The Slab and the Permacomputer
Metadata
Highlights
- I have about a dozen cloud functions running — or, I guess it’s more accurate to say, waiting to run. My little platoon of terra cotta warriors, dozing in their data centers until called upon (View Highlight)
- As with a lot of things in crypto, the feeling is as much mystical as it is technical. I understand why people get excited when they deploy an Ethereum contract: it feels like you are programming not just a computer, but THE computer. That feeling is technically wrong; it is definitely just a computer; but since when did the technical wrongness of feelings prevent them from being motivating?
I think these are glimpses of an accelerating reformulation of “computers”—the individual machines like my laptop, or your phone, or the server whirring in the corner of my office — into “compute”, a seamless slab of digital capability.
I like “slab” better than “cloud”, both for its sense of a smooth, opaque surface and its suggestion of real mass and weight. That’s the twist, of course: cloud functions and Colab notebooks and Ethereum contracts DO run on “computers”, vast armadas of individual machines taking up real physical space, venting real hot air. A responsible user of these systems ought to remember that, but … only sometimes. Power outlets also conceal gnarly infrastructural realities, real mass and weight, and a person ought to be aware of those, too — but not, perhaps, every time they plug in the vacuum. (View Highlight)
- Textiles in 1800 : textiles in 2020 :: computers in 2020 : ???
I mean, I am betting the ??? is a slab — but I don’t know exactly what kind, nor do I know how it will be built or operated or accessed.
The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices. (View Highlight)
- First, if somebody offers you a seamless slab of compute and says, here, take a bite: sure, go for it. See what you can make. Solve problems for yourself and for others. Explore, invent, play.
At the same time, think further and more pointedly ahead. There’s an idea simmering out there, still fringe, coaxed forward by a network of artists and hobbyists: it’s called “permacomputing” and it asks the question, what would computers look like if they were really engineered to last, on serious time scales?
You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements; they’d be repairable — that’s crucial — and they’d be comprehensible. The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head. (View Highlight)
- Earlier this year, Alexander released a stripped-down implementation of DeepDream written in a vintage dialect of C, his code carefully commented. This version runs on a CPU, not a GPU. It does so very slowly. Who cares? It whorls its eyeballs eventually, even on the humblest hardware. You could run Alexander’s
deepdream.c on a Raspberry Pi. You could probably run it on a smart refrigerator.
The implementation does depend on a single pre-trained model file, produced at (then-)great expense by many computers with very fast GPUs. I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires … (View Highlight)
- I’d like a permacomputer of my own (View Highlight)
title: “The Slab and the Permacomputer”
author: “Robin Sloan”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/slab/”
date: 2023-07-29
source: reader
tags: media/articles
The Slab and the Permacomputer
Metadata
Highlights
- I have about a dozen cloud functions running — or, I guess it’s more accurate to say, waiting to run. My little platoon of terra cotta warriors, dozing in their data centers until called upon (View Highlight)
- As with a lot of things in crypto, the feeling is as much mystical as it is technical. I understand why people get excited when they deploy an Ethereum contract: it feels like you are programming not just a computer, but THE computer. That feeling is technically wrong; it is definitely just a computer; but since when did the technical wrongness of feelings prevent them from being motivating?
I think these are glimpses of an accelerating reformulation of “computers”—the individual machines like my laptop, or your phone, or the server whirring in the corner of my office — into “compute”, a seamless slab of digital capability.
I like “slab” better than “cloud”, both for its sense of a smooth, opaque surface and its suggestion of real mass and weight. That’s the twist, of course: cloud functions and Colab notebooks and Ethereum contracts DO run on “computers”, vast armadas of individual machines taking up real physical space, venting real hot air. A responsible user of these systems ought to remember that, but … only sometimes. Power outlets also conceal gnarly infrastructural realities, real mass and weight, and a person ought to be aware of those, too — but not, perhaps, every time they plug in the vacuum. (View Highlight)
- Textiles in 1800 : textiles in 2020 :: computers in 2020 : ???
I mean, I am betting the ??? is a slab — but I don’t know exactly what kind, nor do I know how it will be built or operated or accessed.
The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices. (View Highlight)
- First, if somebody offers you a seamless slab of compute and says, here, take a bite: sure, go for it. See what you can make. Solve problems for yourself and for others. Explore, invent, play.
