introducing the It Should Not Have To Be Said But Here We Are software license

sorry, that “they” in the parent toot is ambiguous; I mean the ultra-wealthy should be abolished. at that point 401(k)s can go too, but it’s kinda moot.

401(k)s are a financial concept designed to tie the long-term survival concerns of workers to the success of the ultra-wealthy and they should be abolished.

what I mean is that by focusing on the “what constitutes this functional component of computing” part of the system, it ignores and invalidates the “how does one constitute this functional component of computing” part of the system, and that part is the key.

I’m not talking about digging into it on any technical level to understand the implementation details, I’m talking about the prerequisites, both technological and informational, required to leverage and/or develop with the thing. what’s the combined total biomass of people required to keep this project running? what’s the documentation footprint, and what’s its update cadence compared to that of the thing itself? how has that documentation footprint changed over time?

sometimes concepts like “software bills of materials” and dependency footprints and “software supply chains” come up and they always make me chafe a bit, not because they’re poorly fit analogies but because they’re so poorly fit they manage to eject the important data to focus on the unimportant data.

don’t worry, I’ll continue to ramble on about this in a thread now.

Something as seemingly simple as calling out trends focusing on scalability with rebuttals around “ability to scale down and/or scale wide” being as or more important than being able to scale up is just wonderful to see and hear, and as they point out in their presentation, “we need to be able to scale [up] to millions of users, billions of users” is very much centralization thinking.

I’ve not made it a secret that I love the work these folks are doing, but this is why - they’re making concrete steps toward user-scale computing environments while so much of the workforce is being directed to focusing on corporate-scale computing. To hell with the corporations! User-scale is where it’s at, and this is one team that knows it.

If you’re in a situation where you can redistribute even tiny sums of corporate funds towards valuable non-profits, please do keep https://spritely.institute/ in mind when it comes time for you to make monetary allocations. In my opinion, it’s some of the best-spent money you can find in all of tech today.

The presentation I’m watching from our friends at the Spritely Institute is by far the most entertaining tech nerd preso I’ve watched in months.

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/spritely-decentralized-architecture/

Thanks @cwebber, @dthompson, and the rest of the Spritely team for getting out there and doing the thing!

A decade ago I had a pi 2 running interim in my basement, hooked up to a keyboard and a monitor and an ethernet switch, and it was my brain’s release from the absolute horrid “you’ll take what we give you and like it” land of computing that I saw all around me. I’d stand there and play with lisp and see what I could get it to do that made me grin, and I’d forget about how massively, aggressively overcomplicated the rest of the computing landscape had become for a few minutes.

The repo is dusty and folks haven’t had a lot of success getting things to build for a while, but it’s still worth spending some time with if that’s a place your head is at, and who knows, maybe you fix the build, or someone else in a similar boat does, and then the sky’s the limit, yeah?

the writeup @mntmn did looking back at Interim OS is something anyone interested in a different computing path forward should read and think about. I revisit it every couple years, and lately every couple weeks, and this week daily.

(and then the rest of the repo is right there…I’d love to see an active fork (or 20) pick it up and revive it and move it forward.)

but do read this regardless:

What I Learned Writing an Operating System (and Building a Keyboard)

and honestly, one of the specifications that I’ve given myself for the completed projects is a full-on cheat code as well as a quick on-ramp for some hands-on-device testing throughout the projects lifetimes.

one of my requirements is that I want to be able to use the keyboard, trackball, and display of my personal computer to connect over VNC to remote computers. it absolutely requires a standards-compliant vnc protocol client program. so I’m gonna be on the hook to implement that. I haven’t written a vnc client yet, but when I get to that point I will; it’s a knowable spec to hit, and if I’m not planning on trying to impress anyone with it I can even skip the parts of the spec that I know I’m not gonna need for my use case.

smaller.

but then, I have the ability to lean on “old ways” by remoting into my current laptop and using its linux environment to do whatever it is I’m trying to do that my new personal computer system isn’t equipped to do yet, and every time I have to fire up the vnc client it’s an opportunity to identify an eventual TODO for me to get to so I can move my personal computering off of the current platforms and onto mine over time, at my pace, without any more artificial deadlines than necessary. gently, thoughtfully, exploring the possibilities for my personal computering.

when the day comes, way down the line, when I end up saying “well, yep, I really wish I just had a database I could use for this”, that’s the day I can start to sit and re-evaluate how I feel about the current state of relational database technologies and SQL and noSQL and others and then decide what I want my database to look like and feel like and provide for the stuff I want to do with the ecosystem I’ve built to that point in mind and proceed from there.

