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.
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...
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.
"When you enter home - based on presence, time of day, ambient illuminance, barometric pressure, temperature what do you want to happen?"
Pretty hard to think of anything I want to happen upon returning home that depends on barometric pressure. I can't really understand what you're getting at here more generally either, though.
When I return home, I (1) put down anything I might be carrying, (2) greet the dog, (3) maybe turn on a couple of lights, (4) maybe take off a coat or jacket, then (5) just sort of go about my life, doing whatever it is that I need or want to do.
So genuine question: what complicated series of events do you want to happen when you return home?
Somewhat related, but I bought a "minimalist phone" recently, and there are edges everywhere (for example, the most recent is not supporting adding a contact from a .vcf file someone texted me). Some features make a phone feel MORE minimalist, by erasing edges.
Maybe my understanding of minimalism is different from other people, but my experience makes me feel that maybe there are a significant number of "minimalist" or "distraction-free" brands that are really just using it as a justification to sell incomplete products, rather than products that are minimal with intentionality.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Huh, I figured there had to be AC in there somewhere because otherwise where is the frequency coming from? (I am ignorant about the physical nature of electronics.)
What happens is that the AC is rectified to DC and then it is chopped up at many kHz (10-100). The idea being that the higher the frequency, the smaller the inductors, capacitors and transformers can be.
Even if the switching frequency is ultrasonic, it can still excite audible mechanical effects in windings of transformers and other elements to create the canonical coil whine. This effect depends on certain ranges of duty cycle (system load) creating periodic spikes in power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> (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)
For desktop applications, the systems could. For 3D games, keep in mind that CRTs (in opposite to flat screens) could also diplay every other supported resolution sharply. The reason why many people think that CRTs were worse in practice is that many graphics cards of the time simply had a low-quality VGA signal generators built-in.
I owned a 17-inch Trinitron and very much preferred it over the early slow and small LCD panels. I did get a 15-inch Samsung VGA LCD panel for free later, but only kept it as a LAN party display as it folded completely flat for storage and transport.
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.
Only SD CRTs make an audible shrieking sound. LCD computer monitors were replacing VGA or better CRTs with a horizontal refresh rate of >30kHZ. Maybe they could annoy your dog but no human could hear it.
I still use a 130kHz CRT monitor sometimes. There's no 15kHz whine, but there's audible harmonics. It depends what you're looking at at and how hard you're pushing it.
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.
Yeah i had a trinitron and i still had bloodshot eyes after a few hours that i never got with LCD screens. Everyone was aware that CRTs sucked terribly for eye strain.
The tradeoffs moving to even the early LCDs was well worth it. I remember people spending effectively double on LCDs at the time over higher specced and larger CRTs and being delighted with the result. eg. early LCDs were just 14inch, low res, low refresh rates when you could get a 17inch CRT higher specced in every way. People were still opting for the early LCDs. Your eyes are important!
> 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)
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.
Matrox used to have the best back in the day. Ai were ok and Nvidia were the worst. Even a lay person could see that difference between the tnt out put vs a millenium. It was so great that i used to use an older matrox card think it was the g450 since it worked great under Linux and the pq was amazing.
I also had something by ELSA with a S3 and a translucent blue RAMDAC by IBM. Same thing. But only 2MB VRAM, and PCI. So only useful for testing purposes.
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.
Almost laser pointer brightness at one point on the screen which you don't consciously see because the your eyes and the hold the image for a few milliseconds but do you really want to be looking at a extremely bright point of light all day. Higher refresh rates on CRTs lowered eye strain since that point could be effectively lower brightness, just refreshing twice as fast.
I honestly don't get eye strain on LCDs nearly as bad under any circumstance. 60hz LCD was a massive improvement over the 120hz CRTs.
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 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.
That's a much more advanced and faster PDP-7, talking to an even bigger and faster Titan over a custom network!
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.
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.
> 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.
Not trying to dismiss your perception, but are you sure the feeling of lag wasn't caused by some other bugs related to the bad config, say, some kind of interval mismatch? The difference between 240hz and 180hz is less than 1.5ms (if my calculation is correct) and I've seen OSU! player demand less precision than this.
