Technology

We need technology to live, as we need food to live. But, of course, if we eat too much food, or eat food that has no nutritional value, or eat food that is infected with disease, we turn a means of survival into its opposite. The same is true for technology.

slip:4a1075.

Incomplete. Forever.

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished.

That word is nearly extinct.

Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

That’s exactly it. I’m often talking about calm technology and that’s one key issue with stuff these days. But this point about finished makes my heart sink.

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"Many gadgets marketed as being 'smart' make me wonder if they would be better off dumb"

Also, it wouldn't be a terrible idea to require escrowed #opensource availability of their code base for companies that make #IoT devices and then go out of business

#calmtechnology
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/the-dory-sign-is-e-ink-smart-screen-simplicity-at-its-finest/

Aplicativos foram treinados para disputar atenção. Talvez o próximo diferencial seja justamente saber quando não interromper.

Interfaces silenciosas não eliminam tecnologia. Elas reorganizam estímulos, reduzem fadiga e alteram a forma como o cérebro habita ambientes digitais.

O curioso é que isso muda até a ideia de lealdade digital.

https://open.substack.com/pub/drucillainsthub/p/o-poder-oculto-das-interfaces-silenciosas

#UX #CalmTechnology #instHub

@knoppix95 They should reread the calm technology "manifesto".

https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technology/

#ai #bloat #calmtechnology

This is why we need #calmtechnology, instead of #wellness apps

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

Coming 2026-02-21 ...

#esp32 #embedded #calm #calmtechnology

AI 에이전트 코딩 이후, 개발 도구는 어떻게 진화하는가

https://aisparkup.com/posts/9128

Even more calm than a sand timer

I tell anyone who will listen about using physical sand timers for managing individual sessions of work. They are the perfect example of calm technology. I like to work with about 40 to 45 minutes of sand time.

Today I took a half an hour to have Claude build me a digital one. Often, I’m not within reach of my favorite sand timer and I’ve wanted to try building a digital one, which behaved exactly like a physical one. A digital one which was exactly as calm as a physical one.

A sand timer permits a constant flow rate through the neck. I didn’t bother modeling that.

In my descriptions and prompting I steered Claude to build a trivially simple approximation: The upper “sand pile” is a perfect triangle and it “drains” by having single-pixel rows removed from its top. The lower “sand pile” grows by adding lines to its top. This is NOT how a sand timer (which approximates fluid flow) actually behaves: It means the height drops at a constant rate, not an accelerating one.

When it was all working, I realized it was actually even more calm than a sand timer.

When you view a sand timer, the height of the sand changes at an increasing rate. In the beginning the height changes very slowly, and right near the end, the height runs down much more quickly.

But my digital sand timer is so calm, it even remains unhurried as it nears its end.

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