Gratitude Day 29: Elegant Simplicity
Tue 29 September 2026
Our computers are so much more powerful than they were a decade or two ago. We have vast multi-core CPUs, massively parallel GPUs, neural processing, hardware compression/decompression and encryption/decryption, even hardware virtualization. I wouldn't be surprised if the latest CPUs had an instruction called "MOVCOFFEE!"
We have thrown mountains of silicon at every single "problem" imaginable, and have ended up with incredibly potent computing devices.
But what are we doing with it? How are we using this absolute paradise of compute capacity literally under our fingerprints?
Finding the most obscenely inefficient ways possible to display text and images? (Why, hello ReactJS, yes I would like more endless greeked loading bars, thank you!!)
Constructing development frameworks so convoluted they would put Rube Goldberg on suicide watch?
Burning our planet so that feckless executives can fall in love with the ultimate vapid, sycophantic large language model virtual yes men?
There has to be a better way.
I guess this subject is parallel to the issues of retrocomputing or permacomputing, but I'd like to form an umbrella term. Something like "Humble Computing."
I wrote four months ago about why I liked vim-style text editors, specifically, the 1994 "nvi" recreation of the original late-1970s vi.
I don't use VSCode, I don't write anything longer than a single paragraph inside of a web browser (if it can be helped), I don't use a graphical text editor or word processor, I don't even use the much beloved vim or Neovim.
I just use plain old vi most of the time. Very little changed since the late 1970s vi, except a few modest enhancements like multiple levels of undo.
Like, it doesn't even have WORD W
RAP, a basic feature of all word
processors and nearly all text ed
itors going back forty plus years
.
So why? Why use something so BASIC?
There's an elegant, unassuming ethos to software simplicity. It makes fewer demands on silicon-based resources (compute) and carbon-based resources (brainpower). That's not to say that it's necessarily "user friendly," because it isn't really.
But for its seeming obtuseness, the software has a great virtue: understandability. Again, I don't mean user-friendliness. I mean that the software exists in such a state (looking both at how it's used and how it's made) that a reasonably-skilled person can understand it in its entirety.
Think about even the simplest piece of software that the average person would be familiar with or at least have heard of. Do you think a single person could come to understand its codebase in a week? A month? A year? A lifetime? Even venerable Notepad has LLM junk crammed into it now.
Does the average person even have a concept of what software is anymore? Or do they only see service labels: Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, iCloud? And each of those is a juggernaut of millions of lines of code.
In the age of sprawling, untenable complexity in technology, I'm thankful for software and techonology that is meant to do something well, stays in its lane, and doesn't spy or even coerce/control its users.
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