4 computing milestones: - You can have a computer - Your computer can talk to every other computer - Computers can be mainstream - You can have a computer v2 (it’s in your pocket), also everything is in the cloud - “Ubiquitious Computing” idk what this is. I guess that computers are now ubiquitous and being used first before other ideas are had.
Oh dear he deploys un-decoded acronyms.
We all know lots about the dreadful practices of google, apple, microsoft, meta, amazon and so on. Let’s see if there’s any good to be picked from these bones. (He doesn’t say it like this, he’s too much of a tech-bro)
“rather have simple binaries, extremes annd ideals… than treeshake the nuance” lol.
Optimistic computing is not: - techno-optimism, or tech-oh-no-optimism - also not permacomputing, solidarity economy, system thinking and so on…, which are all too bay area. but maybe it is Tadi
Apparently the optimism he’s talking about can still make money. Okay here’s the thesis: “both of these extremes crave something, whether that’s a trillion dollars or a technical solution to society’s fundamentally social problems… real optimism doesn’t want anything. Rather, it just anticipates a specific inevitability based on the confluence of a bunch of darn great ideas.”
Okay. Consider me intrigued…
Boot To Kill
Idea numero uno: simplicity and ease of use (he says Apple sort of started this one)
okay well, “boot to kill” is a phrase from the pople who were designing diablo who said “time from boot up to kill was, like… it’s gotta be under a minute”.
So no complicated installation, no READMEs or Quickstart, no cluster to stand up, or a YAML file to edit if you only have one minute. You push the button, it turn’s on. No questions asked.
To do this, you gotta eliminate dependencies, simplicity raw ease of use, less-is-more, no logging in (or optional logging in).
Most things shouldn’t neeed you logging in. Exceptions are things which are exclusively social where identity matters. For lots of software, identity does not matter.
Software is meant to be a good utility, (okay, he means software distinct from entertainment, ie games) which should be un-noticable unless it breaks, and good utilities don’t break.
Less, less, less
Diablo has excellent UI, but Apple pushed the idea of doing less (like MacOS is a BSD with all the options pre-set and you don’t get to change them very easily). Oh no… this guy is anti-options. iPhone’s technical constraints (small screen size, imprecise clicking) meant UI and UX had to be less complicated. Had to do less.
Apparently this means making products that are opinionated, fashionable or constrained. He gives the examples of NES cartridges not giving you the option to write over them, so you can’t break them. I guess. That’s a limited example.
“Isn’t this ‘anti-hacker’”. Not neceserily, he says! Okay, sure, but I feel like the way 99% of companies do it is. Ah okay, that’s the problem he’s trying to get at. He notably doesn’t seem to give any examples of this being pulled off (other than sort of MacOS at the start but then he immediately talks about how you can actually change things if you like it’s just hard). It’s okay, I know what he means. I’ll walk with him.
Yeah! Why do javascript frameworks all try and have super sleek UIs from the developer side?? I’m developing!! I need the knobs to be easy to reach!!
Done.
Okay I like this one. NES cartridges (why isn’t nintendo up on his list above lol) are Done in a way continually update modern software is not. Enterprise software often is, because companies won’t fund continual development, but a lot of consumer stuff… is not (because the big tech firms take us all for suckers, and most of us do pay). New is not necessery! No more ideas!
if banks can run on 40-year-old COBOL then surely mastodon can last that long? Right?
“internet is hard” I guess, but it’s doable. You can have security updates only. anyway, all your software works offline too right? (unless it’s fundamentally social!) then does it work locally?
Okay i wrote that last line myself and then this was the next section, haha.
Local-first
This can be summarised as “the availability of another computer should never prevent you from working”. Yup. That’s it. Nothing more needs to be sai- oh crap it’s another paragraph.
Okay i really like this one. It includes a lot of other things. “It just works”, “it works forever” and so on. Damn. It’s also helpful for privacy: your sending all my data to your servers to do who knows what with? if it’s local first, why is it even talking to your servers at all in the first place. It will work if I stop it from doing right?
Huh.
Every User is a Power User
Again, Steven, please front load the important stuff!
Okay so this is related but different to the idea we want to get rid of the user/devopler distinction (hi pastagang) and the audience/performer distinction (hi again, pastagang). But not every user is a developer, and they don’t want to be! Every user wants to do what they want, they want to be a power user.
Lmao, “it’s getting harder and harder to step into a living room that isn’t running a little homelab or self-hosting an invite-only mastodon server”. I’m pretty sure that’s still very easy. I think you speak to too many tech people. Actually… a lot of mastodon servers I know aren’t ran by tech people. Okay but they’re not self-hosted. Anyway.
Hmm, he makes a good point about ChatGPT enabling this. Someone can just ask it to write a script that will download all their youtube videos and put them into an excel workbook (he says). That’s a good point. These people might not even think of themselves as “hackers” or w/e.
Boring Tech, Boring Businesses
all this stuff isn’t futuristic! it isn’t fancy! it also isn’t nostalgic! it’s how a lot of things are done/were done/can be done.
if all the tech is boring and respectful… it’s harder for businesses to do dumb shit with it. in the world where the software is respectful, or where people develop respectful (i thought it was supposed to be optimistic :P) software, is your insurance company as likely to ask you to srape all the customer PII and sell it to a partner through an API. Probably, because I’m not a capitalist.
Maybe it could happen this way. Insurance companies just wanted to sell insurance, but tech/software has made it easy to do other things, too.
The Great Convergence
I feel like the election of Donald Trump has undercut a lot of this stuff.
all these things are happening, slowly. aleardy, whether you want or work for it or not!
ideas espousing resiency and longevity are more likely to last a long time! they’re gonna stick around. Oooh that’s a nice thought.
prefiguration and shit. okay yeah. that’s cool, i agree.
he has a lot of faith in market forces and governments and society not collapsing but, i think he makes good points. good software outlasts bad software (in general? maybe?). companies with sustainable practices will last longer than those without (not strictly @ big oil).
hmm. let’s see.
My takeaways:
- This guy is very verbose and needs an editor
- How can I have a local-first version of my reading list? currently my server being offline stops me from working. I only read on one device, surely it should live on there? Does it need to be publically viewable anyway? Not really? I should just have a lil php server running on my laptop and feed it in, and then copy the thunks over every so often. Hmm adding things from my phone, however… I don’t browse social media on my phone, really, anymore so is that even needed?
- I guess similarly… this is that “can i have a webserver running on my phone” “can i have my activity pub server running on my phone?”. why do i need a server for this shit anyway, my phone is on all the time and networked, as it is!
- Navidrome is a OSS music streaming service for my mp3s!! ahah! This seems rlly cool actually. But what is it like on mobile? and will it work offline?
- He gave up on the “what good can we suck from the corpses of apple and the like” pretty quick lol. And only did apple.
- ideas espousing resiliency and longevity will stick around longer. they will win.
- not sure if he’s ultimately correct, but then I’m more pessimistic about the state of the world than he is.