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Things that used to be hard and are now easy

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Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#191

Post by gwern »

jrc2022 wrote: post #176
milesward wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevon’s Paradox

wikipedia : In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I would call it just "demand elasticity". Jevons paradox is a subset of demand elasticity where there happens to be some relatively fixed 'resource' like oil. There's no 'resource' equivalent for something like video gaming; it's just demand for writing games is elastic and when a game gets easier to build, people demand more supply, which comes into existence then.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#192

Post by fenesiistvan »

pphysch wrote: post #163
pleb_nz wrote: post #152

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

- registering internet resources (e.g. IPv4 block or desirable domain), due to scarcity - various features that are harder to implement due to changing user/regulator expectations (from simple websites to stuff like GDPR) - multimedia in the browser post-Flash, pre-WASM

- sending emails (spam filters)

- publishing apps (app store / google play rules)

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#193

Post by tomaloner »

milesward wrote: post #167
CharlesW wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a law for "when a thing becomes easier and/or cheaper to do, more of that thing is created, and the mean quality of that thing goes down"? Of course, there are positive effects as well — desktop publishing was responsible for countless design crimes, but it also unlocked some real innovation during print's last stand.

Jevon’s Paradox

That's a super interesting take in that the normal assumption that "there's more games" is a supply-side statement.

But Jevon's would apply a step before that. The "demand" is really the people wanting to write games. When they do that, they then create "supply" in the video game market.

Per the parent comment however, Jevon's doesn't address the mean "quality" of games decreasing.

Similar things happened to published writing (prior to the Internet, published writing typically involved editors and professional writers) or Photography prior to digital cameras. That is - technology made something far easier to create so, it was indeed more commonly created and the mean quality (at least in the artistic sense) went down.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#194

Post by nozzlegear »

globalise83 wrote: post #34

IE support for JS/CSS has been massively simplified by not supporting IE any more.

It’s honestly freeing. I was so happy when the last holdout among my clients told me they no longer need to support any version of IE. Removing all of the IE polyfills and babel transformations from package.json felt so good.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#195

Post by tonightstoast »

oconnor663 wrote: post #148
antirez wrote: post #70

It's very hard to accept the statement that writing fast programs is now simpler with Go/Rust. I think that what happened is more like this: * With Go is now possible to write reasonably fast (not as fast as C) programs in a simpler way. That's great indeed, but is not exactly the above statement. * With Rust it is possible to write programs that have a speed that is comparable to the one of C programs, that are memo…

> writing a fast program in C is often simpler compared to writing a fast program in Rust I think it really depends on what you need to do. If you need a HashMap or a BTree, getting your hands on high-performance implementations of those structures in Rust is much easier than in C. Also "sprinkling some threads" on existing serial code can be much easier in Rust, using a library like Rayon. But I take your point that…

I would agree. I feel like we keep seeing these “software has become more complicated!” blogs. But it’s really just that modern languages/stacks don’t focus on making software development easier for the individual, they focus on making it easier for the organization.

Related anecdote: I have been using GraphQL at work and holy shit it is boilerplate galore but I swear we hardly have to train new hires on how to structure their software to look like ours.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#196

Post by andrewstuart »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #165

Writing GUI apps for Apple products. Too many variables to mention, but I wrote my first Apple application in 1986. It took several weeks, and wasn't much to look at. These days, I can spin out a full-fat, shippable app, in a couple of hours. I do that all the time, for my test harnesses.

>> These days, I can spin out a full-fat, shippable app, in a couple of hours.

How do you do that? What's your approach?

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#197

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #165

Writing GUI apps for Apple products. Too many variables to mention, but I wrote my first Apple application in 1986. It took several weeks, and wasn't much to look at. These days, I can spin out a full-fat, shippable app, in a couple of hours. I do that all the time, for my test harnesses.

I used to do this on Windows in the 90s with Delphi: this is only really remarkable because we lost all the good tools somewhere along the way.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#198

Post by perlgeek »

pleb_nz wrote: post #152

I would love to see the reverse of this 'things that used to be easy and are now hard' That would be an interesting read

* Running any website with user-contributed content. Spam is just everywhere nowadays, and you cannot publish a simple hiscore list for your game anymore without some kind of anti-spam measures, otherwise the spammers find it astonishingly fast and flood it with spam, even if it doesn't allow any clickable links

* Thinking about it some more, everything related to security. Back in the days, the whole Internet wasn't port-scanned for known vulnerable services multiple times a day, and you could get much further with less refined security practices.

* Drawing things on screen. Back in the days of DOS and QBasic, it was just a single line of code to put the screen into a different mode and start to paint lines and rectangles on it, placing text at certain coordinates. Now you have to have a GUI (though canvas elements in web pages make it a bit simpler again; still not quite as simple as in the 80s/90s)

* Getting access to a particular memory location, without layers and layers of virtualization in between

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#199

Post by Tijdreiziger »

sdoering wrote: post #179
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Germany Well, I'm not in Germany... you didn't mention in your original comment that it only applies to German websites!

Germany is the only country I can speak of from experience. Not sure about the other EU countries, but would expect similar regulations. Everybody else. Officially if you target European audiences you would need to adhere to the same regulations, but practically nobody could reasonably enforce it.

Well, as I mentioned, I've only ever seen an imprint on websites from Germany, so I think you're conflating EU and national regulations.

Re: Things that used to be hard and are now easy

#200

Post by mahoro »

Wow! Let me continue :)

- Text-to-speech and vice versa, using cloud APIs. - creating a solid objects from 3D models (3d printing) - messaging: pub/sub, message buses (kafka, redis, postgresql channels, rabbitmq etc) - advanced data structures are more available (sets/hashes/etc now in standard libraries of any language, and in many databases)

Things that surprisingly still a pain: - scanning documents preserving formatting (there are niche solutions but they are too expensive for a person who needs it a couple times a year)

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