The Last Quiet Thing
86 points by Aks
86 points by Aks
The animation for showing the text is very irritating. At first I thought the page was broken as there was no content, and I refreshed it several times before I realised that scrolling would cause it to appear. After that the animation made it hard to focus on the content because the text appeared too slowly for me to comfortably read, causing me to lose my flow.
To be fair the first link in the article is to a no-motion, lo-fi presentation that’s actually really good. Sadly I did still have to scroll down past the first animation to see it, so could be more accessible and (maybe) should be the default.
Yeah, I think animations that take longer than 3 seconds should be a faux pas (the animation itself is set for 1500ms but I think the effective time is longer) :/
Any text-appearing animation makes me close the tab. It should never be a thing. Ironic that the article is about "taking control" and taking that control away from the user.
It's this sort of thought that made me get a (self-winding) mechanical watch a few years ago. It's a low-end Seiko thing, the very definition of "nothing special". It'll need service every 5 years or so, and as long as it gets it and the occasional fairly-easily-sourced replacement part, it'll probably outlive me.
Meanwhile, my phone just today gave me a notification saying that if I was getting too many notifications it could turn on a special mode that would rate-limit them.
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
I have this quote from Johnny Mnemonic written on the front of my laptop in old school label maker. I think this article might be the best distillation I've read of the principle that these days, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
Ah, one of my favorite quotes <3
Never forget that a Perl scalar/list context programming error combined with that quote caused police trouble for two high school kids quarter of a century ago: Sophomore Uses List Context; Cops Interrogate - Slashdot
"Quiet things" are also completely knowable - there is little or no surprising or emergent behaviour. They do not change unless you change them, or they break.
I know the ROMs in my C64 have not changed, so assuming it is still working, it will still give me a READY. prompt when I turn it on. I also know it cannot change unless I go in there and pull the ROMs.
I know the CD in the CD player is permanently burned, so assuming it is still working, it will still play (checks player) Chumbawamba when I press play. I also know it cannot change unless I go in there and put another disc in.
It's an interesting topic... but if I wanted to read what an LLM has to say about it, I'd just prompt the LLM. Actually I did that now. I prompted ChatGPT about how devices demand our constant attention and it generated an article with the same talking points as this.
I'm also not sure what purpose LLM-generated posts have. Everyone already has access to these tools and can generate the same article themselves.
If the goal is to spark discussion, we don't need a full LLM-generated article to do that. Just share the prompt and we can all discuss the prompt. (/s)
Yeah, I bit my tongue here yesterday because (a) at least it's not an AI-written piece about AI; and (b) I don't want all my comments here to revolve around pointing out stuff that's AI written. But it is deeply ironic when articles about how we should reject AI, simplify our life, and so on, are actually robot-generated bait. We're converging on a set of topics and presentation styles that very strongly imply LLM-generated websites, and this is one of them.
And yep, it almost certainly is AI.
FWIW, a HN account saying they are the author denies using GenAI to produce this:
I don't have a smoking gun, but looking at the archive.org copy of the author's earlier, now-defunct site (unbound.news), I think it's more likely than not that he's not forthcoming about his tool use.
I find it grimly amusing that authors are reflexively denying any GenAI involvement in their works, despite the promotion of such tools from vendors as the future of "content creation".
I'd bet up to $800 it was drafted or edited with GenAI. The author is just lying through their teeth.
I've stopped clicking on anything that looks AI or lifestyle related. By the time you can tell it's fake, you've spent twenty minutes reading LLM output. Unfortunately there's no "minimalism" tag to filter like with "vibecoding".
Ah, but does you LLM present the content in an annoying animation? That's the value-add.
Edit I guess the watch face animation is cute. Ironically, it's more reminiscent of a high-definition OLED screen such as can be found on the Apple Watch than the original FW91's very basic segment LCD.
(Casio has recently introduced a more high-definition MIPS display, but so far it's confined to more expensive watches)
The entire article sounds like it was written by AI (and FWIW gptzero says it is "highly confident" that the text is AI generated, not sure how accurate that is). I agree with other commenters that the animations are distracting and add nothing to the content. I'm not a fan of the message either, while I agree with the principle, its a little over the top.
One of these is a product. The other is a relationship.
This sounds like Apple marketing copy. Relationships are something you have with people, not your wrist watch. It's such a strange thing to say.
That’s the very thing the metaphor try to express and the point of the article.
Through the product you have bought from them, you are forced to deal with the whimsy of the corporation that sold it. Whatever happens at say, Microsoft, impact your day to day use of windows. Meanwhile, a paper book stay the same whatever happens to the publisher.
