101–110 of 157 posts
If you get a chance to read Computer Power and Human Reason by Weizenbaum, now is the time to do it by any means available - especially if curiosity drives your question.
Its likely a combination of many factors. i) The demographics of the user base. Maybe "Young Hacker News" happens inside discord or whatever. ii) The fact that the past keeps growing . The body of interesting developments keeps growing and while some stuff is obsolete / nostalgic, other stuff is totally not. In fact revisiting the mindset and vision of past decades is many times very inspiring and educational. iii) T…
(i) definitely applies. I often see younger hackers talking about “the orange website”, never in positive tones. HN is seen as older, richer, and with various negative tendencies.
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> iii) The fact that the present is shrill, exhaustively hyped, manipulated and in a sense damaged. Tech is no longer a force for good and we long for the time when this illusion was available. I agree with this sentiment to some extent. Yet, I am struggling to identify if it's "just me getting old" or if there is more to it.
Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the…
Scams however always existed
I know rose tinted goggles and all that. But honestly the older I get the worse the quality of products has become (for me - important). Everything has shifted towards planned obsolescence and I barely spend money today when I make way more than I used to when I first started working. I got a Tesla and it was built crappy and interior kept breaking. A purchase should make me happy but I felt like my dollar didn’t go…
They sucker you in, every time, and you don't learn.
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Speaking as someone who started working in the mid 90s, we're definitely well past The Internet's "Golden Hour". These days we can see first hand just how much societal degeneracy it has helped facilitate. All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. This easily helps explain the point of looking backwards to when the…
I agree to an extent, especially about misinformation madness Scams however always existed
I know rose tinted goggles and all that. But honestly the older I get the worse the quality of products has become (for me - important). Everything has shifted towards planned obsolescence and I barely spend money today when I make way more than I used to when I first started working. I got a Tesla and it was built crappy and interior kept breaking. A purchase should make me happy but I felt like my dollar didn’t go…
Sounds like you need to learn to avoid the hype, mon ami. They sucker you in, every time, and you don't learn.
iPhone have gotten more and more like glass art objects than functional phones. Apple knows people want their products, and their whole model made to extract as much money out of people as possible (apple care) obviously shows they are masters of capitalism and creating tons of shareholder value. It sucks, but hey at least I'll use the gains from holding apple stocks to spend on something else (which will also break lol).
I find it much better now that I don't spend money on anything beyond basic functionality and create the aesthetics around it myself. I save a ton of money, and makes me feel better that I don't contribute to these companies beyond holding their stocks.
I appreciate the quality items from my past (that were not that high quality to begin with during their time - they were just built better than what's available today at similar price points) that have lasted to this day. Everything else just gets tossed out when I'm done using it, and I buy it either used or the lowest end model.
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Yes but not at this speed and scale.
Counter point to this, is that centralized mass media enabled early 20th century fascism and communism to thrive. Hitler's head of propaganda, Goebbels, supplied subsidized radios to the Germans and used it to funnel propaganda into German households at the speed of light. Goebbels had this to say about it: "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio....It…
kidding aside though theres really just a lot of good things to talk about in the past, so why not haha