My Dream Setup
--------------
A long time ago, I quite enjoyed perusing a site called "Uses this"
(
https://usesthis.com), the premise of which was interviewing interesting and
acomplished technical people about what kind of stuff - software and hardware,
both computer and otherwise - that they used to do the kinds of things they did.
The site managed to get a lot of "big nameS" on there, including RMS, Aaron
Swartz, Andrew "bunnie" Huang, Stephen Wolfram, James Gosling, Bruce Schneier
and more. As a quick aside, I learned who Yan Zhu was from her interview on
this site (
https://usesthis.com/interviews/yan.zhu/). She was the first person
I ever saw speak openly about the idea of "respecting the autonomy of users"
using exactly that language, and I still haven't quite fallen out of love with
her for it. It was interesting to see really detailed, well-thought out
discussion of equipment from people who obviously knew what they were doing.
I eventually stopped visiting the site when I perceived that the majority of
new posts were tremendously boring things along the lines of "I am a trendy
young blogger you have never heard of who blogs about trendy things. I use a
MacBook of some kind and also an iPhone of some kind! I use exactly the same
bog standard software everyone else uses.". Yawn.
Where am I going with all this? The final usesthis.com interview question has
always been "What would be your dream setup?". While occasionally people seemed
content with what they had, or had very reasonable desires, it always surprised
me that a lot of people seemed ravenous for ridiculously powerful and ubiquitous
tech of a kind that couldn't realistically be expected to appear for decades.
It seems clear that nothing will ever be enough for some people. By contrast, I
tried to answer this question for myself, and to consider it in the spirit in
which it was intended, i.e. your *dream* setup, if money were no object, if any
technological barrier could be broken. I found it really hard!
I don't doubt that when I was younger I would have been first in line for a
neural implant, but now there honestly aren't many things I would want less. I
do not lust over large, high resolution monitors, never have, and I don't feel
like I get much of a productivity boost from having multiple monitors. I
appreciate a good keyboard, but I've never felt the need for anything expensive
or specialist. It's been a long time since I considered the speed of my home
internet connection a serious limitation for what I use it for. More battery
life on a laptop is always nice, but beyond 24 hours worth of use I don't see
much point.
To be honest, I think perhaps the nearest thing I could come up with for an
outlandish wet-dream tech setup that I know will never ever happen in the real
world would be the ability to go out and buy a nice laptop secure in the
knowledge that I could just using *that* laptop for the rest of my life.
What does this actually entail?
That official, manufacturer-approved and guaranteed 100% compatible replacements
for the battery, keyboard and screen would be available for easy purchase decades
into the future, at a pricepoint relative to new laptops and an ease of DIY
installation that it would make perfect economic sense to replace those
easily-failing parts when they die, rather than replacing the machine.
That software developers would focus on making existing software run more
efficiently on machines with present day specs, instead of writing new software
that runs even worse on current machine specs in the unthinking expectation that
it will run just fine on faster newer machines which will be out in a few years.
That none of the connectors on the laptop would go obsolete and be replaced by new
and incompatible connectors later. It's not that I don't believe the industry
could design something more capable than USB 3.0 that would enable things I
cannot do today, I'm sure it could. It's that when I sit down at night and take
a long, hard look at my life and contemplate what's really important to me, the
limitations of USB 3.0 or HDMI or whatever don't enter my mind for a second. The
current capabilities of my laptop, in every respect, afford me a digital lifestyle
which promises to keep me intellectually stimulated, socialised and entertained
for the remainder of my plausible lifespan, so I'm happy to just leave it here.
I suspect not many people on Earth would want this, although I'm sure I'm not
alone. I'm also sure that any computer manufacturer that catered to us would
not stay in business for very long.
This ties quite deeply into "jandal conservatism", which I mentioned briefly a
few updates back. I am increasingly realising that this philosophy, applied not
just to computers but to a lot of the material side of life, is really core to
my current self-identity. I hope to explore this more in future updates.
Fellow phloggers, what's *your* dream setup?