One is a product. The other is [a product that require] a relationship [with the corporation that made the product]
I've been using the F-91W for at least 15 years. I'm probably on my third unit. It really is wonderful. There was a brief period where I tried an Apple Watch - I blogged later:
I looked at this damn watch compulsively. It was fun to press the button and make the screen light up and see what the fitness numbers were. Well, not really fun. But it was a shiny distraction that kept drawing my attention away from whatever actually mattered and it wasn’t getting better after 4 or 5 months. Does Apple engineer it to be addictive to play with? Probably—but I really can’t fault them for whatever they did. It did exactly what I asked it to do. And I was addicted to tapping on it to look at a number all the same, so I got rid of it.
Being quiet is half the problem. Avoiding variable rewards is the other. (If your brain requires it, which mine seems to.)
I stopped wearing a watch about 20 years ago.
At that point I realized that, as a time-telling device, my phone was superior in every way except being on my wrist, which changes the access time from roughly a second to roughly three seconds. If I walked outside the house without my watch, nothing bad happened; if I go out wiithout my phone, I've lost my communications, education, entertainment, contacts, and calendar as well as my timekeeping. So why wear a watch?
Inside the house, there are clocks, and every computer (where I do my work, unsurprisingly) has a clock on the desktop.
It took about a day to stop looking at my wrist. It's one less thing to care for, one less thing to get snagged on a sleeve or a box.
If you want to wear a watch, that's a personal choice, just like jewelry. I'm just here to remind you that nothing is quieter than nothing.
Did you know that humans used to think that fire was alive, a divine gift of the gods, and associated with the most powerful and good forces in the universe? The fire department doesn't undo our understanding of chemistry; we will be treating folks for ELIZA effects for centuries despite our excellent and ever-deepening understanding of bertology.
For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was FINISHED.
Neither the author nor Claude actually put any evidence in front of this claim. Meanwhile, in the real world, people have been repairing and maintaining their belongings for millennia.
I think there's a difference between maintenance I choose to do and changes the device takes upon itself (via auto update etc as per the article)
Washing the clothes, washing the dishes, refilling the materials I need to do both, filling the hand soap dispenser. Sighing because my favorite shirt got a stain on it and now I have to figure out if I can clean it out or relegate it to "around the house". Pants ripped; do I try to repair or by a new one?
I changed to F-91W around 2019 and it is really cozy, the plastic wristband only deteriorated and had to buy a new one, but the watch is still flawless.
I hate the hyperinflation of objects built around to obsessively collect information about our personal lives.
I put two of my F-91Ws on 18mm Perlon straps, and I highly recommend it. Very comfortable and durable. I'm wearing a green F-91W on a brown Perlon strap right now.
I agree, the F-91W wristband is the weak part; it won't last as long as the battery.
After breaking two, I instead got a A168WA which has a metal wristband and better lighting.
I'm wearing a F-91W sensor watch right now, and I've been consistently happy with how useful it is. I have to think about what functionality I want to add to my watch, and if it works, I keep it, if it doesn't, I rip it out again. And it's still "just" a watch, albeit one that's been tailored to my requirements (by me): I have an interval timer for hangboard training, alarms for waking up, a timer for other exercises, a temperature sensor to check what the temperature is when camping. I'm very happy with it, and I wish more tools worked this way.
oh hey I'm wearing the same thing! I would love the new sensor Pro to get an RFC tag add-on, it would get me to upgrade in an instant. Being able to unlock my ebike with the watch would feel very cool.
I set my smart watch to simply not ping me on anything that isn't slack during work time - since that's what I want it to notify me on. It does track my heart rate, useful during sports. And it shows me the weather since I told it to do so on the main display.
I get the sentiment but it's also about how you use these things.
I set my smart watch […] it's also about how you use these things.
That sounds like what the author refers to as maintenance, as a job. You had to set the watch. You have to deliberately use these new devices. That deliberation requires thought and energy.
My parents gave me a F-91W when I was 12 and I'm still using it 16 years later (wearing it while typing this). It was not my first watch, I already had one, a more expensive one and also from Casio, gifted to me by my grandparents when I did my First Communion as it was common at that time to gift watches to the kids doing the First Communion. But I always enjoyed my F-91W more because I didn't have to take care of it. But if you are into Casio watches you probably know that the F-91W is not a perfect watch. Its light is very poorly designed and the wristband is not very durable (some third party ones are better). There are other Casio watches that are very similar to the F-91W but better, yet they don't have that mythical status.
A few years ago I tried the Xiaomi Mi Band 4. I thought it could be the F-91W of the decade. And I think it does some things well. But yes, it's a different thing. You need an app on your phone to set the time. The things is more capable devices are useful, but they're designed with these addicting patterns, intentionally or not. For example, I'm searching for a cheap smartwatch with GPS so I can track my orienteering races. That would be more useful to me than the F-91W, at least during the race or the training, because I could analyze later where I did mistakes and it's becoming common in the sport because people forget about all the details or they if they did a mistake they probably don't know where exactly things started to go wrong.
I feel like the article has lots of good points but stops a bit too short.
