components are also translated into a computational model on the small computer, which after model completion can then be analysed or simulated on a larger computer, it becomes a winning situation all round. This was the aim of the PIXIE-Rainbow (PDP7-Titan) framework in those times. What appears to be missing now in our times is the “vertically positioned but slightly tilted drawing board” that used to be in the 1950’s and 60’s a social meeting point for all the colleagues in the drawing departments. This may be the loosing part of the advances in computer graphics.

If those input devices are so good, why don't we see people winning e-sports tournaments with them? The mouse (as in a high-end gaming mouse on a high-end gaming mouse pad) is the best positioning device yet invented because it allows very precise positioning with very small movements of the hand. And unlike a pen, you're not constantly fighting gravity.

My arm would get tired quickly if I tried to point to things by pen as fast as I can by mouse.

I disagree. There’s absolutely diminishing returns above 120 or so, and at 120hz you’d do as well to remove input latency rather than output latency. On a non full screen app you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a full frame from the OS/compositor, and more if your application has an event loop that is in any way abstracted from the OS.

Any meaningful amount of work is either going to be done “immediately” (see pretty much every spreadsheet in existence except for that one on the network drive) or it will take a perceptible amount of time. Giving progress in 4ms increments instead of 8ms isn’t really going to affect the perception of the task.

There are definitely real world tools that take time - pumping petrol/gas isn’t an instant action, neither is cooking.

Also - the device that I would consider quietist in my life has a sub 1hz refresh rate, and an 800MHz cpu with a 3 week battery life.

I agree that input latency matters a LOT but disagree about 120hz being some sort of sweet spot.

On the input side, yeah even a few 10’s of ms is very noticeable when typing or doing something quick.

But also I use 240hz monitors for everything, and when I had a config bug on my Mac that degraded my connection to 180hz, my computer felt slow and laggy, and I only realized when it drove me crazy enough to check the settings again. I’m sure the same would happen if I was on a 480hz monitor and it got degraded to the 240hz that I’m used to now.

And I agree there are diminishing returns, but there are still very perceptible returns.

I tried clicking the "#551A8B streaks" link, looking forward to reading a rant about websites overriding link color (and link underlines to boot!)

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.

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.

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.

Also chat is private. We went from public but anonymous to private and unanimous.

Well on facebook you could originally choose who you wanted to share things with. Not sure if that's still there because I haven't used it in years.

In theory you could do this with facebook but the defaults matter and they defaulted to sharing very widely. With chat it's obviously and understandably bounded (at least unless a member of the group takes a positive action to forward/copy messages elsewhere, which is not generally very socially accepted to do without some level of permission or least a good reason).

Perhaps we can make internet forums trendy again. Those are artisanal by nature. Only user generated content. Strict moderation.

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.

>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.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng

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)

>That's only the DSA, it's only a small part of web regulation in the EU

Absolutely, but the context was small online forums. I don't disagree with the gist of your general criticism.

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.

Just send the package. When something is imported, the importer is the one who's liable for all the conformance stuff. If customs stops the package because it's packaging isn't recyclable (this won't happen, but they'll stop it to make you pay taxes) the importer will correctly be mad at customs.

Why are we all complying in advance with the broadest possible understanding of laws?

> 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. ;)

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

Please do not attempt to move goalposts.

My original comment was quite clearly about businesses, I wrote company/companies three times.

I was unaware German Impressum applied to a natural person who is not running a business. If that is true, then I agree that is unfair. But I was never seeking to comment on that anyway.

> I was unaware German Impressum applied to a natural person who is not running a business. If that is true, then I agree that is unfair.

Then it seems we agree. I thougt you were commenting about both personal and business sites, given the original context being community forums.

Ok.

Maybe look up what something is, before commenting about what you assume it is.

> I was unaware German Impressum applied to a natural person who is not running a business.

It doesn't.

I don't think you're familiar with how far doxxing/etc. can go

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.

> 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.

Not all websites are businesses.

If you're selling something then yes. But the German requirement is not only for sites that sell things.

> 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.

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.

Have you tried just ignoring the regulations? It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and in the unlikely event you get punished, it will be proportionate - if you're not actively causing harm it will just be formally ordering you to comply.

In previous eras we'd just ignore laws like these. But in this era we have become, as they say, cucked.

Discord took this place.

I have only used Discord briefly but I found it to be very closed off and to be more of a chatbox than a knowledge base.

The user is not saying that there was an evolution from forums to Discord, they are saying the popular digital space people go to has changed.

I don't recall most forums being particularly welcoming either or very good knowledge bases. Probably the main difference is the default for visibility of non-members, which does make a little bit of difference but I think if you want to maintain a knowledge base you should run a wiki, if you want a community then a forum or discord guild is the way to go, and discord is way easier for most people to set up.

It absolutely did not and it is one of my least favourite things on the modern internet.

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.

I mean, I would describe most forums in the same way, and yet they persist as well. The main thing is not the details of the interface, but the fact that the systems allow creating your own community, and discord has made this significantly more accessible and hosts a huge number of smaller, closer-knit communities.

