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Programming in the Apocalypse

matduggan.com

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Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#131

Post by pc86 »

boringg wrote: post #106
tasuki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it. > Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Huma…

Our response was actually what made it a much more insignificant blip (thanks public health + vaccines), and technically we aren't through it yet.

I'd argue that we are through it in the public health, government mandate, change how you live day-to-day sense of things. Everyone who is willing to get vaccinated is probably vaccinated at this point. There is very little support for more government intervention even as cases rise in various areas, regardless of political persuasion (at least in the US, maybe it's different in the UK and EU?)

The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and mutating, is irrelevant to most people.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#132

Post by kzzzznot »

poulpy123 wrote: post #59
luxuryballs wrote: post #21

“we have to accept immense hits to the global economy and the resulting poverty, suffering and impact. The scope of the change required is staggering. We've never done something like this” This is an insanely extreme claim with very little evidence to back it up, if we watch this unfold at the hands of global leadership please know that it didn’t have to be this way and somebody is taking advantage of all of us for p…

How is it insanely extreme ? Except if we are lucky and there is a Deus ex machina that saves us (which by definition is unpredictable), this is the current trajectory

Can you provide something to back up your apocalyptic claim?

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#133

Post by KerrAvon »

tasuki wrote: post #105
madrox wrote: post #97

The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. While people are a lot slower to buy into collective action and changing their way of life than I thought, society is far more robust than I expected. Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. With that in mind, I have some ideas on what programming will look like in 30 years: 1. New frameworks and abstractions for making apps even more disposable while maint…

> The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it. > Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Huma…

https://also.kottke.org/22/04/the-mass-delusion-of-the-pande...

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#134

Post by edgedetector »

openknot wrote: post #107
skyfaller wrote: post #16

I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…

>"- This post, as dire as its predictions are, may underestimate the difficulty of computing in 2050, given current trends. If you are/were living in Ukraine recently, programming is not most people's top priority, they have other problems. Famines, extreme weather events, and resource wars will affect programmers who live in comfortable locations today." It's true that programming was not a top priority outside of s…

I recall being stuck in a closet for hours during tornado warnings multiple times throughout my life. It gets boring. Programming is a good way to pass the time.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#135

Post by FargaColora »

skyfaller wrote: post #16

I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…

"the difference between human extinction and the mere collapse of our civilization"

Literally nobody is predicting any of those things, except propagandists and doomers. I would urge you to broaden your media intake to more mainstream sources, because it is not mentally healthy to be living a life under such falsehoods.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#136

Post by dijit »

KerrAvon wrote: post #133
tasuki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse. I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it. > Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Huma…

https://also.kottke.org/22/04/the-mass-delusion-of-the-pande...

We have a widely deployed vaccine.

COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.

As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.

Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.

Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#137

Post by KerrAvon »

reggieband wrote: post #94

I have fear that the cathartic pessimism we sometimes enjoy ironically is turning into a chronic fatalism. It's like a habit that has become an addiction. I think the author was in a discussion that started as a fun catharsis for all involved and then devolved into an addictive argument that the author felt they needed to win. There is a cliché which goes: "Expect the best. Prepare for the worst". Articles like this…

You want to provide a reason based in reality for that level of optimism at the present time? It seems like pessimism is currently warranted absent major upheavals that would change the political situation worldwide, which would bring their own issues.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#138

Post by dijit »

madrox wrote: post #124
coldtea wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god. That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".

I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse. It's our response…

Reminds me of the millennium bug.

Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#139

Post by polishdude20 »

skyfaller wrote: post #16

I agree that we need to plan for climate adaptation (preparing for predictable problems) and resilience (preparing for unpredictable problems), but I have a few kneejerk responses: - Although it's looking increasingly unlikely that we can avert climate disaster, we can never give up. For example, 8 degrees of warming would be much worse than 4 degrees of warming, and could mean the difference between human extinction…

Then again, demand for fossil fuels is also part of the equation. You get a remote programming job, demand to travel by car potentially goes down. So there's potentially a net reduction in emissions.

Re: Programming in the Apocalypse

#140

Post by edgedetector »

rectang wrote: post #103
waynecochran wrote: post #87

Based on this I felt like some of the big winners in 2050 will be Rust, Clojure and Go. These will be less than we think of Cobol today. The paradigms will be completely different by then. Declarative languages have the best shot at surviving since they are the least tied to today's paradigms. We have to figure a may to program for fine and coarse grain parallel machines -- and not von Neumann fetch-decode-execute st…

"Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?" — John Backus, 1978 44 years later, it hasn't happened. I'm skeptical that it will happen in the next 28.

We've made a ton of progress. They didn't have decentralized computing at all in 1978. Now most things run on remote machines. Also, there has been a move away from the imperative style that makes parallelism so difficult.
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