A lot of current devices/apps/whatever require you to care about them regularly and that's indeed a chore, almost a job. A major point of the article is to avoid devices that require you to do work. It's annoying and I also appreciate not buying something that will put additional burdens on me!
The example here (displaying time) is pretty basic and we all have needs and uses that go futher than that. However, avoiding doing "work" is not a solution and may be one of the reasons we are in the current situation.
When we want a shared calendar or a messaging platform, it must come from somewhere and servers must be maintained: there is work to do. Most people have traded control in order to not even think about that work.
(I write that in the past tense because I think people currently do have control to trade and cannot even think about the work because of the current habits.)
I self-host my stuff, I configure my devices. It's more upfront work and not everyone can do all of it there's an ocean between my situation and the one of 99% of people. Getting more control doesn't mean doing everything I do but at least being conscious that work happens somewhere is certainly needed for that.
I agree with your point about putting in the work for things. And I think the author's claim that "Audit your subscriptions. Curate your devices. Own less," being the "same trick wearing different clothes," is an easy way to avoid doing that work.
I think what people really feel shame over is that auditing services, and curating devices doesn't solve the problem immediately. There is a point you'll have to learn to live without them and it can be frustrating. Getting rid of music streaming was difficult for me because many of the iOS local file music players don't have the same user experience as those of a streamer like Spotify, Tidal, etc.
However, after a few months of commitment, I've ended up with a sense of pride rather than guilt as described by the author. There's something rewarding about curating your own collection, and actually giving the artist your money via a platform like Bandcamp where in exchange you get to own the files forever.
At some point effort is going to be required if anyone wants to swim against the mainstream.
This came up on Mastodon, too, where I remarked: There's a forcing function for products that don't come with relationships: they're easy to break up with. If a seller then wants to maintain a relationship, the onus is more on them, and they're encouraged to align to your interests. Relationships in late-stage capitalism enshittify.
Lovely page, thanks for posting. I think I can one-up this though.
My watch has a solar cell in its face. For the decade I've owned it, I've never had to change the battery, perform any repairs, or do anything to it. Even when adjusting for daylight savings, I simply wind it forward/backward without using another clock as a reference. Over the last ten years, it's remained accurate to within a minute, despite me never having synchronised it with an external source.
I don't know how long it's likely to keep functioning (it's mechanical, so parts are invariably degrading slowly), but I suspect that a careful wrist-haver could experience its utility for a century or more. I love it, and the experience of highly connected technology breaking persistently in other corners of my life only makes me love it more.
I did have to change the wrist strap once because my dog decided to chew through it though. Alas, entropy eventually comes for us all.
Maybe adopt a simple rule: carefully read every contract someone wants you to sign. This applies to every terms of service, licenses, cookie consents, privacy policy (they „really care about your privacy“!) etc. If you do not understand that texts, do not agree or do not have time to read so many pages… do not use such product or service – or rather: do not be used by such corporation, do not become their product. If the cost of reading a contract outweighs the utility or joy of the product or service, it is not start of a good relationship.
The problem (and I think that's partly what the article is trying to point out) is that nowadays more and more products come with such contracts. Every company is becoming a software company, making it harder and harder to participate in society without being exposed to this kind of bullshit.
For instance, try buying a car or TV without such contracts. At least (for now) TVs can be kept off the net. I recently bought an electric car for the family, because our old fuel car was dying and we want to do our part in the energy transition. These things are basically smartphones on wheels, and if you want to charge at a public access point (which you basically have to if you intend to drive beyond its range) you have to get a smartcard from a provider, which comes with its own app etc etc, ad nauseam.
I'm not happy about it, but I'd be even less happy without a car.
Why participate in a society that pushes you to sign contracts you have not read (this alone is absurd enough) and that wants to spy on you etc.? I would rather drive an old car and not connect the „smart“ TV to the internet (I can use e.g. some small computer with Kodi instead). They should learn that the long texts their lawyers vomit cause costs and losses.
It's not a replacement for reading the terms of service through, but I found https://tosdr.org is a good resource for verifying that I didn't miss anything.
I have never once in my career shipped a piece of software that was finished. The very first commercial desktop app I shipped, in 2002 in my early 20s while I was still in college, had an auto-updater. We never once questioned that it should be there. I wonder if my generation and younger even have the discipline to ship something that's finished, as consumer electronics manufacturers used to.
I agree with the others saying that the animations are way too annoying. With that said; this is an excellent read, and it talks about something I've been thinking about almost weekly for the last year or so: the way we allow our devices to dictate our lives. I've yet to draw any real conclusion, but nonetheless - great read! Not only the one you linked, but the other ones on the page as well!
I think many people, myself included, likes Arch Linux for the same reasons:
It never asks anything of the user. They can install it, if they like. They can update the system, if they like. They can install packages, if they like.
It never nags unless the user has installed a package to nag them.