The Joy of Slow Computing | Hacker News Reader

The Joy of Slow Computing

newrepublic.com

126 pointsxj948 comments

It was an interesting and different kind of article. I particularly loved his attack on companies' claims to democratize some function. I know there's two meanings to the word but we're better off using (verbally and as consumers) the more important one. They're just cheapening the concept for profit.

The other thing I liked was how the author took ownership of the situation while expecting less at the same time. I had this experience using little-known and semi-custom OS's for high security setups. The secure system lacked access to so much stuff. Yet, it had enough stuff on it to be useful and content-proxies were easy enough to build. I occasionally wanted a certain program, Youtube video, or whatever. Yet, my system did exactly what I designed it to do, nothing more and nothing less. And, like the author, I was happy with it rather than disappointed. It's a strange, good feeling which I'm not sure most people experience while using their computers.

Of course, with KVM switch, I could always go right back to a full Windows/Linux system if I couldn't resist the urge or needed to do something modern. We can have the best of both worlds.

For me "democracy" in this context is used as social equality and commonness (both are dictionary definitions).

As such, I think that "democratising" and "making cheaper for profit" are far from being mutually exclusive. Companies use the word democratising because of a lack of a better word I assume. Nevertheless, and this is apparent from the article, the biggest price to pay for Slow Computing is to consecrate it a bunch of your time.

Of course you can deploy your own cloud rather than use, say Dropbox, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn how stuff works, even more so if you are not a computer engineer. Most people don’t have time for that.

In my opinion, most profit is made when the goals of both parties are aligned. A company will make more money if the product they offer remains useful for their clients. The offer of these companies is "you will be able to use this stuff with ease" -> democratisation.

You're right about the equality aspect of things getting cheaper. We discussed this on Schneier's blog. It's compatible with "make accessible to everyone" definition. I think, playing devil's advocate, my counter was that we often don't get the same thing because we lack the quality, support, or privacy of prior, paid solutions. My Gmail, Dropbox, and so on are selling me out. My MyKolab and secure hosting solution cost a bit more with totally different effect.

I think the "features" are getting democratized by most of these companies but other critical aspects don't. They don't either because they cost too much to implement or too much profit will be lost by opportunities to sell users out. So, as part of it gets democratized, a serious loss happens as either a tradeoff or straight subversion. The original it isn't democratized: only a watered-down, less trustworthy version which may or may not be a good deal. More good ones all the time, at least. :)

Thoughts?

Sandstorm.io and others are trying to free cloud computing.

"Democracy" is the reason I hate most of the music I hear.

I would reply to that but it's easy to misinterpret a statement like that. What do you mean by that?

The popular stuff is what is frequently played which is what appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Ahh. Yeah that makes plenty of sense lol. I agree for many pop songs.

And it's your friends who know you well enough to bring you music you do enjoy hearing.

Actually, no, because there's only a small subset overlapping the music we enjoy.

all that means is your friendsmaking strategy could be optimized wrt music recommendation

This article puts into words how I have always felt but never could explain. Slow computing, a nice term. It is indeed about awareness, and very much about taking ownership. When I got Nginx running HTTPS with a valid cert, or sent my first mail with postfix/dovecot/roundcube it felt like I did it and that I owned the server and the software. Getting it all working taught me a lot about the fundamentals of the internet. It was a long, slow process though. But very enjoyable and rewarding. Recently I moved away from Gmail/Google calendar for my own mail server and ownCloud, sadly nobody I know understands my euphoric feelings... this writer does.

Spent 10+ years trying to grok music on my own, I understand the bliss of finally seeing the big picture. I wish it was mentioned more often, but things are mostly what they should be.

I'm not sure I like the idea of calling the use of open source tools "slow computing", and connecting it up in people's minds the way we think about a middle-class fashion.

Or maybe I'm just concerned about the middle class hipsters choosing open source tools ironically or without thought. It might give it an air of exclusion it does not - can not - deserve. I don't want open source tools to become equivalent to a mini penny farthing.

But if it makes people sit up and think the way Whole Foods and the organic food movement has, well, maybe it could work.

Hipster: someone who enjoys something I like in a way I don't like.

I don't think you need to worry. If people are picking open source tools purely because they're cool, then that means they're cool, and that's an enormous victory.

I've also thought that "organic" would be a cute way to brand Free software, but then again "organic" food is usually more expensive...

