#granary

this sounds like something from the Magnus Archives:

“…I found a population of [acorn] woodpeckers in suburban California. I noticed this tree with thousands and thousands of holes in it…”

(from STATEMENT OF MARIE READ)

The Old Granary Bristol (UK) Situated on Bristol's Harbourside

The Granary, also known as Wait and James' Granary, is a building on Welsh Back in Bristol, England. Designed by Archibald Ponton and William Venn Gough and completed in 1869, it is considered the best-preserved and most exuberant example of the Bristol Byzantine architectural style. It is designated by Historic England as a Grade II* listed building and has been identified as a key landmark within the City and Queen Square Conservation Area.

The building was constructed in 1869 as a granary for the firm Wait, James and Co. To function effectively for drying large quantities of grain, the structure required immense strength, stability, and warmth, combined with excellent ventilation. The architects, Ponton and Gough, devised a functional yet highly decorative solution. Unlike many contemporary warehouses that utilized external hoists, the Granary featured internal lifts located in the corners of the building to transport grain between floors. For distribution, sacks were slid down onto the street via movable skids that extended from circular openings (oculi) in the spandrels of the ground-floor arcade.

From 1968 to 1988, the building housed a celebrated music venue known as The Granary. It was initially opened in 1968 as a jazz club by Ted Cowell, under the guidance of Acker Bilk, who once described it as the "most ornate jazz club in the world".

In 1969, the venue began hosting regular rock nights organized by the Plastic Dog collective. The group, whose existing night at the nearby Dugout club had become overcrowded, initially took over the poorly attended Monday nights. By early 1970, the venue had dropped 'Old' from its title, and by 1978 it had transitioned into an all-rock club. During this era, the club hosted numerous notable acts, including Yes, Genesis, Status Quo, Motörhead, and Iron Maiden. The venue was also the filming location for the a scene in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses where the character Del Boy falls through an open bar hatch.

Dogon, Granary door, Mali, 20th century,

Carved wood,

A smart device reaches peak enshittification when feeding the cat becomes secondary to maintaining a successful connection with corporate headquarters.

The theorem states that once a company discovers telemetry, every household appliance must eventually become a remote sensor that happens to perform a useful function on the side.

A feeder used to have one job:

At 7:00, release food.

Then someone added Wi-Fi.

Then an app.

Then an account.

Then cloud services.

Then telemetry.

And finally, somewhere in the architecture diagram, the cat became an optional dependency.

This week, Petlibro suffered a major outage affecting its smart pet ecosystem.

Automatic feeders stopped feeding.

Water fountains and smart litter boxes lost functionality.

Scheduled meals that were supposedly stored locally failed to trigger for some users.

Owners of RFID and Granary feeders reported that their pets simply did not receive their scheduled food.

Which is an interesting engineering achievement.

Humanity has successfully built a food bowl that can fail because a server somewhere else is having a bad day.

Petlibro says stored feeding schedules should continue working even when the internet connection disappears.

Many customers discovered that “should” is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence.

And this is where the theorem becomes useful.

Because there is no fundamental reason an automatic feeder needs the cloud to execute:

7:00 → rotate motor → release kibble.

A $3 digital alarm clock can remember the time during an internet outage.

Your microwave does not contact a data center before allowing you to heat soup.

A mechanical timer does not need authentication.

But a modern smart device is increasingly designed around a different priority.

The company must be able to see it.

The company must be able to measure it.

The company must be able to update it.

The company must be able to control it.

And if achieving that requires turning a perfectly functional local appliance into a peripheral attached to somebody else's server, apparently that is considered progress.

The result is a strange inversion.

You bought the feeder because you wanted control over feeding your cat remotely.

The architecture was built because the company wanted control over the feeder remotely.

Only one of those two control systems appears to be considered essential.

When the cloud disappears, the product does not gracefully become a dumb feeder.

It becomes a very expensive bowl with a login problem.

Conclusion

If your product's primary job is keeping an animal fed, the animal should rank slightly higher in the system architecture than telemetry.

A smart feeder that cannot feed without corporate infrastructure is not an autonomous appliance.

The quays of Old Gdańsk have always been the most important heart of this port city. Every day, dozens of merchant sailing ships arrived at the port with goods from all over Europe and the world. Most of them were stored in numerous granaries built since the 12th century.