Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens • Hacker News Board

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#81

Post by eyko » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #46

mchusma wrote: post #9

Average adult will spend 34 years with a miracle portal into infinite knowledge and possibility.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

It's not for us to judge what sort of information constitutes knowledge.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#82

Post by VBprogrammer » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #46

mchusma wrote: post #9

Average adult will spend 34 years with a miracle portal into infinite knowledge and possibility.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

I'm not sure about that. The topics I want to dig into I usually find it's harder to get the level of depth I want on a topic in book form than I do than to find videos on YouTube.

Some random examples:

- I'm interested in turbine engines, AgentJayZ has a while host of videos taking real turbine engines apart, talking about obscure features like compressor variable valve vanes etc.

- Plumbing, almost everything I've ever needed to know about plumbing has been available from PlumberParts / dereton33.

- Woodworking, I basically learned everything I know from watching people like Matthias Wandel.

- Recently I've been digging to electronics, I have an excellent book "Practical Electronics for Inventors" but every now and again I need to hear a different take on the same things and invariably there is a good video or article which clears it up for me.

What's more, to get the level of detail these guys show for free in book form would mean investing in some seriously expensive books, most of which hide the interesting parts under a lot of uninteresting maths.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#83

Post by matwood » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #25

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And will use that infinite potential to binge watch Friends for the 11th time.

I'll have you know this is a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine household, and we are on our 12th rewatch of the Dominion War, tyvm.

I'm going through TNG right now, and the stories still hold up very well. There are a lot more useful lessons in them than I remember when watching as a kid. I really do like the humankind aspirational nature of the show also.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#84

Post by pharke » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

karatestomp wrote: post #46

mchusma wrote: post #9

Average adult will spend 34 years with a miracle portal into infinite knowledge and possibility.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

Due to the changing nature of the web I'd even say that the sum total of useful information is actually decreasing year over year. I believe we hit an inflection point a decade or more ago when the number of people with specialized knowledge and skills who were publishing information about their domain online was surpassed by the new "content creators" whose primary goal was to optimize for clicks and ad revenue. This is unevenly applied across different areas of knowledge, the amount of information about computer and media related topics has increased but other areas seem to have realized a sharp decrease. I don't have any hard numbers to support this, only the feeling of it becoming increasingly difficult to find expert information in many areas. More and more I have to resort to public domain books as the only substantive source. There's just a general sense of something deeply wrong with the current state of the web.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#85

Post by squeaky-clean » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

Andhurati wrote: post #7

martindbp wrote: post #2

Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

Do books do the same damage to your eyes as screens?

If you believe my parents then all the years of reading books at night with almost no ambient light would have destroyed my eyes.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#86

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #65

outworlder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are backlit though, that's a big difference. Not sure if any issues would be caused by this.

Is it a big difference? If you take the reverse of ray tracing, why would a light beam of given intensity and wavelength act differently on my retina because it was directly transmitted vs reflected?

Backlit screens are brighter than a book under typical indoor lighting conditions. (Although this doesn't really support the original point, because the canonical alternative of going outside is much brighter than anything you do indoors.)

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#87

Post by literalanyone » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

martindbp wrote: post #2

Well, personally I don't sit staring at a screen, I watch movies, play games, talk to people, build stuff and learn new things. You wouldn't say reading a book is "staring at paper" would you?

I really wish this was discussed more often. As a parent, I am constantly bombarded with people telling me I should limit my kids' "screen time."

Generational skepticism of new technology is played out. Can we move on yet?

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#88

Post by karatestomp » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

rfdearborn wrote: post #73

karatestomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

Approximately once per week I observe a comment on HN saying approximately "search doesn't work anymore." Why is this? Why do I only observe such complaints here?

Lots of people here who were and remember being "good at search" and able to make exactly the thing they're looking for shoot to the top 3 spots on the results screen and being able to craft a series of searches such that, if they all failed, one could be pretty damn sure the information wasn't online or at least was hidden from the Google bot, neither of which are really possible anymore. The 100th time one attempts to find something on Google that one knows is there but just cannot get to show up no matter how many rare keywords one uses, one concludes Google has lost some pretty significant utility it used to have and starts to wonder what one is not finding when one doesn't know exactly the page one is trying to find.

(of course it may be better for lots of other things, but for a fairly large set of "finding things on the Web" tasks it's way worse than it used to be, to the point of being nearly useless—in part I think this is because sometime around 2008-2010 they stopped trying to fight webspammers, choosing instead to embrace some set of them provided they play by Google's rules, and downrank anything that wasn't "well-behaved" webspam or well-known sites hard)

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#89

Post by karatestomp » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

joefourier wrote: post #79

karatestomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

That's an awfully pessimistic view of things. I've studied some fairly obscure corners of computer science and the Internet has allowed me to get instant access to mountains of scientific papers, a huge variety of books (many of which are out of circulation), incredibly high-quality courses on maths, DSP, algorithms and the like. Previously I would have had no way of accessing any of that information unless I happene…

Certain fields are much better off than others. One might expect that CS would be among the best-represented on the Web.

Re: Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

#90

Post by nbardy » Wed, May 20, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

pharke wrote: post #84

karatestomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. Scratch most topics past the surface level and if you're lucky the Web can find you the book you need. Usually though you'll need to find the best book the Web can find you, then use that book and/or correspondence with experts to find the ones you actually need. The problem seems to be a mix of tons of stuff just not being on the Web yet, even decades in (some of it's in ebooks, though, yes, but a whole lot…

Due to the changing nature of the web I'd even say that the sum total of useful information is actually decreasing year over year. I believe we hit an inflection point a decade or more ago when the number of people with specialized knowledge and skills who were publishing information about their domain online was surpassed by the new "content creators" whose primary goal was to optimize for clicks and ad revenue. Thi…

Even if the content creators overwhelm the rest of the crowd now, you can still find experts and their content continues to pile up. For example, iq of internet graphics is still adding incredible content to his site 10 years later. https://iquilezles.org/. He's not the only example of this. There may be a higher noise to quality ratio, but the quality content is still growing, you just have to get better at tuning out the noise.