Especially as 99.99% of HPC clusters are running Linux or some unix variant.

So this dual Xenon 72 Core system is slow - Subs are so cute just like 6 year olds pretending to be like mommy and daddy

Ironically or without thought might last until the first time the going gets tricky, don't you think?

> The May First team has a record of resistance to snooping law enforcement agencies; over the phone, McClelland told me about the security system they’d built around the servers, which relays its data outside U.S. borders.

Hmm... If I remember correctly, sending data outside the US will cause the US security agencies to treat it as "foreign", and hence a legitimate target for surveillance.

Yes, but this is only one of the excuses US Security Agencies use to target traffic, and there are enough other excuses that almost all traffic is eligible for surveillance.

Legal approaches such as those taken by the EFF and ACLU have a lot of value, but I don't think a legal approach of trying to keep your traffic legally un-tappable is going to work. It's clear that the NSA et al are above the law and unconcerned with your rights, so until that is fixed, it's too easy to fall into a "grey" area where they have an excuse to monitor your traffic. Fundamentally this is an approach that tries to make it so the NSA won't surveil your traffic, which places an unearned amount of trust in the NSA. I think a better approach makes it so that they can't surveil your traffic--and for this there are only technical solutions.

Part of this is making sure that the NSA can't spy on who you are talking to, and every solution I know of to that bouncing traffic across multiple servers. I would be very skeptical of such a system that didn't bounce traffic overseas.

As much as I enjoy playing with my Linux, OS X, and Windows 8.1 laptops, I have thought of going the free and privacy enhanced mode of Linux, running my OwnCloud, etc.

The thing that holds me back is that I really rely on my Android smartphone for being able to SSH to a server anytime, write, and generally work on most stuff, only slower. The problem is that smart phones track us, even with custimization and are not free software. Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions?

My 2c.

I host my own mail server, owncloud, RSS reader, bookmarker, blog and a bunch of other stuff.

I don't particularly like sysadmin tasks or having to update stuff and then hope that nothing breaks, but I love the fact that I'm in control of my data and my computing experience.

On my phone I've been using Android without a Google account and I use the F-droid app store.

There are definitely still ways I'm being surveilled. That's just life in the 21st century I guess.

However, what I love about FOSS is that the software is not exploitative or antagonistic. So much closed-sourced software or Saas apps use sleazy, user-hostile tactics.

This is just not a problem with Free software. Yes, the UIs are sometimes bad or lacking and there might be bugs, but the whole spirit behind the software is, for me, so much more positive. I don't feel like I'm constantly fighting against software designed to exploit me.

What I have wanted to do for years is setup additional scripts/packages that act like DigitalOcean's droplets but for XMPP/mail server/ownCloud/MediaGoblin/etc. A one-click package that you can drop onto any host or your own machine and possibly having one-click streaming encrypted backups to wherever you want. So you can basically run a community site without worrying about being taken down. If someone doesn't like storing their data with you they can also just follow 5 steps and have their own setup.

The problem with proprietary is that someone else in some office, usually a middle manager or pointy haired boss or marketer, decides what the priorities are. So even the low hanging bugs aren't fixed and are simply avoided or worked around.

Can you please elaborate a bit on what you're using for your RSS reader and bookmarker? (and the bunch of other stuff :-)

Thanks!

I've been wanting to write a blog post about this transition for ages. Perhaps I should.

Here's a quick list:

* Cloud (files, contacts, photos, calendar): https://owncloud.org

* RSS Reader: http://selfoss.aditu.de/

* Bookmarks (ala pocket): https://www.wallabag.org/

* Email: http://www.iredmail.org/

* Chat/XMPP: http://prosody.im

* Git: http://gitolite.com/gitolite/index.html

* Blog: Blogophile static site generator (but wouldn't recommend anymore, Jekyll is better).

I keep my contacts and calendar on owncloud and sync to my Android with DavDroid https://davdroid.bitfire.at/what-is-davdroid

On my phone I installed CyanogenMod without Google apps but I recently got a one+ phone with CM installed by default (with Google apps). https://oneplus.net/

>smart phones track us

How do you imagine participating in a network such that it isn't tracking you?

- Identifying which port/antenna it's receiving you on (i.e. switching tables, tower pings) is tracking.

- Tagging your traffic with your unique identifier (i.e. MAC and IP addresses) is tracking.

