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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.