451–460 of 469 posts
I really believed computers would make people smarter, better informed, able to make more rational decisions. They'd understand and trust science more, make better political decisions. We even had a slogan for it: "computers are bicycles for the mind": https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... I was so naive...
Instead companies created an endless churn of features, rewrote everything because fixing the old problems seemed too difficult (hence inventing endless new problems), hacked new languages for convenience (and to create lock-in) then rediscovered why all that complexity was in the old languages, security was ignored, everyone built new code layered on top of the old stuff we hacked instead of fixing the old code, and everyone switched to commodity hardware creating a race to the bottom driven by low cost.
I've been expecting computing infrastructure to crumble for many years. I think the many modern problems with computing and networks, security in particular but also reliability, indicate it is starting to happen. It will take decades to fix.
Part of the problem seems to be the limited lifespan of people. The old engineers retire and are replaced by the young and a lot of hard won knowledge is lost. Books and the code itself pass on some of that knowledge but it is incomplete (or ignored because who wants to spend the time? We need something new to sell in three months.)
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Well, Google Glass was launched big some years ago, and everybody mocked it.
I think fewer people would have mocked it if it were in anyway accessible to ordinary folks. They set the wrong price point, which made it an easy target for ridicule because only 'rich' people with sufficient disposable income even had them.
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I think glasses/goggles are less intrusive than contact lenses. Lenses are irritating and difficult to insert. It's also impossible to share contact lenses. I think VR is already pretty close with the Quest 2, to what it needs to be to get mainstream adoption. A little lighter, a little thinner, maybe 5-10 more years of iterative improvements and we'll be there.
I've been wearing lenses for 15 years and do not think they are difficult to insert or irritating. But it does take some getting used to.
Oh god, there were so many boneheaded 90s predictions about computers. 1) We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. Many of us were ignorant of single-core performance scaling and the memory wall issues. I want to be clear: Computer Architects were warning people about this in the early 90s but many ignored their inconvenient truth. 2) 2D GUIs would evolve into 3D GUIs - maybe VR…
> We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. I don't get that. Moore's law is about transistor size shrinking, but that has an obvious end — transistors can't be smaller than one atom across. I feel like "everyone" did know that, even in the 90s. Or, at least, it was mentioned in every explanation of Moore's law itself. > Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would tak…
For example, these techniques improve instructions per clock, at the cost of adding transistors:
* pipelining (late 80’s early 90’s) MIPS R3000, Intel 486, Motorola 68040
* superscalarity (early 90’s) Pentium, DEC Alpha 21064, MIPS R8000, Sun SuperSparc, HP PA-7100
* out of order execution (mid 90’s) Intel Pentium Pro and later, DEC Alpha 21264, Sun UltraSparc, HP PA-8000
* SIMD (vector) instructions (mid/late 90’s) Pentium MMX (integer) Pentium III (floating point), DEC Alpha 21264
* multithreading (early 2000’s) Pentium 4, planned chips from DEC and MIPS
We also got improved branch predictors and larger, more-associative caches.
But it feels like most of that progress stopped in the early 2000’s, and the only progress is slapping more cores on a die. I mean, if you can put 8 cores in a consumer level CPU, you have 8 times as many transistor (give or take) as you need to implement a CPU. Nobody seems to be building a higher IPC CPU with 2x transistors, even though they clearly have the transistors to do it.
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It still is. But nobody is using that feature. People choose to centralize and visit the same 10 sites and to avoid self-hosting. Nothing is preventing society from using the internet in that way, but it's sooo much easier for the average non-tech person to not self-host an email server versus using something like gmail. It's the same reason I do not own a lift for my car.. sure technically I can install a lift at my…
Nowadays you cannot do selfhosting because of NAT and blocked ports on ISP networks.
I did it a while ago and it seems to work fine to this day: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you... (disclaimer: forwarding ALL ports is usually overkill, unless you're lazy like me)
Alternatively, just ask your ISP for a static IP address, even though that could be more expensive.
Well, I certainly didn't expect to still be coding for loops by hand in a text editor after 30 years. Guess it could be worse, at least I (mostly) don't have to worry about memory leaks anymore. So that's something I guess.
First, accessible files would become so numerous that no one would be able to navigate them sensibly with the tools that we had. We would drown in a sea of random gratuitous data.
Second, user interfaces would tend toward a swamp of accidental complexity unless someone made it their business to compete on the basis of superior user experience, based on sound UX research.
Third, unless we could figure out a framework for individuals to own and control their own data, everything would end up owned and controlled by large, faceless institutions with no accountability, and regular people would be reduced to serfs with no effective control of their own data.
I wrote an email about these predictions and circulated it at Apple, trying to get someone interested. I tried to pitch the idea of tackling these problems head-on.
Nobody bit.
Partly that's because I'm not a great salesman. I lack the absolute conviction and the necessary zeal.
Partly it's because I was a minor cog in a large machine.
Partly it's because Apple was in a death spiral at that moment, and didn't have a lot of attention to spare for grand visions of the future.
I had worked for a couple of years on Apple's Newton project, then at NeXT. My expectations of the future arose from stuff I saw while working on those projects. Both Newton and NeXT tried really hard to make user experiences that were natural and comfortable and productive. Both were concerned with trying to connect people using ubiquitous networking.
Both succeeded in no small measure, but both also exposed problems that didn't become visible until you started connecting everything together and trying to design interfaces to help people make sense of it all.
I didn't sell my pitch to anybody, and neither did anybody else. Instead, I think we more or less got the dystopia I was afraid of.