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# thinking-together
s
This thread’s discussion (on Apple + privacy) was interesting to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078034 Nobody really suggested the alternative being end-user + true personal computing. The analogy I use is that what we call ‘personal computing’ is really restaurant made food delivered to our homes very quickly (vs true personal cooking where I can make the food I want at home using tools that are personal-human-scale). The common answers to centralized computing / centralized internet like handwaving ‘decentralized’ or ‘p2p’ or ‘open source / libre’ I strongly feel are WORSE options for most people (minus the philosophy). That’s like taking a restaurant kitchen & food-assembly-line and putting it on every street corner for the neighborhood to run (for most people this is worse than a regular restaurant). (the analogy isn’t perfect I know!) Personal, home cooking is fundamentally different than restaurant made food in qualitative ways that make it appealing in its own right and not let people get caught up in their ‘resistance’ of centralized restaurants. The other great insight from food industry is that centralized food creation and personalized food creation can co-exist just fine, and people can move between both systems as they please.
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s
This is a false dichotomy - I would argue that p2p systems and libre software is a precondition to "person-human-scale" tools and computing. Without p2p you are beholden to network structures, and without libre software you can't modify your system in the first place. The remaining problem is one of UX, which has largely been ignored as you point out, and is something that should be worked on. But I think making a dichotomy like that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. "Person-human-scale" tools are useless without the structural factors to make them useful—resurrecting hypercard, for example, is not going to solve the problem of every program you run being monitored by apple or whatever.
s
Oh for sure, I’m not disagreeing with the importance of developing the underlying protocols like p2p. But often the discussion ends with JUST the technology, like…ALL we need is the tech. I think the design principles should lead the tech, not the other way around (obv in reality these things are a bit more entangled), especially since the end user conveniences of modern computing (URL’s are dope!) is what lead companies to innovate our way to our current situation. Thinking only about the tech means that personal computing will remain in the hands of open source hackers who want to compile their own kernels.
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I would also argue that we have more of the tech already ready, but the UX is nowhere close IMO.
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s
I totally agree, it's sad how personal computing UX has in a lot of ways actually regressed since the 80s or $FAVOURITE_TIME_PERIOD
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And while I think we don't have the tech necessary for a full powered personal computing system, it could certainly be significantly better than it is currently.
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j
I love this analogy. I think it nicely sidesteps a thought-virus I have when thinking about approaches to these things: “That won’t scale”. Home cooking doesn’t scale up into restaurant cooking, and that’s okay. They’re different things with different qualities.
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e
@Srini K There is a kind of contradiction to all of this. In order to make truly malleable/personal computing systems, you need to invest a lot of time and money. But our society seems only capable of making such large scale investments in projects that exacerbate a user/developer divide. Open source/free software is not going to cut it
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s
I empathize with the need for better, focused funding here, bring back the good ol PARC days, etc. I think good funding can be helpful in fighting the good-enough-ness that current computing offers. The funding can help make sure that academia, ACM, CS journals, computer companies, hardware vendors, etc don’t only cater to the existing system. It can also help design hardware that’s better suited for this type of end user computing (think one-laptop-per-child but less politicized!).
One counter point though is that other end-user-heavy markets / use cases didn’t necessarily have this. Cooking, knitting, house cleaning, etc all evolved naturally and ‘have refused to die’ (in the good sense). What can we learn from those? • These tend to be rooted in family / cultural traditions that are passed down, sideways, etc. Bret talks about ‘horizon of observability’ as a key property of shared cognitive tools (e.g. war-room maps) • Many of these were old traditions & crafts that have been around a while • These tend to REALLY celebrate unique tastes. There’s not 1 way to make Chicken Biriyani, there’s literally millions of ways. Then you throw in fusion cuisine, etc. • The tools tend to have admirable & desirable properties for learning. Easy to get started, hard to master. Spatial / tactile / tangible, no compiling kernels or arbitrary abstract BS (humans have evolved amazing physics priors). • I’m sure there are others, I suppose Bret / Dynamicland had a similar line of thinking and are aligning their work around that I think ultimately these other end-user-heavy endeavors have been quite anti-fragile and resistant to centralization, over-corporatization, etc. To be clear, I don’t think centralization is ‘bad’ but it is counter to the ideals & goals of end-user computing.
j
I think an interesting distinction is the timescale. For knitting for example (due to some recent googling), hand knitting had been around for at least 500 years by the time the first knitting machine was made. It was much more well-established compared to computing, which has gone from not existing in any form, to our current industry-dominated model in about O(50) years.
s
you’re right @Jared Windover I added that to the list! There are some newer endeavors like the work that electricians do
I think another issue here is that ‘personal computing’ is such a HUGE area. It’s not a single activity or set of activities like cooking, it’s like ’anything that’s Turing complete and emulates some existing set of activities + has new activities native to the medium [like video games]’. What’s challenging is that even new end-user focused tools, like Para for dynamic drawing (http://jenniferjacobs.mat.ucsb.edu/), have to be designed for the current computing environment.
e
To me the questions are not necessarily technological. They are socioeconomic. It's not just about funding models, but about how people view their relationship with technical artifacts, media, and even work
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k
I would also argue that we have more of the tech already ready, but the UX is nowhere close IMO.
Perhaps predictably, I'd push back on this. The tech we have ready is for running restaurants. We have to recreate it for the equivalent of home cooking. From a standing start. In the face of entrenched competition. Without a huge centralized funding source. Thinking of it as purely a UX problem is doomed, I think. Existing tech assumes reliable funding.
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s
Yeah I’d agree with that
k
Though of course we benefit from cross-pollination from people trained in building parts of restaurants. Like @Chris Maughan: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CCL5VVBAN/p1605269840163900
It's taken a while, but I'm growing to like your analogy, @srini. I just shared it on a different HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044031#25084332
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s
glad y’all like it! Its been my metaphorical hammer I deploy often in these discussions over the years 😛 Hell I should write a blog post about ths…
k
Indeed! I actually scanned your Twitter in hopes of a linkable citation.
c
Love the analogy with food service! It’s also apt to say that just because someone can cook or wants to cook for themselves or their family doesn’t mean that they have or necessarily want to have the skills to cater a wedding!
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t
Love the analogy too (because I love food 😛). Some other directions for the analogy, taking into account some innovations in food technology/media: • More powerful home equipment packaged in consumer friendly ways eg, slow cooker, sous vide machine, ninja food blenders. On a socio-technical level, I can see the parallel elistism of using such tools by “proper” chefs, similar to C++ programmers looking at Unity, or professional programmers looking at no-code tools. • Recipe boxes eg, gousto, mindful chef. Meet halfway with the user so they still need to cook, but provide the ingredients and recipes to them to guide them. Maybe no-code with tutorials/sharing community is going in this direction • Masterchef/British Bake off/Youtube videos - it’s quite easy to be inspired by others making food, and it’s just pure entertaining! I’m not sure watching a code editor/terminal on twitch will be very entertaining to someone who does not program. There’s this thing with game design, where some games are fun to watch, as well as play (sometimes more so). Making software can be quite solitary a lot of times. I guess dynamic land tackles this by having a “local-multiplayer” feel to it. Also, may live programming eg, sonic-pi
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