At the same time, think further and more pointedly ahead. There’s an idea simmering out there, still fringe, coaxed forward by a network of artists and hobbyists: it’s called “permacomputing” and it asks the question, what would computers look like if they were really engineered to last, on serious time scales?
You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements; they’d be repairable — that’s crucial — and they’d be comprehensible. The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head. (View Highlight)
- Earlier this year, Alexander released a stripped-down implementation of DeepDream written in a vintage dialect of C, his code carefully commented. This version runs on a CPU, not a GPU. It does so very slowly. Who cares? It whorls its eyeballs eventually, even on the humblest hardware. You could run Alexander’s
deepdream.c on a Raspberry Pi. You could probably run it on a smart refrigerator.
The implementation does depend on a single pre-trained model file, produced at (then-)great expense by many computers with very fast GPUs. I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires … (View Highlight)
- I’d like a permacomputer of my own (View Highlight)
title: “The Slab and the Permacomputer”
author: “Robin Sloan”
url: ”https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/slab/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
The Slab and the Permacomputer
Metadata
Highlights
- I have about a dozen cloud functions running — or, I guess it’s more accurate to say, waiting to run. My little platoon of terra cotta warriors, dozing in their data centers until called upon (View Highlight)
- As with a lot of things in crypto, the feeling is as much mystical as it is technical. I understand why people get excited when they deploy an Ethereum contract: it feels like you are programming not just a computer, but THE computer. That feeling is technically wrong; it is definitely just a computer; but since when did the technical wrongness of feelings prevent them from being motivating?
I think these are glimpses of an accelerating reformulation of “computers”—the individual machines like my laptop, or your phone, or the server whirring in the corner of my office — into “compute”, a seamless slab of digital capability.
I like “slab” better than “cloud”, both for its sense of a smooth, opaque surface and its suggestion of real mass and weight. That’s the twist, of course: cloud functions and Colab notebooks and Ethereum contracts DO run on “computers”, vast armadas of individual machines taking up real physical space, venting real hot air. A responsible user of these systems ought to remember that, but … only sometimes. Power outlets also conceal gnarly infrastructural realities, real mass and weight, and a person ought to be aware of those, too — but not, perhaps, every time they plug in the vacuum. (View Highlight)
- Textiles in 1800 : textiles in 2020 :: computers in 2020 : ???
I mean, I am betting the ??? is a slab — but I don’t know exactly what kind, nor do I know how it will be built or operated or accessed.
The dutifully critical part of me wants to shout: you shouldn’t trust these slabs! Their operators, G — and A — and M — and the rest, will surely betray you. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp. The leviathans swim off in pursuit new markets, and what do they leave you with? Deprecation notices. (View Highlight)
- First, if somebody offers you a seamless slab of compute and says, here, take a bite: sure, go for it. See what you can make. Solve problems for yourself and for others. Explore, invent, play.
At the same time, think further and more pointedly ahead. There’s an idea simmering out there, still fringe, coaxed forward by a network of artists and hobbyists: it’s called “permacomputing” and it asks the question, what would computers look like if they were really engineered to last, on serious time scales?
You already know the answers! They’d use less power; they’d be hardy against the elements; they’d be repairable — that’s crucial — and they’d be comprehensible. The whole stack, from the hardware to the boot loader to the OS (if there is one) to the application, would be something that a person could hold in their head. (View Highlight)
- Earlier this year, Alexander released a stripped-down implementation of DeepDream written in a vintage dialect of C, his code carefully commented. This version runs on a CPU, not a GPU. It does so very slowly. Who cares? It whorls its eyeballs eventually, even on the humblest hardware. You could run Alexander’s
deepdream.c on a Raspberry Pi. You could probably run it on a smart refrigerator.
The implementation does depend on a single pre-trained model file, produced at (then-)great expense by many computers with very fast GPUs. I find this totally evocative: it’s easy to imagine future permacomputers that rely, for some of their functions, on artifacts from a time before permacomputing. It would be impossible, or at least forbiddingly difficult, to produce new model files, so the old ones would be ferried around like precious grimoires … (View Highlight)
- I’d like a permacomputer of my own (View Highlight)