You don't need to feel the latency difference. You can tell the difference between high refresh rates by keeping your eyes still and moving your mouse cursor. The higher the display refresh rate (assuming the mouse sampling rate is high enough), the tighter the spacing between the phantom array effect images.
totally outside of the scope of this tech website but genuine question: assuming you fixed you heart successfully, would you ever be guiding others to die?
I don't feel threatened, I just think you and the webpage are stupid. I love how you jump STRAIGHT to transphobia at the slightest pushback. I'm pro trans rights, just anti-idiot.
I'm almost suspecting that you are not a true trans activist, because it's easier to think that comments like this are trolling. Atleast that would make sense.
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).
91 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 49.9 ms ] threadThere’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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Pretty hard to think of anything I want to happen upon returning home that depends on barometric pressure. I can't really understand what you're getting at here more generally either, though.
When I return home, I (1) put down anything I might be carrying, (2) greet the dog, (3) maybe turn on a couple of lights, (4) maybe take off a coat or jacket, then (5) just sort of go about my life, doing whatever it is that I need or want to do.
So genuine question: what complicated series of events do you want to happen when you return home?
You could program an electric grandmother who announces that her knees hurt and it's going to rain.
Maybe my understanding of minimalism is different from other people, but my experience makes me feel that maybe there are a significant number of "minimalist" or "distraction-free" brands that are really just using it as a justification to sell incomplete products, rather than products that are minimal with intentionality.
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.
True that.
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.
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/
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.
What happens is that the AC is rectified to DC and then it is chopped up at many kHz (10-100). The idea being that the higher the frequency, the smaller the inductors, capacitors and transformers can be.
Even if the switching frequency is ultrasonic, it can still excite audible mechanical effects in windings of transformers and other elements to create the canonical coil whine. This effect depends on certain ranges of duty cycle (system load) creating periodic spikes in power.
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.
That said, I will point out that the only person that the creator “wants dead” are the people who want to deny her existence in the first place.
I think we can use our brains and understand the context here. I.e., I don’t think the New Hampshire license plate is threatening to kill anyone.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
For desktop applications, the systems could. For 3D games, keep in mind that CRTs (in opposite to flat screens) could also diplay every other supported resolution sharply. The reason why many people think that CRTs were worse in practice is that many graphics cards of the time simply had a low-quality VGA signal generators built-in.
The tradeoffs moving to even the early LCDs was well worth it. I remember people spending effectively double on LCDs at the time over higher specced and larger CRTs and being delighted with the result. eg. early LCDs were just 14inch, low res, low refresh rates when you could get a 17inch CRT higher specced in every way. People were still opting for the early LCDs. Your eyes are important!
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)
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.
At 1600x1200@75Hz. Crystal clear and sharp.
I also had something by ELSA with a S3 and a translucent blue RAMDAC by IBM. Same thing. But only 2MB VRAM, and PCI. So only useful for testing purposes.
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.
Almost laser pointer brightness at one point on the screen which you don't consciously see because the your eyes and the hold the image for a few milliseconds but do you really want to be looking at a extremely bright point of light all day. Higher refresh rates on CRTs lowered eye strain since that point could be effectively lower brightness, just refreshing twice as fast.
I honestly don't get eye strain on LCDs nearly as bad under any circumstance. 60hz LCD was a massive improvement over the 120hz CRTs.
https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=832
But slow computers still need fast and reliable user interfaces, like radial pie menus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
That's a much more advanced and faster PDP-7, talking to an even bigger and faster Titan over a custom network!
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.
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.
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.
Not trying to dismiss your perception, but are you sure the feeling of lag wasn't caused by some other bugs related to the bad config, say, some kind of interval mismatch? The difference between 240hz and 180hz is less than 1.5ms (if my calculation is correct) and I've seen OSU! player demand less precision than this.
Do you at least take the time to read the text, or did you stop as soon as your transphobia kicked in ?
I'm almost suspecting that you are not a true trans activist, because it's easier to think that comments like this are trolling. Atleast that would make sense.
But identity politics are discouraged here, so just flag, hide, and move on... Mental illness shouldn't be encouraged.
https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing
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.
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).
As it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s all the same. I don't understand what this article is talking about.