it’s my personal computer. it only has to comply with exactly as many standards as I say, but it has a whole world of standards to choose to implement should I decide I want that functionality. it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it may seem at the first thought of “wait build a personal computer and operating system?”

but there’s absolutely no need whatsoever until I have some part I want to implement that’s gonna need some sort of database!

shave that yak in its day, friend! why the crap am I worrying about whether or not to have a relational database management system on my personal computer?

smaller.

one of my challenges in my projects, as I set out to define the constraints to which I want to define my goal for a new personal computer for me by me, is that I have a lot of experience with a lot of different tech - different languages, different operating systems, different application stacks, what have you - so when I’m asking myself what I need to do what I want it’s easy to bring concepts and capabilities over together rather than just specifying the capability and letting the concepts be reconsidered during implementation, yeah?

like, as an example, I am going to want programs to be able to store data in databases. I know a lot about a lot of different databases! it would seem to make sense for me to just bring one or two of the databases that I already have experience with over to my new operating system, but that’s a misstep in my opinion, for a couple reasons.

first, modulo some very specific database engines, most database systems in the modern age do not live in a vacuum, so you are implicitly signing up to support their entire dependency stack into your new thing. so, postgresql is great, but probably not what I need on my personal computer.

libsqlite might be a better fit, smaller, simpler model, yet sufficiently databasey, right?

yeah, what if that’s still more database than my personal computer needs right off the bat?

we can go smaller.

computer science is to making computers as music theory is to making music.

having some computer science concepts under your belt can make it easier for you to make computers. knowing some music theory can make it easier for you to make music.

but neither is a hard prerequisite. full stop.

you can make computers without going all in on learning deep computer science stuff. it’s probably harder, but it’s provably been done. that’s where computers came from, right?

so, you got this. whoever you are, if you want to make computers, go with the blessings of Sundog and have a good heckin’ time.

another equally beneficial side effect of finding unnecessary baggage is that code that’s not in your program isn’t using resources, making your hardware requirements go down for equivalent theoretical perceived functionality, right? if you are asking the computer parts to do fifty percent less then it can use fifty percent fewer resources in the process of doing the things that it does do. I know, it sounds silly and weird to say it like that and not at all computer science-y, but I’m not talking about computer science, I’m talking about making stuff.

one of the main reasons for doing exercises like this if you’re thinking about trying to build a new type of computer system for personal use is that you start to identify whole swaths of capabilities that your current system has that you don’t even know what they are much less make use of them.

that either eliminates a whole bunch of programming that doesn’t need to be mirrored in your new thing or it takes you down a rabbit hole that teaches why yes actually you are going to want that capability after all and a better understanding of how and why various things work in current computers and operating systems.

you didn’t think this was going to be a short project, right?

remember, this is personal computing I’m talking about these days.

not work computing, you’re not in charge there. not even you, mx. cto.

so using a hard requirement for things you need for work don’t count in these exercises. this is for you stuff.

does your computer need POSIX?

tough but fair questions to consider up and down the twenty-layer dip we call an operating system these days, and millions of embedded assumptions, often made arbitrarily or capriciously in the moment by someone who was just trying to figure out how to make something work one time in the late 1990s. keep an eye out for them; they’re everywhere and they deserve to be re-examined. all of them.

it sounds like pure snark to say “log off and touch grass” and the like, but there were drastically different social dynamics and use patterns and dopamine triggers involved with participating in the same sorts of chats that we have on fedi but on a dial-up bulletin board system with a single phone line and modem for incoming calls.

if you wanted to interact with the other users (other than the sysop who may or may not be hovering near the computer running the BBS ready to intercept you for a chat or to see what you’re up to) you had to log off so someone else could log in.

because of this, some BBSes had session time limits - you get 60 minutes and then you’re done until next time, you get two sessions a day, that sort of restriction - to ensure other folk got access to the shared resources and could also use them according to that BBS’ setup and norms and so forth.

so you’d develop your own optimized loops for any given set of favorite BBSes but eventually you’d be done for the day - you’d read all the posts and responded to the ones you were gonna respond to, you used all your turns in tradewar for the day, you downloaded your allotment of files for the day, it was contained.

does your computer always need to be connected to the internet?

whole entire layers of our current computing environments have been specified by people with a financial interest in being able to program the user to behave in ways conducive to their economic model.

if you want to change your relationship with computing, you’re going to have to not bring along all of that, no matter how familiar it may feel. your familiarity is often one with the state of shit sucking. try becoming familiar with other stuff instead, maybe!