> I would describe most forums in the same way

True that.

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'.

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/

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.

Based on what I’ve seen, most people use their phones (computer is mostly a work thing) as an entertainment device (like a tv) or to communicate with friends (chat and call). The other roles are to be a camera, a music player, a flashlight, and a game console. They only do computing for work and rarely interact with the web (as in hyperlinked documents) for personal reasons. There’s literally no reason to pine for a small web.

I think of ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing Network at the MIT-AI Lab) as the first social network.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31807854

Artisnal means "the algorithm" and "chat" 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

It already happened. For a lot of people, social media has been replaced entirely by group chat.

I expected this to be literally about quieter computers.

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.

I think most of the squealing actually comes from DC-DC conversion.

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.

i expected some undervolting tutorial or something

I have to say I'm pleased to have a mostly silent computer, an M1 Air, after many years of whirring ones.

What a wholsome and inclusive site. Page title reads “fix your heart or die”. Spread the love indeed.

This is my sincere response.

it's a quote from twin peaks if that matters

>Everything these days is glass and refresh rates

As it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s all the same. I don't understand what this article is talking about.

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.

What does that look like? It decides which HN link to render based on the angle of the sun?

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.

> And that logic will last you for years.

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.

> 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.

"Sensors -> zigbee or zwave -> home assistant"

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.

Esp32s with eink displays are pretty much this

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.

From a few months ago and highly relevant:

https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing

That's a great article too. I hope we'll see it comig back frontpage once in a while.

He differentiates between "things that last" (knowledge that transfers) and the rest...

Something has to be said about dodging a lot of the last shiny new tech that's going to invariably be tomorrow's long lost and not regretted turd. I make my friends laugh when I say that if there's one tech I know nothing about I don't feel bad because...

I think of all the long gone things I never bothered learning.

Just think about the graveyard of crap you're better off for never having wasting one cycle learning: tech is full of it.

It makes people smile but they know deep down it's true: most of the noise shall disappear.

Don't feel bad about not knowing it all: just look ten years in the mirror at all that was shiny and new and that's now totally obsolete.

It's literally how I cope with not knowing it all.

And I somehow managed to bet, for three decades, on techs that did stay a very long time. For example I adopted Linux in the very early Slackware days: I did dive all in and learned all that I could. And I've been using Linux on the desktop (and on my laptops and on my servers and on my VMs etc.) ever since.

Hypervisors and hardware-virt? Bought the first consumer mobo that supported it and was running Xen happily more than two decades ago.

Much less sexy but: one day I ran into one my best friend who had left the city and he told me "I found this new language, it's called Java, it's going to be big" and I did dive into Java. Only certification I ever got: Sun Certified Java Programmer. It was was it was (the cert), nothing stellar. But it was obvious Java was here to stay.

Then I saw a post on HN in the very early Clojure days: I decided I had to learn Clojure. It's not the most used language but, darn, is it stable (and on top of the JVM, mostly: so the Java thing helped).

I'm using Emacs since so long I don't exactly remember when (I did try it when I discovered Linux, back when Emacs took 45 minutes or something like that to compile on my 486 but really adopted it only later on).

I basically use the same window manager and same windows layout (and virtual desktops) since 15 years: when I upgrade my Linux distro, I just reuse my configuration.

Monitor is 9 years old (38" 3840x1600, I love it because I can do many different layouts, including 3x 1280x1600 side by side "columns).

Chair is 13 years old (out of warranty since one year) and still going strong.

Keyboard is 10 years old: Happy Hacking Keyboard.

It's a fast-paced, ever evolving world and all that helps brings some quietness.

P.S: as for present techs, you bet I'm using LLMs: three subscriptions and lately I'm support for my less-tech savvy brother who's running models locally using GPU passthrough on a Proxmox rig I helped him set up. But I like to think I'm using them in a sane way: not drinking the kool-aid.

> of handmade websites viewed on hackable hardware

but what if I don't what to hack my hardware? what if instead for me my hardware is just a tool i use from time to time to open my banking stuff, send/receive email to keep in touch with friends, watch movies and in my spare time i do other stuff?

what if instead of hacking my hardware i want to go swimming, or take care of my garden, or cook or play the piano?

articles like this make me chuckle nowadays because we in the tech industry assume most people are like us. they aren't. for them computers are just a tool. the less they get nagged by their tools, the better.

unironically, that's why apple has so much success. apple's hardware is as far as you can get from hackability. they fix in place a lot of degrees of freedom (both in hardware and in software) and in exchange you get tools that work very well and very reliably.

the author of this post should really touch grass more often.

(i know i'll be downvoted for writing this, i don't care).

..and I dream of less activist sites.

yeah all i can see now is this creator wants a bunch of visitors dead, in cursive

Oh wow, someone on a tech site that doesn’t know how OR works!

Wait, shit. It's OR, not XOR. Instructions unclear. Am dead.

I am more focused on Rem'mie Fells than Lea Thomas.

Man your whole profile looks like an activist site

weird hill(s) to die on

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