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It's Cold in the Information Age

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Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

antidesitter wrote: post #62
TeMPOraL wrote: post #34

I don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :). What also warms my spirit is that it seems GDPR had a side-effect in that many other places are now considering implementing similar data protection regulation. So it's not all bad news. That said, I sort of agree with the sentiment. Where's the technological innovation on the web these days? Where are the tools and…

> don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :) What did you mean by this?

I mean that I consider cryptocurrency scene to be net social negative (a nasty breed of fraud, gambling and MLM) and cryptocurrencies themselves a technology that's an environmental disaster and which should have never left the research stage. As for Uber, their only innovation so far was showing the sheer scale at which you can make an inherently unsustainable business built on anticompetitive subsidizing and illegal behaviour without people noticing.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#72

Post by peter_retief »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #55
peter_retief wrote: post #31

It is sad that open source has been hijacked by the likes of Amazon. However, open hardware is an exciting option with desktop fabrication, electronics and low energy wireless creating new opportunities for small entrepreneurs

I think the situation is a bit more complex: the proliferation of F/OSS itself has driven the market into the situation where integrating and running other people's commodity software is one of the only commercially viable options left. Another factor is that commodity hardware is so powerful, and has been for over ten years, that it just had to be put back into the hands of datacenters/clouds.

Sure, every generation has had its own challenges, there are cracks where new ideas can grow

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#73

Post by sek »

What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far.

Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T.

Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! The last record got broken just a few months ago...".

What is happening in other mature markets with good dynamics is that gains come much more slowly and it becomes "boring" so you don't think about it too much. You get an incredibly efficient and secure car for a few thousand dollars, profits come from people who buy for status. If you look at the truck industry or aviation, the margins are really low, buyers mostly care about price there.

Most people don't need more than a smartphone, they already buy for status, others need a Mac or a cloud instance like truck drivers need a special kind of car to do their work.

There are just so many car companies, there will be just so many cloud hosters with will compete for ever shrinking margins to run your cloud-function-app magically infinitely scalable on their gigantic datacenters. If you want your own get a raspberry pi rack.

This is amazing, this frees so much energy and resources to focus on other stuff that matters.

Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.

Then SpaceX and Blue Origin will compete to bring your 3D-Printed robot spaceship into space you just simulated in your hyperrealistic Kerbal Space Program. The enabler here is price per kilogram to orbit.

That's where my imagination stops, because it's "the final frontier" and the problems there are really infinitely hard.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#74

Post by zerogvt »

sgt101 wrote: post #38
trabant00 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. On which you deploy an web app that has 30 working components written in 10 different languages that is able to do a fraction of the work a single vertically scaled server that runs 3 C written components. And has less than two 9 uptime. No one person can grasp it mentally. Is statically linked and must be updated piece by piece, unable to use the dis…

So, why are we doing this? In truth because the world of C (I was a C and then C++ programmer 30 years ago) did not enable the production of effective applications cheaply and quickly. Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. We've traded efficiency for productivity. We have been able to do this because of Moore's law and all its friends. Also, C code is hellish to read and understand (…

"So, why are we doing this?" I think there are a lot of reasons. Market share, control of technology, not invented here syndrome, ego issues, fads, shifting focus on specific set of problems. I personally think that OO proliferation (C++) and Java and enterprise mindset was the point of no return. The mental point where the majority left simplicity and maintainability out of its scope. There was (and still is) an era where complexity (and the ability to comprehend it) is a synonym of mental machismo. Simple was left as something that lesser minds/developers had to worry about whilst the 10x devs (another great proliferated myth) which everyone worth his salt should strive to be (so the myth went on), must not only conquer it but also thrive on it and create more of it. Thus you got a multitude of tooling, languages, stacks that do the same things differently, you got Godzilla OO hierarchies and architecture diagrams that look like a dozen overlapped London metro maps. Now we got microservices and k8s which in itself is a testament to irony - started as an attempt to simplify uservices/cluster mgmt and has evolved to perhaps the most complicated ecosystem ever (one has serious trouble even comprehending what most of the tooling in k8s land are supposed to be doing, much less use them and don't get me started about really understanding code in there).

I personally think more people should read and embrace the Unix philosophy of simple and reusable but on the other hand I'm afraid that the ship is unstoppable now.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#75

Post by oblio »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #67
vortegne wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them" Wait what? Have you like, been on the web at all? How the hell are javascript frontends not used everywhere?!