- Figuring out where to send replies to your requests is impossible without extensive, persistent tracking.

How do you have network without these things?

It's true that carrying a smartphone entails being tracked more than not carrying electronics, but it's unclear how you could have a phone that doesn't track you while still functioning as a phone.

Perhaps a pager? They passively receive encrypted satellite broadcasts. But then, they are receive-only devices. You can't transmit things without facilitating the tracking of where you are transmitting from.

One important element would be to rotate the hardware identifiers frequently, and, if the network is collecting payment from its users, totally decouple billing from any persistent identifier (for example, with blinded signatures). You also want to decouple user-oriented communication services from network connectivity, so your mobile operator shouldn't give you a phone number (or e-mail address), just generic IP connectivity to reach other services that give you those things. That's a start!

The reason that we have persist identifiers with mobile phones historically is all about billing and call completion. If we did the billing and call completion at other layers that weren't tied to a mobile subscriber's identity, we could ditch the persistent identifiers and use much more temporary ones (much like you could still get on a wifi network with DHCP even if you changed your MAC address every 5 minutes, and you could also netcat anonymous voucher tokens to a network provider's server to prove your entitlement to receive connectivity).

Receiving calls is a critical (/the only) point of a cell phone for many people. How do you route the right call to the right hardware if you can't associate the hardware with a phone number?

If you want to do that, you need to register with someone who can give you a phone number, but ideally not your carrier. You could conceivably have a SIP-like model where you can send control connections over Tor and media connections over the regular Internet.

(I think the Guardian Project has tried making actual VoIP calls over TCP over Tor, and I don't know how well it worked out for them. So I'm assuming you won't be able to route the media streams anonymously, maybe just the control channel.)

You can't transmit things without facilitating the tracking of where you are transmitting from.

True, but cellphones are constantly checking in to the network, even if they aren't transmitting any actual data. In theory, a cellphone could remain passive, waiting for a pager-like signal indicating there's an inbound connection waiting, and then iﬀ the user wants to accept it, indicate its current position to the network.

I suppose a poor-man’s version could be achieved by carrying both a pager and a cellphone (turned off or in airplane mode), and having a gateway that would retransmit your SMSs and missed call notifications to the pager.

> waiting for a pager-like signal indicating there's an inbound connection waiting, and then iﬀ the user wants to accept it, indicate its current position to the network.

So you page the entire network globally to find the device?

> So you page the entire network globally to find the device?

Or locally, and have the device check in when it enters a new geographic area instead of all the time. The accuracy of passive tracking could be decreased considerably if the protocols were designed with that goal in mind.

This is one of those cases where perfect is the enemy of good. Just because there will always be the possibility of tracking in wireless networks, does not mean that that we can not work on minimising that leak.

> Why go the privacy route on my laptop, then have a smartphone? Suggestions?

One of the things I considered quite a while ago, was getting a "feature phone" that allowed Bluetooth PAN -- a way of tethering via Bluetooth to it. This would allow me to get a feature phone with hopefully less tracking than our modern-day smartphones, but carry around an Android (or Ubuntu, perhaps?) tablet.

That's the other thing you could look into -- while the baseband is still not free and open, Ubuntu Phones themselves are. As far as I'm aware there are no proprietary parts of it, unlike Android (not AOSP).

Thanks, a Ubuntu Phone is a good idea.

I have an Ubuntu phone. Not sure exactly what is in there but there are definitely some packages borrowed from Android.

Why would your smartphone hold you back from securing other parts of your computer experience?

Just because your smartphone is insecure it dont mean that there are no value in securing the rest of your computer enviroment.

Are you worried about OS level privacy or baseband proccessor-level privacy?

Yes.

Interesting to see open source called "slow computing" (not quite what I expected when I clicked on the link). I've never been a big fan of the use of the word "slow" in the various slow movements though. I know the slow movements started with "slow food" and that was chosen to contrast with "fast food", but it does have connotations relating to physical speed, and I think that could be particularly misleading applied to computing. I prefer "thoughtful computing", "thoughtful food", "thoughtful parenting" etc. Too late to change now though.

\tangent There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. - Turing

Worse than built-in obsolescense, we are the agents of our redundancy... and the end of all our coding shall be to return to the place where we began, unneeded.

Article however good, and making valid points (I'm so to speak "slow computerist" myself) is a bit chaotic.

