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The History of the Dot Com Era

joshelman.medium.com

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Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#51

Post by ryanianian »

noduerme wrote: post #34
1cvmask wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminded me of the Louis CK rant on Conan regarding nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited i…

That's a pessimistic interpretation. By contrast, the amazing is now mundane because there other things that are now more amazing and more novel.

I have degrees in math and computer science from good schools, but I would struggle to reinvent basic trigonometry. I don't think we've "lost knowledge" so much as shifted our emphasis to the novel.

I teach Python to 6th graders. These 12-year-olds consider basic coding knowledge akin to algebra. One of the "popular kids" (himself above the 'nerd stuff') is making a little Android app using a public-school-provided chromebook.

The lever of utility (and thus focus) has shifted. It doesn't mean a net loss of knowledge or ability.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#52

Post by chrismaeda »

I also graduated into the heart of the dot com era (I was a friend's 'plus one' at the Wired Magazine 5th anniversary party). But my brain fixated on the dinnerware. I grew up in driving distance of the Homer Laughlin china factory and we went there on a grade school field trip in the 70s. Their stuff is super expensive but it's nice to hear the factory is still there and they found a market in commercial buyers.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#53

Post by noduerme »

luffapi wrote: post #48
noduerme wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@luffapi Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion. I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But id…

There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism. I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly l…

I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets.

You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far southwest myself). The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day. What I'm saying is that to run the machine you actually have to be post-political, and the third group in modern culture are the people who can switch tabs as necessary, or just don't care because they're more concerned with making things function.

I'd be excoriated as being "privileged" by most progressive ideological friends for even suggesting that there exists a neutral position free from racial or historical advantage; and maybe it's not free of those things. But it exists and it attempts to be neutral to the extent that the biggest debate in the country right now is about what some website should or shouldn't censor, while the government itself can barely function, and the people who work for that website only care about making it more responsive and profitable. There is clearly a third group of people to whom most of the left/right debate is just unserious noise. As far as their day-to-day reality, we probably don't disagree that much on what that consists of.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#54

Post by tluyben2 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #18
tluyben2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will burst. But probably not for a year or two. The current hyped up everything + large scale money printing by the EU + US makes me want to put actual gold bars under my bed.

I believe many people would rather buy gold bars if this wasn't regulated heavily. Today gold bars are not much different from paper money - they must have a label of a licensed foundry, can only be traded by licensed merchants and the price at which an individual can sell a random piece of gold usually is well below the market AFAIK. Cryptocurrencies are way more convenient but are themselves a bubble (which I find…

If the system would collapse like in the great depression, gold still works.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#55

Post by luffapi »

noduerme wrote: post #53
luffapi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism. I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly l…

I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets. You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far s…

> The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day.

This isn’t true though. The very platforms you’re talking about have many employees that are keeping the systems running and also steeped in politics. There are tons of very overt and loud neo-liberals in tech. Same goes for leftists and libertarians.

You seem to dislike social media activism. Fair enough, but like I said it’s orthogonal to one’s politics and technical competence.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#56

Post by dr-detroit »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

[dead]

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#57

Post by wazoox »

Ah, the dotcom era. I ditched a job offer from Silicon Graphics (remember this one?) to join a startup just as the bubble started to burst (late 99). The guy who's got the job I refused then went on to be one of the early employees at O[...] and then H[...] Inc., where he's now EMEA director of something (and rich, I suppose though terribly overworked).

My startup had most of its founding hopes in no other company than Enron. I suppose I don't really need to explain it went very, very wrong. However we managed to limp until mid-2003, burning through all of our cash. Fun times :)

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#58

Post by noduerme »

ryanianian wrote: post #51
noduerme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. That was fun to watch. It's kinda just sad to me to see so much lost knowledge. No joke, I know a girl who can't read an analog clock. As someone said, if we have all this technology and don't know where it came from or how to build it ourselves, we're a doomed society. We're a cargo cult. When I really need to fall asleep, I lay awake thinking about how I would explain smartphones if I were suddenly deposited i…

That's a pessimistic interpretation. By contrast, the amazing is now mundane because there other things that are now more amazing and more novel. I have degrees in math and computer science from good schools, but I would struggle to reinvent basic trigonometry. I don't think we've "lost knowledge" so much as shifted our emphasis to the novel. I teach Python to 6th graders. These 12-year-olds consider basic coding kno…

That's fair, and overall it's a good thing. I'm not saying I can forge a sword or build a CPU or write an operating system in Assembly. The first language I learned was BASIC, when I was about 7, and after that they showed me Logo in school, moving the turtle around. So since I had a sense of how to turn pixels on and off with arrays and make fireworks, that seemed pretty ridiculous and easy. But even then, Hypercard blew my mind. And I was able to build things on it that I would never understand the low-level nature of.

I'm not saying everyone needs to build every tool they use by starting with a piece of rock. But knowing how things are made and how they work is really important. If python is the new algebra, great! The thing is, someone needs to be able to fix the instrument if it's broken.

Like, this is extreme, but I drive a car that's a simple machine. I can open the hood and know what I'm looking at, and if something is wrong I have a good idea what it is. But I can't make a piston or a fuel injector. I have to rely on people with plant investment, tooling, machines, to keep molding parts. They rely on people who have to forge the steel or iron. The forges rely on people who mine the raw material. The end consumer knowing roughly how that works is what separates us as a society from a cargo cult.

I don't think we can ever successfully separate ourselves from the roots of our technology or the lower layers of it. Anyway, if you're a curious 12-year-old coding in python you should wonder - how does this magic work! I was about that age when someone explained Assembly to me, and though I would never try to write something that way, just seeing it and understanding how it was moving bits around in memory to handle the higher level languages I was writing, blew my mind. I suddenly understood a lot more about what I was doing when I said "print $f"

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#59

Post by itsoktocry »

noduerme wrote: post #4

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physic…

>I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99

This is a weird mentality to me. Of course human nature hasn't changed in the past 25 years. But that isn't where DotCom nostalgia comes from. It comes from the fact that "The Internet" as we know it, the force that has driven the majority of recent technological progress as well as the careers of many people on this site, was brand new.

I have no idea how anyone can be a tech person and not look back fondly (or curiously) at that period in time.

Re: The History of the Dot Com Era

#60

Post by andrepd »

noduerme wrote: post #32
hrh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often. HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideologi…

Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect. I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technologica…

>I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.

Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the people in the "centre" are the rational people interested in solving problems?

> the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical

There is nothing apolitical about this. Accepting the current broad system and ruling class and trying only for "small fixes" is a political position.

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