Half the workforce in webdev has an average work experience of 5 years or less which leads to self-sustaining generational churn in this area, and a whole industry of bootcamps and fizzbuzz-style questions handed out to employers and webdevs alike. Being hellbent to deliver webapps regardless of fit is no progress, and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

> and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

Sorry, but LOL. That's so low on any regulator's agenda that it wouldn't make it even as a campaign point if we were to elect a "president of IT", let alone a real-world senator or mayor or president.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#76

Post by oblio »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #63
peteforde wrote: post #27

To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective. Some thoughts: 1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.) 2. Perhaps the best-kep…

Remove China from the numbers and Pinker and Goslings points pretty much disappear. Both aren’t a secret, they are well known and criticized a lot for their use and abuse of numbers.

I'm pretty sure India also has a positive outlook.

And if we remove those countries we're removing half the world's population...

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#77

Post by tannhaeuser »

oblio wrote: post #75
tannhaeuser wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half the workforce in webdev has an average work experience of 5 years or less which leads to self-sustaining generational churn in this area, and a whole industry of bootcamps and fizzbuzz-style questions handed out to employers and webdevs alike. Being hellbent to deliver webapps regardless of fit is no progress, and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

> and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency. Sorry, but LOL. That's so low on any regulator's agenda that it wouldn't make it even as a campaign point if we were to elect a "president of IT", let alone a real-world senator or mayor or president.

Ok it might not be yet, but things are changing rapidly. In Germany, established parties are running scared right now over loosing first-voters, and push for significant change.

Imagine a little icon or traffic sign or so we put on websites informing users about independently measured power effiency. Could work with privacy and network footprint as well. Hell, maybe I should put up a competition for graphic artists to design such a thing, with a 1k USD/EUR prize.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#78

Post by amelius »

sek wrote: post #73

What you can see here is market maturity, this is a very common thing. There was just so much to do in the computer industry so far. Look at the history of other industries, there have been hundreds of car companies before Ford took out most of them with the Model T. Imagine you are one of those people working is the car industry before that. "Company X had a car that drove 50 miles per hour, a new record, insane! Th…

> Look at software, the next decades we can focus on creating ERP-Systems that are as perfect as Whatsapp.

Like with zero customizability?

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#79

Post by taneq »

trabant00 wrote: post #21
pbourke wrote: post #9

I really don’t get articles like this. You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. Your cellular phone is more powerful than the time-sharing systems of 25 years ago. There is pervasive wireless broadband internet available in much of the world. Single computers can be bought with dozens of cores and a lake of RAM. You can look up nearly any piece of human knowledge in a few seconds. The labor of…

> You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. On which you deploy an web app that has 30 working components written in 10 different languages that is able to do a fraction of the work a single vertically scaled server that runs 3 C written components. And has less than two 9 uptime. No one person can grasp it mentally. Is statically linked and must be updated piece by piece, unable to use the dis…

That's because as a sysadmin you can now do work in a week of plugging components together that would have taken three months for a team of five to pull off with C.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

zerogvt wrote: post #74
sgt101 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why are we doing this? In truth because the world of C (I was a C and then C++ programmer 30 years ago) did not enable the production of effective applications cheaply and quickly. Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. We've traded efficiency for productivity. We have been able to do this because of Moore's law and all its friends. Also, C code is hellish to read and understand (…

"So, why are we doing this?" I think there are a lot of reasons. Market share, control of technology, not invented here syndrome, ego issues, fads, shifting focus on specific set of problems. I personally think that OO proliferation (C++) and Java and enterprise mindset was the point of no return. The mental point where the majority left simplicity and maintainability out of its scope. There was (and still is) an era…

Tangential, but it's interesting how we can't seem to agree who the mythical 10x devs are.

> There was (and still is) an era where complexity (and the ability to comprehend it) is a synonym of mental machismo. Simple was left as something that lesser minds/developers had to worry about whilst the 10x devs (another great proliferated myth) which everyone worth his salt should strive to be (so the myth went on), must not only conquer it but also thrive on it and create more of it. Thus you got a multitude of tooling, languages, stacks that do the same things differently, you got Godzilla OO hierarchies and architecture diagrams that look like a dozen overlapped London metro maps.

I always believed that this kind of stuff is what mediocre developers relish. Meanwhile, the 10x developer looks at all this complex cloud-scale data pipeline, and does the same job 3x faster with a few Unix tools piped together on their mid-tier laptop.

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