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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

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Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#111

Post by spiritplumber »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14
nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but keeps the ones that already exist Step 2: 100 years pass Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines. Was that so hard?

That's just 40k with extra steps

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#112

Post by Dylan16807 »

didericis wrote: post #47
nh23423fefe wrote: post #3

This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak it and then press play and see what the world looks like now. Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting…

It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early mainframe era. The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was t…

It brings in those aesthetics, but then gives individuals as much computer time as they want. Then zero people make spreadsheets.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#113

Post by brokenmachine »

Dalewyn wrote: post #101
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files and folders are based on a metaphor applying to paper-based organizational systems. People used to have typewriter printouts that they used to mark up by pen and place into folders, then file away into filing cabinets. Is there really a need for a filesystem other than in the vestiges of what we consider an operating system?

This. The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop. Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) an…

I prefer being able to find stuff.

Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#114

Post by Dalewyn »

brokenmachine wrote: post #113
Dalewyn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop. Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) an…

I prefer being able to find stuff. Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.

>Tags or folders, I don't care.

My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#115

Post by Dylan16807 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #28
curtisblaine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.

Step 1 and 3 are, arguably, quite probable to happen in the future. I don't think you're appreciating just how many circular dependencies we have in the global supply chains. We're one big cataclysm or global war to reverting back to pre-industrial times , and if that were to happen, we'd likely be stuck there for quite a long time. Consider the following observations: A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve…

Even if we're ignoring wind and water power, boosted by charcoal, computers would be quite useful for lots of business purposes.

And if things are so low tech, the long-distance communication would be far more impressive than the story suggests!

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#116

Post by Dylan16807 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #114
brokenmachine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer being able to find stuff. Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.

>Tags or folders, I don't care. My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.

The problem is that mobile devices lack competent tagging on most things and don't let you organize with folders either.

And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#117

Post by Dylan16807 »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #55
Syonyk wrote: post #33

> Solid-state computer components, on the other hand, have no mechanical decay, so they are practically eternal. I wish. Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of about 10-20 years, transistors do wear out, electromigration is a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed, and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of "solid state" electronics that mean they're not g…

I recently had to replace an SSD that was only 3 years old; it's dead-dead, as in, slowed down one day and then wouldn't boot. I've never had an HDD die this fast in my life. I know this is only one example but I'm curious if anyone else has a similar experience.

> it's dead-dead, as in, slowed down one day and then wouldn't boot

Did you double check if the files could be read by another system? A drive that goes read-only will also fail to boot, I think.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#118

Post by brokenmachine »

Dalewyn wrote: post #114
brokenmachine wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer being able to find stuff. Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.

>Tags or folders, I don't care. My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.

I like file and folder. I like tags. I need something.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#119

Post by didericis »

Dalewyn wrote: post #101
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Files and folders are based on a metaphor applying to paper-based organizational systems. People used to have typewriter printouts that they used to mark up by pen and place into folders, then file away into filing cabinets. Is there really a need for a filesystem other than in the vestiges of what we consider an operating system?

This. The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop. Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) an…

> a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.

I understand the desire, and clever search indexing allegedly solves this, but it's fundamentally an impossible tradeoff. Organization is essential to finding things.

I'm tired of people pretending search and AI can solve that problem. It can help, but it can't tell you what x or y thing you want is. I find myself typing nonsense like "what's the thing that's important in speaking" if I watched a video about how to give a good talk and am wanting to watch a part of it again. I haven't given it a title relative to how I think about it, I haven't thought about how to categorize it, and I haven't let a "place" for it settle in my head, because I didn't bookmark it or add it to a playlist.

Re: Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

#120

Post by Dalewyn »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #116
Dalewyn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tags or folders, I don't care. My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.

The problem is that mobile devices lack competent tagging on most things and don't let you organize with folders either. And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.

>And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.

Simple to us. I've seen accountants, aka people who deal with files and folders as a matter of their god damn line of work, fail to understand or care for files and folders in computers. They still put everything on the desktop.

Fact of the matter is people do not care for files-and-folders. It's high time we admit most people do not want it, do not care for it, and just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want. Most people don't care about file systems, and both iOS and Android are right for abstracting away something nobody cares about.

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