Re: Reinventing How We Use Computers

First a mini-update

Uhh hi gemspace. It's been /awhile/. A lot's happened. The rising tide of homophobia in my country meant that continuing to work with kids as an instructor wasn't feasible anymore. I changed careers. I got my makerspace project taken from me. A lot has happened.

On the other hand I now I have a job that actually pays me a living wage and I have the opportunity to create an actual curriculum that addresses literacy around AI hype and the limitations of this technology across departments at a higher ed institution

so uhhh interesting year

Now my response to Ploum

Ploum's post Reinventing How We Use Computers

Okay so this is a great post from Ploum, I want to say that first.

I've been stewing a lot of things like this myself. Probably for similar reasons to Ploum. I don't use a typewriter myself but my partner does, regularly, and I watch them write and we talk about the feel of writing on a typewriter. I myself often write with fountain pens first, even when it's code or gemposts or articles to be posted online.

I would agree that our interfaces are also funnelling us more towards consumption than creation but I would go even further and say that even our creation is being pushed towards being in-browser/permanently online. I already dealt with the horror of chromebooks when I was working in youth-ed and the problem of everything being browser-based, but now that I'm doing more in the realm of machine learning google colab notebooks are the lingua franca and it's far easier to just give into the temptation to use them online than to take the ostensibly portable code and run it locally. That is, of course, if your machine even *can* run it locally. But I'll get into that rant another time.

No, now I just want to focus on how much of our ability to manage our information and even do our work forces us to interact with computers-as-tracking-devices and computers-as-distraction-engines more than computers-as-tools-for-creation.

I'd been lamenting for awhile that what I wanted was a "writing laptop": e-ink screen, nice keyboard, capable of being plugged into a real monitor if I need to test out art projects and such, but generally a low-powered efficient device. But I've gotten discouraged at how much of a difference it could even make because it feels like so much of the workflow I'm forced into as a programmer & writer---co-workers want google docs and to use only google email and put everything in google drive and share work as google colab notebooks &c.---has me locked into this high-resource-usage always connected model.

But maybe Ploum onto something. I don't have a forever computer, obviously. But I do have an old rpi400 I bought awhile back. The kind that's a rpi4 built into a keyboard you just connect to a screen. Could I try approximating workflows that de-prioritize the kind of "be on the internet with fifty browser tabs while I work and while I'm here maybe a few youtube videos and okay now I got pinged on discord and oh I got some emails and okay I wonder what's happening on the fediverse and..." life I feel like I get sucked into unless I'm really vigilant? Maybe. The inherent limitations of the device. The fact that to use it to watch things I'd really have to move from my desk to where the tv is and actually share media with my household instead of getting stuck in something on my own? Maybe that would at least start pushing me into a better relationship on the creation/consumption dichotomy.

Maybe I can even start figuring out what things I /really/ need to be running in colab and what things I could just run as, y'know, *programs* even though that's very much not the fashion of how proper machine learning coders seem to work.

So, yeah, I guess that's the thing: I wish I had a Forever Computer like Ploum is describing but even more than that I wish I could figure out the workflows needed to interact with a world that is constantly trying to make me be as online as possible with tools that are broken if I'm not.