"with Ubuntu, a free-and-open operating system managed by a U.K.-based company and a large network of volunteers. It’s one of the more user-friendly variants of Linux, which first appeared in 1991 when a student at the University of Helsinki wrote his own version of a then-popular operating system invented at AT&T in the 1970s."

what appeared first? Linux or Ubuntu? Linus "wrote" Ubuntu? Can't really tell from this mess. And it's GNU/Linux or Linux distribution not version btw.

"Emacs, a program first developed in the mid-’70s that runs on a text-only terminal screen."

Well back in the days sure, for past I guess 20 years it has GUI version.

"There are no fonts or wizards. But it displays multiple files side-by-side and plays Tetris."

No fonts?

I think the author glorifies the archaic interface of Emacs too much, particularly since he doesn't need it for its original purpose as a programmer's editor. I wonder why he doesn't just use LibreOffice; it's equally free.

Huh interesting- never heard of May First/People Link. Anyone have any comments on it? Concept seems appealing.

Neat article. It's good to see non-programmers get some of the value that FOSS brings.

I have a fancy aluminium unibody laptop and the latest shiny phone and all that, but I also keep a couple of netbooks at home on which I run archlinux + xmonad. I do almost everything in the terminal; I wrote a lot of my own tools to e.g. read twitter, my email, manage my todo lists, etc. In a high level language with a wide variety of libraries like Python, it requires very little effort to get stuff running if you're a programmer, and you quickly get a nice foundation to customize your own software and workflows. You can get things to integrate in ways that would be nigh impossible to do with other software. For instance, on one of my netbooks, my terminal's color palette changes with the time of the day (i.e. dark on white at night, white on dark during the day) and time of the year (green + red colorscheme on Christmas day!), which in turn propagates to all of my terminal apps to achieve a consistent look. It's absolutely useless, but tons of fun!

The only non terminal program I use is surf, a minimalistic tabless web browser which helps you focus and not get too distracted. All in all, I really like my setup - it'd be impractical to use it at my job, but I could see myself using it exclusively at a different stage of my life. At the end of the day, most of what I do is write {code|prose}.

I have a side project to clean up my setup and release it as an open source project for other people to use, but time is lacking. Although really, most of the fun comes from building your own environment. A good source of inspiration (despite the silly name) is the /r/unixporn subreddit - the screenshots there tend to encapsulate nicely the kind of basic yet pleasant aesthetic that such a setup can offer. For many years, everyone wanted their Linux desktop to be as flashy as what the professional OSs were promising (remember Compiz, Beryl, Project Looking Glass, etc.?) - but I think a Linux environment is best when it plays to its own strengths.

A couple nitpicks regarding the article because I'm a nerd :)

> Instead of relying on rich kids in a Googleplex somewhere, Slow Computing works best when we’re employing people nearby, like Jamie McClelland, to adapt open tools to local needs. He’s my farmer; May First is my CSA.

Does the author realize that there is a non-negligible overlap between contributors to the software he praises and the rich kids from the Googleplex?

>Despite its scale, the original amateurism of Linux is alive and well; once, when a student was helping me set up my computer for a lecture at his college, he told me that he’d helped design Ubuntu’s icons.

What a gauche formulation that needlessly diminishes the work of the student.

Not a nitpick: Sudo room in Oakland is great. If you're in the Bay Area, check it out. I started going there when I lived in Oakland a couple years ago because noisebridge was too far away and becoming too... unfriendly, and I was not disappointed. One of the main things I miss about living in Oakland for sure.

>Does the author realize that there is a non-negligible overlap between contributors to the software he praises and the rich kids from the Googleplex?

Probably not, but it shows how fashionable tech worker hate has become. You don't usually see digs like that at "rich doctors" in articles on our heath care system, despite American doctors being the highest paid in the world: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/02/amer...

>Eric Schmidt doesn’t care if I’m using Emacs

Actually, yes he does especially if you use GNU/Linux because that runs the world. The importance of free/open source is so great that if the popular libraries switched to a proprietary license a lot of companies would go bankrupt paying the license fees.

Licensing is the reason all the Apple GNU tools are forever stuck on old versions now. Once the tools moved to GPLv3, Apple stopped updating them. Check out how old your version of /bin/bash is on a completely up-to-date OS X machine.

I appreciate author's effort in explaining the useful fashion, and I wonder whether he enlightens us about his mobile phone.

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